Our Backward Revolution

On election night 2024, when the Associated Press called Pennsylvania and North Carolina for Donald Trump, I knew that he would be our next president, and I went to bed. The next morning, as I came back from a walk, the Harris-Walz bumper stickers on the back of our cars caught my eye.

HARRIS-WALZ 2024 | WE’RE NOT GOING BACK

I immediately thought of the late Willie Lee Rose’s The Port Royal Experiment: Rehearsal for Reconstruction. Rose tells the remarkable story of enslaved and subsequently free Black people living on the South Carolina Sea Islands who gained their freedom—and small plots of land—while the war still raged, and then gained political rights during Reconstruction. That moment ended when a violent white, counter-revolutionary movement took away their rights as citizens and much of their property, returning them to a state of semi-slavery. Written in 1964 at the crest of the civil rights movement, Rose’s last chapter, “Revolutions May Go Backward,” was a cautionary warning to the optimists of her time. Today it seems an epitaph for those of my generation who saw the possibilities of a second Reconstruction that fulfilled the promises of the first.¹Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1964), 378–408.

It’s not that I was blindsided by the election results. After President Biden's withdrawal, I became increasingly convinced that the Harris-Walz campaign was in jeopardy. In very close races, polls are unreliable in choosing winners, particularly when it comes to Donald Trump who outperformed almost every major poll in 2016 and 2020, as he would in 2024. But I do think they give some sense of direction. During the last three weeks of the campaign, as Trump became more unhinged in his lies, more threatening to his enemies and more obscene in his rallies, I watched as Harris’s lead slip from 3% to 1%. By election day, I had little confidence that she would win.

I can’t claim to be a prophet. I assumed former President Trump would receive something like his 46 per cent of the vote in 2016 and win because of our archaic and undemocratic eighteenth-century electoral college. I was wrong. He didn’t gain a mandate (49.8 %), but it was more than Harris’s 48.3%. Moreover, by narrow margins in dozens of races, Republicans maintained control of the House and won the Senate. However precarious the majorities, the party of Trump now controls the executive, congressional, judicial branches of government.

Over the next week, I neither read any post-mortems of the election’s outcome nor listened to or watched the news. I knew it would be filled with "what if's?" second-guessing the strategy and tactics of the Harris-Walz/Democratic campaign. The Democratic Party bears some of the blame for this loss. Inhibited by its own wealthy backers and so frightened of the term “socialism” or even “liberalism,” party leaders failed to drive home the economic damage to working- and middle-class voters caused by the neo-liberal policies of the last half century and the dominance of the nation’s new plutocracy.²Elizabeth Popp Berman, Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).Despite these failures, there have been substantive policy differences between a Republican Party that has consistently reshaped our tax and economic system to benefit the wealthy and Democratic measures that helped the working and middle-class programs proposed by Democrats. The 2024 election is less about the failures of the Democratic Party than the remarkable success of the wealthy interests and disciplined zealots who have joined hands with Donald Trump to capture the Republican Party.

Historians such as Nancy MacLean (Democracy in Chains), journalists Jane Mayer (Dark Money), and Anne Applebaum (Autocracy, Inc.) as well as other scholars and journalists have described how this anti-government movement has proved successful in carrying out its long-term strategy of promoting libertarian ideas and policies into the mainstream, ideas once dismissed as the work of Ayn Rand cranks and ideologues.³Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America (New York: Viking Press, 2017); Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016); Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (New York: Doubleday, 2024).

Over the last half century, bankrolled by their wealthy backers, this reactionary movement created a broad and effective network of institutions, think tanks, and media mouthpieces that honed dual messages.

The first: money corrupts the poor but elevates the moral character of the rich. Making the lives of marginal and lower middle-class Americans more insecure would lead them to return to the lost work ethic that had made America great. At the same time, making wealthy Americans even richer enabled the super-rich “job creators” to benefit society as a whole.

The second: a contempt for the very concept of “public” in “all its forms (public service, public health and safety agencies, public parks, the protection of public lands, public schools, etc.) and a conviction that the hand of “government” inevitably guarantees inefficiency and corruption. The solution? Replace those critical institutions with the unrestrained market, driven only by profits and freed from the restraints of oversight, regulations, and the demands of labor unions, civil rights activists, feminists, the disabled, and others who struggle for social justice.

