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February 19 - April 23, 2023
Crises never have a single cause, but in this instance a good deal of blame can be attributed to the political campaigns and presidency of Donald Trump.
Washington Post launched a database tracking them all, accounting for more than thirty thousand instances in the end.
Trump presidency pushed the country to this crisis point, but it was able to do so only because of two large-scale changes that have in recent years given right-wing myths a huge platform
first major development was the creation of the conservative media ecosystem, which ranges today from cable news networks such as Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News
Tucker Carlson was sued for slander, Fox News, own lawyers argued that Carlson’s on-air statements “cannot reasonably be interpreted as facts” because the show clearly engages in “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary.”)
second significant change, related to the first, is the devolution of the Republican Party’s commitment to truth.
During the Obama era, out-of-power Republicans felt freer to criticize what the administration was doing and craft fantastical complaints about what it was not. They propagated wild conspiracies about the existence of “death panels” in the Affordable Care Act and spread claims that the program would provide coverage to undocumented immigrants.
Donald Trump gained a foothold in conservative circles by spreading the “birther” conspiracy
A history that seeks to exalt a nation’s strengths without examining its shortcomings, that values feeling good over thinking hard, that embraces simplistic celebration over complex understanding, isn’t history; it’s propaganda.
When Trump finally left office, Republicans in Congress and in state legislatures picked up his “history war” as their own. They have worked to block the teaching of popular histories such as the New York Times’ 1619 Project
it is one thing to acknowledge how historians were influenced by their particular context and could therefore disagree about how to interpret certain facts; it is quite another thing to ignore the facts altogether.
Unmooring our debates from some shared understanding of facts inevitably makes constructive dialogue impossible because there is no shared starting point.
This volume has brought together historians who have been actively engaging the general public through the short forms of modern media and has provided them a platform where they might expand those engagements into fuller essays
They were both ardent radicals, albeit of rather different sorts: Joseph Stalin and Newt Gingrich.
Marxists have very often answered this question in the affirmative, and it is therefore not entirely surprising that the term American exceptionalism originated in the international communist movement.
America’s exceptional character served to justify various projects of national aggression against both Native and foreign peoples, but they also highlighted what Americans saw as their best qualities and their moral duties, giving them a standard to live up to.
combat. As such, somewhat ironically, the rise of the term illustrates the decline of American idealism.
Jay Lovestone tried to explain, nervously, to Joseph Stalin’s Comintern why communism had made such little progress in the United States. The reason, he suggested, was that the path followed by American capitalism represented an “exception” to the normal laws of historical development.
In the LexisNexis periodical database it rose nearly twenty-five-fold just between 2000 and 2010.13 What had previously been an academic term of art became a rhetorical weapon in the increasingly polarized US political landscape.
Newt Gingrich—a history PhD who considers himself an intellectual and likes to show off his command of scholarly language—was the most important. In the 1994 election, in which Republicans took control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years, the then minority whip was already making the term a centerpiece of his stump speeches:
Mainstream Democrats not only embraced the term but also found that its very emptiness made it strategically useful.
Gingrich, in his 2011 book, called Obama “outright contemptuous of American exceptionalism.”
Trump’s vision of history and of international affairs is one of brute competition between nation-states that differ principally in their degree of toughness and strength, not in their essential qualities.
Hillary Clinton, not her opponent, who repeatedly invoked American exceptionalism. (“If there’s one core belief that has guided and inspired me every step of the way, it is this. The United States is an exceptional nation. I believe we are still Lincoln’s last, best hope
America’s pro-democracy Constitution of 1787 was, sadly, also pro-slavery in its basic structure and foreseeable effects, even though not everyone at the time, especially in the North, foresaw the foreseeable during the drafting and ratification process.
The Three Fifths Clause gave slave states a massive advantage in the House and in the Electoral College—an advantage that in turn would ultimately warp the antebellum presidency, the federal judiciary (whose members were nominated by presidents), state legislative apportionment, Senate selection, western expansion policy, and much more.
Benjamin Franklin as inventor of the myth (along with his other inventions
he anxiously characterized Germans, the largest non-English group of white settlers in colonial America, as “swarthy” aliens who “herd[ed] together.”
In the mid-nineteenth century, xenophobes and nativists warned of the new threat of Catholic immigration.
US Congress eventually heeded the call of West Coast activists to protect them from the so-called Chinese invasion with the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
nearly 20 percent of the entire Mexican and Mexican American population in the United States, up to one million people, were expelled to Mexico during the Depression. Sixty percent were American citizens by birth. For most, expulsion was final.14
Mexicans were also found in Minnesota’s sugar-beet fields,
President Bill Clinton implemented new border-enforcement initiatives that accepted, rather than dispelled, the idea that immigration was a dangerous invasion.
the North American Free Trade Agreement allowed American agricultural companies to flood Mexican markets with corn and other grains. Unable to compete with US corporations, two million Mexican farmers and farmworkers were forced out of agriculture.
In 2000, foreign-born Mexicans accounted for only 3 percent of the total US population. In fact, by the time Trump was running for president, net migration from Mexico was below zero, meaning that more immigrants were returning to Mexico than were heading to the United States.
America First
The history of America First, unlike the myths about it, reveals a story less about isolationism abroad than bigotry at home.
the expression goes back much further, to the first nativist movement in the United States, when the American Party (nicknamed the “Know Nothings”) emerged during the 1850s to defend what they considered the real American culture of Protestantism from the threat of immigrant Catholicism.
America First’s fundamental opposition to all forms of “foreignism” has never substantially altered—but what counts as “foreignism” has.
so America First must continually produce new enemies against which to define its own supposed pure vision of America.
William “Big Bill” Thompson ran for Chicago mayor in 1927 on an America First platform, absurdly charging the English monarchy with planting pro-British propaganda in the Chicago schools.
Pat Buchanan ran for president espousing “America First” “neo-isolationism” to appeal to “insular, inward-looking” voters.
he claimed that his political opponents “would put America’s wealth and power at the service of some vague New World Order,” whereas “we will put America first.”
After Buchanan announced a “Reform Party” for the 2000 election with an America First platform, Donald Trump, a bankrupt playboy billionaire, unexpectedly entered the lists. Because “the Republicans are just too crazy right,” Trump said he’d decided to challenge Buchanan, “a Hitler lover” and “anti-Semite” who was going after the “really staunch right wacko vote,” for the nomination of his own party.
in 2016, Trump announced his own presidential candidacy on a platform of America First, and he stopped repudiating the really staunch Right wacko vote.
On November 9, 2016, Trump became the fourth president in a century to run successfully on a slogan of America First and the first to openly court fascism.
After Trump’s (protracted) loss in 2020, Republican members of Congress Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia attempted to maintain the momentum of his ethno-nationalist America First movement. “‘America First’ isn’t going away.
Gaetz declared in May 2021, as he and Greene announced the formation of the “America First Caucus”—
This belief is part of its founding myth. The country was born of an anti-imperial rebellion, the story goes, and has since been a champion of republican values in a world of domineering empires.
But is it correct? Is the United States fundamentally different from the violent, acquisitive empires of old?
