Is Donald Trump truly one of a kind—a sui generis sensation in U.S. politics? As Americans try to make sense of the businessman-turned-Republican presidential frontrunner and how he’s come to dominate the polls and the airwaves in the 2016 cycle, Politico Magazine decided to consult the archives: Is there a historical figure the Donald resembles—a model who can help explain his rise? We asked some of the smartest historians we know to name the closest antecedent to Trump from the annals of American history
Category: USH: Post AP Ideas
Donald Trump in an Historical Perspective
We are currently enjoying a master class in the art of political stupidity. Donald J. Trump has been schooling us for some time, but the Iran nuclear deal has touched off a new race to the bottom. Mike Huckabee said the agreement with Iran would “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” Ted Cruz called the Obama administration “the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism.” Let’s not even get started on the Affordable Care Act, which Ben Carson once called “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”
It’s tempting to rail against the media’s ability to elicit and amplify such stupidity. But none of this is new. Politicians have always resorted to dumb claims, blatant insults, bold exaggerations and baldfaced lies to gain press coverage and win votes.
Historian Joanne Freeman takes the long view on political shenanigans and tomfoolery in America.
The end of capitalism has begun
Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian.
I’ve raised this question–albeit with much less clarity–in class.
The Most Common* Job In Each State 1978-2014
…and the rise of truck drivers.
from our friends at Planet Money
America’s angriest white men: Up close with racism, rage and Southern supremacy
Up close with small-town white rage, with bitter, scary men who feel left behind by economic and cultural change.
“These are the sons of small-town America, the Jeffersonian yeoman of the nineteenth century, disfigured by global restructuring and economic downturns. They come from the “large and growing number of US citizens disaffected from and alienated by a government that seems indifferent, if not hostile, to their interests. This predominantly white, male, and middle-and working-class sector has been buffeted by global economic restructuring with its attendant job losses, declining real wages, and social dislocations. While under economic stress, this sector has also seen its traditional privileges and status challenged by 1960s-style social movements, such as feminism, minority rights, and environmentalism.”
The sons of these farmers and shopkeepers expected to—and felt entitled to—inherit their fathers’ legacy. And when it became evident it was not going to happen, they became murderously angry—at a system that emasculated their fathers and threatens their manhood. They live in what they call a “Walmart economy” and are governed by a “nanny state” that doles out their birthright to ungrateful and undeserving immigrants. What they want, says one guy, is to “take back what is rightfully ours.”
What happened to the environmental movement?
Adam Rome’s genial new book, “The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-in Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation” (Hill & Wang), brings to life another era. We’re as distant from Earth Day as the Battle of Gettysburg was from James Monroe’s reëlection, and Rome evokes a United States that feels, politically, like a foreign country. There were a number of liberal Republicans. Most active members of environmental groups were hunters and fishermen. The Sierra Club was an actual club that required new members to be proposed by old ones. The Environmental Defense Fund was two years old. Things like bottle recycling and organic food were exotic.
How much military is enough?
The U.S. once regarded a standing army as a form of tyranny. Now it spends more on defense than all other nations combined.
Between 1998 and 2011, military spending doubled, reaching more than seven hundred billion dollars a year—more, in adjusted dollars, than at any time since the Allies were fighting the Axis.
The decision at hand concerns limits, not some kind of national, existential apocalypse. Force requires bounds. Between militarism and pacifism lie diplomacy, accountability, and restraint.
Post-AP Film Selections
Here are some films to choose from. All of them are awesome. Comment below if you strongly endorse one of these films and/or if you would like to propose an alternative (if you propose an alternative I will expect that you can bring it to class):
- All the President’s Men: Academy Award winner of 1974 based on the book of the same name. Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford as Woodward and Bernstein. Watergate political thriller.
- Eyes on the Prize: award winning documentary on Civil Rights mvmt
- Fail Safe: The Other Dr. Strangelove. Released the same year. Similar content. More serious. Sydney Lumet film with Henry Ford and Walter Matthau
- Glory: Story of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment in the Civil War. Broderick, Denzel, Morgan Freeman. Box office sleeper.
- Goodnight and Good Luck: Directed by and starring George Clooney
- Grapes of Wrath: Henry Ford and Henry Fonda team up to do justice to the Steinbeck novel.