The New Right was also able to draw upon a deeply rooted anti-government/“dog-eat-dog”/“everyone for himself and the devil take the hindmost” ethos. While a pittance of charity for widows and orphans has long been considered acceptable, assistance for those who do not succeed (obviously through their own laziness and lack of initiative) designates them as undeserving poor and dependent “takers.”

The Social Darwinism of the Gilded Age shifted somewhat in the wake of the late-nineteenth century Populist movement and during the “Progressive Era” of the early twentieth. Bolstered by an emerging “social gospel” movement that emerged within Protestant, Catholic, and, what Rabbi Shaul Magrid, has called the “Jewish social gospel,” when a majority of Americans concluded—in our complex and interdependent economy—only national institutions could offer protection from monopolistic corporate power and reckless actions that threatened citizens’ health and well-being. Then, faced with the devastation of the Great Depression, Americans of that generation learned the hard way that a reliance on rugged individualism proved useless in the face of a collapsing economy.⁴Christopher H. Evans, The Social Gospel in American Religion (New York: NYU Press, 2017); Rabbi Shaul Magid is professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth. His book is The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (Brooklyn: Ayin Press, 2023).

By the time Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953, the Roosevelt revolution seemed broadly accepted by both parties. As Eisenhower wrote to his brother in 1954, federal initiatives such as social security, unemployment compensation, labor laws and other government funded programs were essential and the “Texas oil millionaires” and the politicians and businessmen who sought to turn back the clock were “negligible and . . . stupid.”⁵Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Letter from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Edgar Newton Eisenhower (1954),” Teaching American History, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-edgar-newton-eisenhower/.

But the political upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s gave an opening to the anti-government reaction of the last fifty years—our backward revolution.

It’s ironic that Richard Nixon took the first steps in this reactionary movement; ironic because he was hardly an anti-government politician. Like Eisenhower, under whom he served for eight years, Nixon had made peace with expansive government under Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. He not only maintained most of the New Deal/Great Society programs, but supported the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, expanded federal resources for the CDC and NIH. and signed Title IX, a sweeping measure designed to prevent gender discrimination at colleges and universities. At one point he considered creating a national guaranteed income program. Politically, however, Nixon was always attuned to the shifting currents of public opinion.

You don’t have to be a historian to list the developments that set us on the road to the election of Donald Trump for a second term. White backlash—activated by the civil rights movement and urban unrest—as well as the trauma of the Vietnam War led the way for this right-ward retreat.

In 1968, Nixon ran as a centrist between Hubert Humphrey and third-party segregationist candidate George Wallace. He came within a hair’s breadth of losing the election after Wallace captured fourteen million votes and the electoral votes of five southern states. (According to exit polls, absent Wallace’s “American Party,” at least four of those states would have voted for Nixon.)

Relying upon the advice of his adviser, Kevin Phillips ("The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who”), Nixon understood the possibilities for political realignment among several groups of voters. White southerners and white northerners opposed to the gains of the civil rights protests and civil rights legislation, suburban voters frightened and angered by the urban violence of the 1960s, and Americans disgusted by an anti-war movement that rejected the patriotic ideology: “My country, right or wrong.”⁶Garry Wills, “The Politics of Grievance,” New York Review, July 19, 1990, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/07/19/the-politics-of-grievance/.

Thus was born the GOP “Southern Strategy,” a political plan to create a solid Republican South by “blackening” the Democratic Party in the states of the former Confederacy and drawing disgruntled whites across the US into what had once been the party of Lincoln. In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Jimmy Carter managed to defeat Gerald Ford in 1976, but his administration was a brief detour.

During the 1950s, middle- and upper-income voters in four southern states had chosen the popular Dwight Eisenhower, but the major growth in Republican support from lower income white voters came over the next two decades. White evangelicals and religious conservatives also played a major role in the political realignment, strongly supporting traditional gender roles, the nuclear family, and male “leadership” while recoiling against the demands of the women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s as well as the way that a new, wide-open popular culture undermined traditional sexual mores. As Playboy came out from under the drug store counters and onto the magazine racks, it was no accident that third-party candidate George Wallace attacked the Supreme Court for its rulings requiring desegregation and striking down broad obscenity laws.

Today’s white evangelicals point to the 1973 Supreme Court decision, in Roe v. Wade as the critical turning point for devout Christians. But, if that is true, how can we explain the fact that mainline Protestant denominations, including Southern Baptists, praised the decision?

