The concluding thesis of historian Alan Brinkley's splendid Voices of Protest — those often malignant tones of Huey Long and Father Coughlin during the Great Depression — is that these extraordinary demagogues commended a past as beautifully nostalgic as it was absurdly nonexistent. They converted millions to the imagined belief that the Golden Ages of the 19th century held the promise of our future; that the Great Depression was proof of society's contemporary corruption; that turning our backs on modernity and returning to (almost literally) horse-and-buggy thinking were the keys to a resplendent, resurrected America.
With gradual economic recovery, the Second World War, the brilliant statesmanship of FDR, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, as well as the United States' postwar global leadership and the socioeconomic revolution in middle-class living standards, most Americans overcame the childlike beliefs and romanticized pronunciamentos of the 1930s' demagogues. They held firm in the future's promise — until, that is, the rise of the New Right in the 1970s (a direct spinoff of Goldwaterism) and its closest ideological kin, Christian evangelicalism. Straight lines can then connect those early days of political senility with the historical ignorance of Reaganism, Bushism II and Trumpism, and the preposterous promise of an immutable America populated by nothing but head-of-household Ozzies and subservient Harriets — plus, naturally, servile minorities.
How similar we've become, once again, to our British cousins. Our Trumpism is their Brexit, our historical ignorance is their wistful nostalgia, our powers of grim concentration is their justified fixation on the fix they're now in. Writes British novelist Sam Byers in a NY Times op-ed, "At dinner with friends and family, on our couches in front of the television, even in our attempts at cinematic escape, there is only one subject of conversation: our departure from the European Union [or Trumpism], the need to either oppose it or enact it…. Brexit [or Trumpism] is not just an event, it is a feeling — suffocating and dispiriting and freighted with gloom."
Indeed significant blocs within both the U.K. and U.S. have reverted to a belief in a romanticized past — one with no globalization, no massive migratory patterns, no human-eliminating technology; just the simple life of unseen government and communal volunteerism and pulled bootstraps. We hear transatlantic, spectral echoes of Huey Long, Father Coughlin and their fellow utopians of the early 1930s, those "With nothing meaningful to say about our future," writes Byers. "We’ve retreated into the falsehoods of the past, painting over the absence of certainty at our core with a whitewash of poisonous nostalgia. The result is that Britain has entered a haunted dreamscape of collective dementia — a half-waking state in which the previous day or hour is swiftly erased and the fantasies of the previous century leap vividly to the fore." Our specialist in erasing the previous day or hour is, of course, Donald Trump, whose every horror is swiftly painted over by yet an even more dispiriting barbarity.
Notwithstanding the pseudo-heroic mantras of blinkered Brexiteers and blind Trumpeteers, "We" — here, Mr. Byers is again writing for only his own — "are not quietly leading any revolutions right now, unless one counts as a revolution our project of self-dismantlement." I, for one, do in fact count that as revolutionary, for rare is backward-looking societal upheaval anything but destructive. "We are pathologically unable to say what needs to be said," concludes Byers: "that nostalgia, exceptionalism and a xenophobic failure of the collective imagination have undone us."
For Britain, Mr. Byers is almost certainly correct. Where we American mutts deviate from Albion's Anglo-Saxons, however, is that we will not be undone by the assorted failures — nostalgia, exceptionalism, xenophobia — of Trumpism any more than we were undone by the passing political hallucinations of Huey Long et al. In 2020 we'll slam the ignominy of this once-noble country into reverse, and get on with human decency and the like in 2021.
In this, I persist in my cynical optimism, or perhaps I should say demarcated pessimism. Sure, we'll keep screwing up, and on occasion in a big way. But in its undisguised evil, Trumpism is sui generis. The Huey Longs of "movement conservatism" and Father Coughlins of Fox News will always be with us, in some perverted way. Trumpism, though, will be remembered and condemned by future American generations as our version of 1930s fascism. Never to be tolerated again.