... You can understand the two Trump presidencies as attempts to relive and re-enact the most atrocious moments in American history, as if the nation were led by toxic obsessives who relished the cruelty and criminality of the past and worshiped perpetrators as heroes — the supposedly hard men who built the country we know.
The president himself gestures toward this game of copycat when he hails Andrew Jackson or praises William McKinley as a man who made America great. And the administration itself seems to want to consciously emulate those moments of infamy and ignobility in the American past.
The administration’s hegemonic war in Venezuela and anti-Canadian saber rattling evoke the crudely imperial posture of the United States at the turn of the 20th century.
... Its use of ICE and Customs and Border Protection as a roving deportation force, aimed at anyone who looks suspect, is more than a little reminiscent of the federal bounty hunters deputized under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
It is also an echo of the first Red Scare, the Palmer raids and J. Edgar Hoover’s hunt for radicals during the Woodrow Wilson administration. ...
Bouie concludes:
[Trump's] vision of the future rests on a rotten nostalgia, and his plans for getting there were drawn from the wreckage of a shameful past.
Healthy, living countries look forward. MAGA poses the question: do we choose life?
• • •
... the White House recently released a 162-page report on the most critical issue facing voters: woke museum exhibitions. ... the most telling section of the White House report relates to its defense of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The report’s authors bristle at any suggestion that this famously racist law may have been motivated by any kind of racial animus. After all, such an acknowledgment might raise uncomfortable questions about the policies of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller—policies that are explicitly modeled on laws like this one.
... The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first major federal law to restrict immigration based on race or nationality. It banned nearly all Chinese laborers from coming to the United States for a decade; it also blocked Chinese immigrants who were already in the United States from ever becoming naturalized citizens. The premise was: If you were of Chinese descent, you were incapable of ever becoming an American, on account of your race.
The law was born of widespread anti-Chinese sentiment. It was passed amid a decade of growing repression and violence against Chinese immigrants in the Western United States, which resulted in massacres such as those in L.A.’s Chinatown (1871) and at Deep Creek in Oregon (1887), as well as many other acts of violence in the region before and after the bill was made law.
And then as now, economic precarity laid the predicate for virulent nativism. The late nineteenth century was a period of significant economic and technological upheaval owing to industrialization, job displacement, and the country’s evolving geographic footprint (including the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, which relied heavily on Chinese and Irish immigrant labor).
There's nothing new about MAGA's nativism. Unless we're from indigenous native ancestry, we all came to this continent from somewhere else. And, together, we make the country however great it may be and become.