Randall Balmer, Cornell University historian of American religion, argues in Bad Faith: Race and the Religious Right (2021) that the shift among evangelicals was linked directly to racial issues.⁷Randall Balmer, Bad Faith (Eerdmans Publishing: Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2021). Gerald Ford’s Justice Department first developed a series of legal cases challenging the tax-exempt status of the segregated “academies” (most of them religious) that expanded in the aftermath of the Brown decision. But it was the Carter administration that dramatically increased the number of lawsuits challenging these tax-exempt segregated schools, a policy eventually affirmed by the Supreme Court in Bob Jones v. United States (1983).

Right-wing Republican activists like Paul Weyrich claimed that this was an attack on religious freedom, but such arguments found only limited traction. Instead, skilled conservative organizer (and devout Catholic) Phyllis Schlafly smoothed over long-time tensions between Catholics, Mormons, and Protestant conservatives, bringing them together to create a “right-to-life” and anti-feminist constituency that proved to be a far more “righteous” movement than defending segregation.

White Protestant evangelicals had voted for the “born-again” Carter in 1976, but four years later two thirds of self-identified white evangelicals voted for the divorced and marginally Christian candidate, Ronald Reagan. Republican support increased through the decades that followed. In the 2024 presidential election, 81 per cent of white evangelicals voted for Trump. Between the late 1960s and the end of the 1980s, the Southern Strategy transformed the “solid South” from a Democratic stronghold to the foundation of Republicans’ national strength.

Racism was not the only factor in creating a white Republican South, but it was a major driving force. And the tactics that created the (white) victory for the Republican Party in the South and attracted white northerners, have allowed politicians to exploit different versions of racism on a national level for the last half century. George Wallace pioneered the use of code words that avoided explicit racist language in the 1960s, but Republican operatives and leaders became even more skilled in their exploitation of white Americans’ underlying racial prejudices. As Lee Atwater, a key adviser to Reagan and to George H.W. Bush famously told Vanderbilt political scientist Alexander Lamis, “You start out in 1954 by saying “N--r, n--r, n--r.” By 1968, you can’t say ‘n--r’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.”⁸Lee Atwater (1981): Interview with Alexander P. Lamis, https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/03/lee-atwater-interview-with-alexander-p-lamis-rough-transcript-weekend-reading.html.

Equally significant in arousing this white backlash was the emergence of Black and, later, Brown Americans into a constant presence on the nation’s television screens that triggered resentment by many white viewers. The emergence of gay men and lesbians prompted a similar response.

Critics often compare Donald Trumps’ dehumanizing language against his enemies—“vermin,” “garbage,” “scum,” “poisoning the blood of our country,” “traitors,” “diseased,” “bad genes”—to Adolf Hitler.⁹Gram Slattery, “Trump’s ‘bloodbath’ and other rhetoric inflame his 2024 campaign trail,” Reuters, March 22, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bloodbath-vermin-animals-trumps-rhetoric-trail-2024-03-22/. But such rhetoric has deep roots in US history, pitting “us” (true Americans) against “them” (threatening outsiders). From John Higham’s 1955 classic, Strangers in the Land to the more recent publication of Erica Lee’s America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States, scholars and journalists have described politicians’ exploitation of white/Anglo-Saxon/Protestant Americans’ fear and hatred of Native Americans, Catholics, Jews, Italians, and Hispanics.¹⁰John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick University Press, 1955); Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2019).

In addition to relying upon such racist and xenophobic appeals, the party that Donald Trump now controls has sought to strengthen its political power by implementing openly undemocratic measures. In Rehearsal for Reconstruction, Willie Lee Rose describes the blunt measures that white Democrats used to disenfranchise (predominantly Black) Republicans. During South Carolina’s 1895 Constitutional Convention the Party stamped out the last handful of Black voters. Whites made no effort to conceal their hand. As one Democrat said, “We don’t propose to have any fair elections.”¹¹Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 404. Such openly partisan and racist voter suppression measures supported by the modern Republican Party are central to our backward revolution.

When Democrat Bill Clinton won in 1992 and 1996, the Republican Party launched a broad range of measures designed to reduce Democratic voters, particularly Black voters. Despite differences between the disenfranchisement efforts of white Democrats in the late nineteenth century and present-day Republicans, Yogi Berra’s memorable phrase: “It’s déjà vu all over again” seems particularly apt. Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have shown how this growing anti-democratic movement has exploited weaknesses in our constitutional system to create a “tyranny of the minority,” a process described in detail by scholars like Steve Suitts and Gene Nichols.¹²Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (New York: Crown, 2023); Steve Suitts, A War of Sections: How Deep South Political Suppression Shaped Voting Rights in America (Athens, Georgia: New South Books, 2024); Gene R. Nichol, Lessons from North Carolina: Race, Religion, Tribe, and the Future of America (Durham, NC: Blair Publishing, 2023).