- The People Speak: Cinematic portrayal of Zinn’s People’s History of the U.S. Dramatic readings of selections of Zinn’s text by Hollywood’s finest (Freeman, Damon, Tomei, Brolin…)
- Lazar’s Bar Mitzvah Video: A coming of age thriller. A young fool rocks his portion of the Haftorah, makes couple grand in cool cash, dances like a cracked out spaz, and kisses his middle school crush (much to her chagrin). [no, we will not watch this]
Why Women Still Can’t Have It All
It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.
A discussion of Slaughter’s Atlantic piece at Slate
It's the Inequality, Stupid
Eleven charts that explain what’s wrong with America.
More visuals from Mother Jones
Originalist Sin: the Founding Fathers not only supported mandates, they passed laws imposing them
The five conservative justices on the Supreme Court—Thomas, Alito, Scalia, Roberts and Kennedy—cloak themselves in the myth that they are somehow channeling the wisdom and understanding of the Founding Fathers, the original intent that guided the drafting of the Constitution. I believe the premise of their argument is itself suspect: It is not clear to me how much weight should be given to non-textually based intent that is practically impossible to discern more than 200 years later. Most of the issues over which there is constitutional dispute today could not even have been envisioned when the document was drafted.
Interactive Map: Measure of America
Play with the U.S. HDI map. Consider the questions the data raises. Come to your own conclusions.
You Say You Want a Devolution?
For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.
Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted
Social media can’t provide what social change has always required. (Gladwell from New Yorker)
What the Hell Just Happened? A Look Back at the Last Eight Years
As we move into the next era of American history, , and on how we — and not just George W. Bush — handled them.
We need to reflect on the bizarre sequence of events we’ve experienced since 2000
Not Fade Away: The myth of American decline
Is the United States in decline, as so many seem to believe these days? Or are Americans in danger of committing pre-emptive superpower suicide out of a misplaced fear of their own declining power? A great deal depends on the answer to these questions.
The present world order—characterized by an unprecedented number of democratic nations; a greater global prosperity, even with the current crisis, than the world has ever known; and a long peace among great powers—reflects American principles and preferences, and was built and preserved by American power in all its political, economic, and military dimensions. If American power declines, this world order will decline with it. It will be replaced by some other kind of order, reflecting the desires and the qualities of other world powers. Or perhaps it will simply collapse, as the European world order collapsed in the first half of the twentieth century. The belief, held by many, that even with diminished American power “the underlying foundations of the liberal international order will survive and thrive,” as the political scientist G. John Ikenberry has argued, is a pleasant illusion. American decline, if it is real, will mean a different world for everyone.
Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs
Benjamin Franklin did it. Henry Ford did it. And American life is built on the faith that others can do it, too: rise from humble origins to economic heights. “Movin’ on up,” George Jefferson-style, is not only a sitcom song but a civil religion.
But many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center stage.
Interpreting The Constitution In The Digital Era
GPS monitors can track your every movement. Brain scans can now see lies forming in your brain. And advancements in genetic engineering may soon allow parents to engineer what their children will look and be like.
These new technologies are “challenging our Constitutional categories in really dramatic ways,” says George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen. “And what’s so striking is that none of the existing amendments give clear answers to the most basic questions we’re having today.”
Listen to this episode of Fresh Air, where Rosen, the co-editor of the Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change, details how technological changes that were unimaginable at the time of the Founding Fathers are challenging our notions of things like personal vs. private space, freedom of speech and our own individual autonomy.
The Paradox of the New Elite
It’s a puzzle: one dispossessed group after another — blacks, women, Hispanics and gays — has been gradually accepted in the United States, granted equal rights and brought into the mainstream.
At the same time, in economic terms, the United States has gone from being a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world.
The two shifts are each huge and hugely important: one shows a steady march toward democratic inclusion, the other toward a tolerance of economic stratification that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
It’s a surprising contradiction. Is the confluence of these two movements a mere historical accident? Or are the two trends related?
Revisiting the Hoover Dam: A great feat of engineering, but no panacea for modern ills
As to whether America could build the dam today, Michael Hiltzik, its modern historian, says in his book “Colossus” that it probably could not. It was hard enough back then to overcome the rivalries of the seven states involved, but at least nobody gave a fig for the down-river rights of the south-western Indians, let alone the Mexicans, or the creatures whose habitats were eradicated when the river was dammed. Today a rampart of federal legislation, such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, would block the way.