Republicans have justified such measures by successfully convincing 88 per cent of Republicans and over 25 percent of Democrats that voter fraud is widespread, despite the fact that every rigorous investigation and analysis has found fraud has been statistically infinitesimal. In a review of such claims over the last twenty-five years, researchers for the Brookings Institution could not find one example of voter fraud that “changed the outcome of a single election.”¹³Owen Averill, Annabel Hazrati, and Elaine Kamarck, “Widespread election fraud claims by Republicans don’t match the evidence,” Brookings, November 22, 2024, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/widespread-election-fraud-claims-by-republicans-dont-match-the-evidence/.

In 2012, dissatisfied with piecemeal measures to limit Democratic voters, the Republican State Leadership Committee launched its “Redistricting Majority Project” (REDMAP) with the goal of using the decennial redistricting process to gerrymander state and congressional districts to give an advantage to Republican candidates at the state and congressional level. While gerrymandering has long been practiced in American politics, the development of sophisticated computer programs, the heightening of partisan division, and the economic support of dark money by wealthy donors made it possible for the Republican Party to reshape American politics. In 2019, the five-member Republican majority of the Supreme Court gave the green light to such gerrymandering. By 2024, Republicans had created the most distorted electoral system in nine of the ten most gerrymandered states in the nation.¹⁴“2012 REDMAP Summary Report,” January 4, 2013, https://www.redistrictingmajorityproject.com/; Nick Wing, “GOP Redmap Memo . . . ,” January 17, 2013, “https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gop-redmap-memo-gerrymandering_n_2498913;  “Rucho v. Common Cause," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rucho_v._Common_Cause; “Most Gerrymandered States,” World Population Review, https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/most-gerrymandered-states.

Republicans and Democrats argue over whether such measures stem from partisan or racial motives, but it is clear that racism remains one of the key factors in Trump’s personal rise to political prominence. It was his promotion of the “birther lie,” the demonstrably false claim that Barack “Hussein” Obama was born in Kenya and not a “true American” that launched his political career. As a real estate developer with an early history of excluding Black people from his family’s rental properties, Donald Trump learned that traditional anti-Black racism could prove adaptable in politics by exploiting fear and hate against other “outsiders.” Of all his inflammatory and racist claims, none was more successful than his description of a massive (non-existent) crime wave by brown-skinned illegal immigrants spreading chaos, raping and pillaging embattled white Americans.¹⁵Slattery, “Trump’s ‘bloodbath’."

Economic inequality grew steadily from the early 1970s onward as members of the middle as well as the working class joined the poor in a struggle from paycheck to paycheck. The New Right didn’t address this increasing wealth gap but kept the emphasis on drawing in religious conservatives by convincing them that Christianity and the family was under attack. Right wing activists and new media outlets spread false but heart-rending accounts of full-term babies ripped from their mother's wombs. As early as 1977, the American singer and anti-gay activist Anita Bryant claimed that homosexuals were seducing children for sexual exploitation, but by 2010, claims of “grooming” were widespread on web sites, promoted by right-wing anti-gay groups and Republican politicians. In a 2023 60 Minute interview, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene insisted to interviewer Leslie Stahl that “Democrats are a party of pedophiles. . . . They support grooming children.”¹⁶“Anti-gay Organizing on the Right,” PBS Out of the Past, https://www.pbs.org/outofthepast/past/p5/1977.html; “Marjorie Taylor Greene: The 60 Minutes Interview,” https://www.rev.com/transcripts/marjorie-taylor-greene-the-60-minutes-interview-transcript.

Even more astonishing has been the success of the New Right in convincing nearly 60 percent of white Americans that “discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”¹⁷Ryan Struyk,”Blacks and whites see racism in the United States very, very differently,” CNN, August 18, 2017, https://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/16/politics/blacks-white-racism-united-states-polls/index.html.

Few examples more clearly illustrate the irrational, but powerful appeal of such success at promoting irrationality than the demonization of transgender people in this country—as though they are somehow an existential threat. When a “Fox and Friends” host asked Trump what he would do to “fix” schools, he responded: “No transgender, no operations. You know, they take your kid. There are some places where your boy leaves the school [and] comes back a girl. Without parental consent.”¹⁸Daniel Dale, “Fact Check: Trump revives his lie that schools are secretly sending children for gender-affirming surgeries,” CNN, October 26, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/26/politics/fact-check-trump-rogan-children-gender-affirming-surgeries/index.html. During the last three months of the 2024 campaign, the GOP spent more than $215 million on political advertisements attacking transgender individuals.¹⁹Zane McNeill, “Republicans Spent Nearly $215M on TV Ads Attacking Trans Rights This Election,” truthout, November 5, 2024, https://truthout.org/articles/republicans-spent-nearly-215m-on-tv-ads-attacking-trans-rights-this-election/.

It is easy to see why special interests such as insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, health care monopolies, the fossil fuel industry and libertarian tech billionaires fell in line behind Donald Trump once he gained the enormous powers of the presidency. Given the tax policies enacted during the first Trump administration and those proposed for the second, economic self-interest has also attracted support from the super-rich, the wealthy, and even the moderately well-to-do. While much of the attention has concentrated on the top one percent, between the mid-1970s and 2020, the income of top five percent of America’s taxpayers increased 125 per cent while median family income rose less than fifty per cent.²⁰Eric Schutz to the author, February 17, 2025.

While working-class and struggling middle-class American voters are keenly aware of their growing economic insecurity, they seem oblivious to the role of the wealthy interests that have profited from an economy that has shifted wealth from labor to capital—all reinforced by changes in “tax reform” that lowered taxes on the new plutocracy and led to an explosion of our national debt. This transfer of wealth from the working and middle class to the wealthiest has created in the United States the greatest income inequality in any advanced democracy in the world.

But many of these voters found Donald Trump’s repeated explanation for their plight more persuasive: “The mass migration invasion has crushed wages, crashed school systems . . . wrecked the standard of living and brought crime, drugs, misery and death.”²¹Linda Qui, “Trump’s Claims That Blame Migrants: False or Misleading,” New York Times, October 18, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/18/us/politics/trump-immigration-fact-check.html.

The Democratic Party is hardly immune from the pressures of big money donors, but promoting the interests of the wealthy has been the explicit policy of the Republican Party since Reagan. Trump’s promise not to reduce the federal government’s most expensive programs—Defense, Social Security and Medicare—mean that the only items on the chopping block are those programs that most affect working-class and poor Americans: SNAP (food stamps), Medicaid, ending student loan forgiveness and loan modifications, dismantling the Education Department, and enacting major tariffs that will be passed on to consumers by higher prices.

Reducing the deficit won’t come from increasing taxes. Since signing the “No New Taxes” pledge in 1986, Republicans have opposed tax increases even though—among the thirty-eight advanced economies—US total federal state and local taxes as a percentage of GDP are lower than all but a handful of countries such as Turkey and Mexico.²²“Revenue Statistics 2024, Key Findings for the United States," OECD, https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-sub-issues/global-tax-revenues/revenue-statistics-united-states.pdf.

Even as wealth has become more concentrated in the highest income brackets, the tax rates on the upper ten percent and particularly the upper one percent have significantly declined since Ronald Reagan became President in 1981. Over the last forty years, the actual income tax rate paid by the wealthiest one percent of taxpayers has fallen from nearly 40 percent to 26 percent.²³Robert McClelland and Nikhita Airi, “Effective Income Tax Rates Have Fallen for the Top One Percent Since World War II,” Tax Policy Center, September 15, 2021, https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/effective-income-tax-rates-have-fallen-top-one-percent-world-war-ii-0. A key provision of the Biden Administration’s 2022 Inflation Reduction was to allocate $80 billion over ten years to the IRS to reduce tax evasion by the wealthiest taxpayers, an amount estimated to be over $600 billion each year.²⁴Natasha Sarin, “The Case for a Robust Attack on the Tax Gap,” U.S. Department of the Treasury Featured Stories, September 7, 2021, https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/the-case-for-a-robust-attack-on-the-tax-gap; Arianna Fano, “Breaking Down the Federal Tax Gap,” Bipartisan Policy Center, June 27, 2024, https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/breaking-down-the-federal-tax-gap/. Republicans used negotiations over extending the debt ceiling to cut the original $80 billion to $60 billion. Within weeks of Trump’s taking office, he ordered the IRS to lay off 6,000 employees, more than six per cent of the IRS staff, even as he made it clear that this was only the beginning of his assault on the agency. Blocking the IRS from requiring the wealthy to pay their taxes is clearly a cause close to Trump. As he said in his first 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton, “Paying no taxes makes me smart.”²⁵Andrew Duehren and Michael S. Schmidt, “I.R.S. to Begin Laying Off Roughly 6,000 Employees on Thursday,” New York Times, February 19, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/us/politics/irs-layoffs.html; Richard Rubin, “Donald Trump on Not Paying Taxes: ‘That Makes Me Smart’,” Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-WB-65659; “September 26, 2016 Debate Transcript,” Commission on Presidential Debates, https://www.debates.org/voter-education/debate-transcripts/september-26-2016-debate-transcript.

In the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump’s unconcealed policies to protect wealthy Americans from paying taxes did not seem to resonate with most Americans who don’t have the advantage of overseas tax havens and creative accountants. Neither did his promise to end clean-energy programs and eviscerate regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency. For decades, the coal, oil, and gas industries have worked to discredit the conclusive evidence that the burning of fossil fuels is the major contributor to global warming. In 2009, Trump signed a full-page New York Times with over one-hundred American business leaders warning that if the United States and other countries failed to act decisively to slow climate change, it was “scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.²⁶“Dear President Obama . . .,” New York Times, November 19, 2016, https://static01.nyt.com/packages/pdf/opinion/Dot-Earth/climatead09nyttrumplowrez.pdf. But in 2012, as he began his plans to enter politics, he tweeted that the “concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."²⁷Edward Wong, “Trump Has Called Climate Change a Chinese Hoax,” New York Times, November 18, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/world/asia/china-trump-climate-change.html.

As in all matters Trump, this was a purely transactional move. Few people were shocked, or even noticed, when he told members of the American Petroleum Industry and over a dozen oil company executives at a private at Mar-a-Lago that they “should donate $1 billion to his presidential campaign.” In return, he said, he would roll back environmental rules.”²⁸Lisa Friedman, Coral Davenport, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman, “At a Dinner, Trump Assailed Climate Rules and Asked $1 Billion From Big Oil,” New York Times, May 9, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/climate/trump-oil-gas-mar-a-lago.html.

Trump knows nothing about economics, science, or history that might guide him as the nation’s President, but his marketing skills honed by years hawking overpriced real estate projects, and his time on television playing the CEO on The Apprentice, created the illusion of him as a brilliant businessman despite his seven bankruptcies and the fact that a jury found his companies guilty of massive tax fraud that led to a $350 million fine. Perhaps many Americans have come to see cheating on taxes by the rich and using bankruptcy laws to stiff those to whom they owe money as simply “good business.”

Above all, Donald Trump discovered what sells in today’s political environment must be saturated with the trappings of entertainment. Our national comedian of cruelty found that the more vulgar, vile and threatening he became, the more millions of Americans adored him.

What initially bewildered me most was the willingness of millions of American voters to accept Trump’s tsunami of transparent lies. In time, I’ve come to believe that Trump sensed the new reality: most Americans believe all politicians lie. By making his lying so brazen and preposterous, he could be seen as somehow more “honest,” and “non-hypocritical” than his opponents.

Even though we can be certain that Trump has never read Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), he grasped one of her critical insights.

The followers of demagogues, writes Arendt, were “ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.” Such power-obsessed leaders discovered they could “make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism.” They would insist that “they had known all along that the statement was a lie” and would admire their leader for his “tactical intelligence.”²⁹Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1971), 433.

As long as you kept repeating something, “it didn’t really matter if it wasn’t true,” said Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s White House Press Secretary. “Casual dishonesty filtered through the White House as though it were in the air-conditioning system.”³⁰Stephanie Grisham, I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House (New York: Harper Collins, 2021), 138; Peter Baker, “In Trump’s Alternate Reality, Lies and Distortions Drive Change,” New York Times, February 23, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/23/us/politics/trump-alternative-reality.html.

Such contempt for the truth is not simply a matter of political tactics. It has demonstrable, and often deadly consequences. In the wake of the COVID epidemic, surveys showed that 75 per cent of Republicans told pollsters they had confidence in Trump’s advice on the epidemic. The result? An analysis published in 2023 in The Journal of American Medicine concluded that, once the COVID vaccine became available, "the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters.”³¹Andrew Greiner, “75% of Republicans trust Trump’s medical advice,” YouGov, April 24, 2020, https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/29305-75-republicans-trust-trumps-medical-advice; Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Jason L. Schwartz, “Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” JAMA Internal Medicine, July 24, 2023, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2807617; Alyssa Bilinski, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, “COVID-19 and Excess All-Cause Mortality in the US and 18 Comparison Countries,” JAMA Network, October 12, 2020, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2771841. Lancet, one of the world’s most trusted medical journals, compared America’s COVID response with our European allies during the Trump time in office and estimated that his administration’s inaction and misinformation led to the unnecessary deaths of at least 400,000 Americans.³²Steffie Woolhandler, David U. Himmelstein, Sameer Ahmed, Zinzi Bailey, Mary T. Bassett, Michael Bird, et al., “Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era,” The Lancet, February 20, 2021, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32545-9/abstract.

As I watched his rise to the presidency in 2016 and 2024, I recalled the 1955 book by Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free. In 1953, Mayer moved to the small German city of Marburg and came to know a number of local townspeople who looked back on their nation’s journey from the democratic Weimar Republic to Hitler’s Third Reich. None were more perceptive than Heinrich Hildebrandt, a retired teacher of classics and literature. What happened from the beginning of the new German Reich, he said, was the gradual acceptance of the German people to the step-by-step destruction of their democratic institutions, the rise of a dictatorship and the ultimate barbarity: the Holocaust. Each act was worse than the last, but only a little worse, he recalled, and he kept waiting for that one dramatic overreach by Hitler’s regime that would lead decent Germans to rise in resistance.

Then, one evening at dinner, his very young son began talking about “Jew swine”, said Hildebrandt, “and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose,” recalled Hildebrandt. “The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all.”³³Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1933–45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 171.

Over the last decade a majority of white Americans have come to accept a President who does little to conceal his racism, his contempt for—and abuse of—women, his cruelty toward the displaced and the vulnerable, and his lack of any respect for democratic norms. Donald Trump is no Adolph Hitler, and today’s America is certainly not the Weimar Germany of the Great Depression. But the process of first being appalled by, and then gradually accepting his abnormal words and actions as “normal,” has marked Trump’s rise to power.

Hildebrandt called the response of the German people during the 1930s gewöhnung — "habituation." Social psychologists use the same word to describe the process by which, through repetition, words and behavior once considered unacceptable eventually become dismissed with a shrug. “Just Trump being Trump.” Barring some dramatic shift in the public mood, that process will only continue during a second Trump administration as we are overwhelmed by his incompetence, his merciless cruelty, and his demand for a powerful “unitary executive,” the kind of unlimited authority claimed by monarchs and dictators.

Despite his words and behavior, Trump has gained the passionate support of an overwhelming majority of Republican voters. Their unquestioning embrace has allowed him to achieve something that has never happened in American history: the complete control of one of the nation’s major political parties by a reckless demagogue. Having abandoned integrity and, what earlier generations called a “sense of honor,” his nominees, appointees, and elected Republican officials have prostrated themselves before a President who openly announced that his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen allowed him to “terminate all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”³⁴Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey, “Trump’s call to suspend Constitution divides Republicans,” Washington Post, December 4, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/12/04/trump-constitution-republicans/.

Trump’s dismissal of constitutional restraints has been a persistent pattern. Less than a month into his new administration, in a post-midnight post on his “Truth Social” account, he wrote: “He who saves his Country does not violate any law,” a restatement of a quote attributed to Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Whether Napoleon actually made such a statement is irrelevant: it reflects Donald Trump’s belief that he is above the law.

Such assertions of unlimited executive power would have discredited any politician a half century ago; a much less extreme claim of presidential authority by Richard Nixon led the Republican Party to abandon the nation’s 37^th President and force his resignation in 1974. But the guardrails that help protect our democracy (however flawed) have fallen away during the last thirty to forty years and a crucial element in this process has been the declining confidence of Americans in the institutions that are essential to making informed public policy choices. “Elitists” of all kinds, scientific and medical organizations, professional journalists, social scientists, academics, researchers, colleges and universities, the government agencies that protect our health and safety, judges, prosecutors and legal institutions: all are dismissed as part of the corrupt “Deep State.” While hardly perfect, these social repositories of inquiry and knowledge incorporate ethical guidelines and self-correcting procedures that seek to arrive at some measure of truthfulness, making them infinitely preferable to understand the world as it is rather than what we wish were true, or what feeds our deepest fears.

Is Trump simply a beneficiary of this transformation in our politics? Or is it a moment when an individual’s bizarre and troubling behavior seems matched to our national mood? Since the 1960s, mental health professionals have been wary of diagnosing the mental health of individuals, particularly politicians, but in his 2019 analysis, Diagnosis from a Distance, psychologist John Martin-Joy suggests that, given Donald Trump’s clearly unstable behavior, we may have no choice but to make that assessment.³⁵John Martin-Joy, Diagnosing from a Distance: Debates over Libel Law, Media, and Psychiatric Ethics from Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) 224–228.

John Gartner, a nationally recognized psychologist who taught at Johns Hopkins University Medical School for twenty-eight years certainly agrees. He has made a powerful argument that Donald Trump “suffers from malignant narcissism, a diagnosis far more toxic and dangerous than mere narcissistic personality disorder because it combines narcissism with three other severely pathological components: paranoia, sociopathy, and sadism.” In a 2020 essay, Gartner documented Trump’s persistent narcissism (he knows “more about everything than anyone” and his “empathy for no one but himself”). The President’s paranoia was reflected in “his demonization of the press, minorities, immigrants, and anyone who disagrees with him.” Such attributes, concluded Gartner, are classic signs of paranoia. Equally dangerous were the examples of his sociopathy, “a diagnosis that describes people who constantly lie, violate norms and laws, exploit other people, and show no remorse”. Finally, there was his constant sadistic behavior—“He takes gleeful pleasure in harming and humiliating other people. He is undoubtedly the most prolific cyberbully in history.”³⁶John Gartner, “DEFCON 2: Nuclear Risk Is Rising as Donald Trump Goes Downhill,” in Rocket Man: Nuclear Madness and the Mind of Donald Trump, ed. John Gartner, Steven Buser, and Leonard Cruz (Asheville, NC: Chiron Publications, 2018), 29–30.

As it has become more difficult to winnow truth from the torrent of lies, it becomes easier to accept his repeated claim: “I alone can fix it.” Any misgivings can be set aside by finding confirmation of Donald Trump’s lies on conspiracy-affirming social media platforms or Fox News.

Trump also learned much from the internal infighting that marked his first administration. The second time around, he is making certain that every appointment and every candidate who hopes to be re-elected is totally dependent upon his whims. There will be no voices to resist or to ask probing questions. And unlike his first administration, he now has the coordinated support and financial backing of much of America’s plutocracy as well as the right-wing ideologues who produced Project 2025 and have vetted individuals to carry out his wishes.

Indiana Senator Jim Banks (R) described the beginning of the second Trump administration as "shock and awe," but it was essentially Steve Bannon’s recipe: “Flood the zone with shit,” overwhelming critics and the opposition party while insuring that members of his party will approve all his nominees and appointments, even if they are incompetent, convicted criminals, sexual predators, paranoiacs, or xenophobes.³⁷Robert Costa, “Trump ally says first 100 days will be ‘shock and awe’,” CBS Sunday Morning, January 19, 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-ally-says-first-100-days-will-be-shock-and-awe/; Brian Stelter, “This infamous Steve Bannon quote is key to understanding America’s crazy politics,” CNN Business, November 16, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources/index.html.

As someone who generally votes for Democratic Party candidates, I have been disappointed with election outcomes in the past. However discouraged, I never felt that Ronald Reagan, or the father and son Bushes (or even Richard Nixon) represented a fundamental threat to our democracy. Donald Trump and the extremists, loyalists, and enablers who fill his Administration are that threat and I have no illusion that a subservient Republican congressional majority will stop his abuses of the Constitution. Perhaps the Supreme Court will block his most radical acts, but the Court’s July 2024 decision granting him absolute immunity for actions taken “within his constitutional powers as president” is far from reassuring.³⁸Trump v. United States, 23 U.S. 939 (2024), https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf.

In all the post-mortems that followed the 2024 election, an interview with Anne Applebaum by the New York Times’ Ezra Klein captured what I had been thinking but couldn’t put into words. As Klein writes:

One of the challenging things about covering Donald Trump is that it is hard to talk about him without sounding unhinged—and that is because he acts in ways that are, by any reasonable standard, unhinged. . . . He makes his opponents look like rabid antagonists by making them respond to a reality that leaves no room for neutrality, no room for a wait-and-see open-mindedness. He creates a wild reality—and then you sound wild simply describing it.³⁹Ezra Klein, “Trump Kicks Down the Guardrails,” New York Times, November 19, 2024,  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-anne-applebaum.html.

In 2018, when the news media uncovered the full extent of the Trump Administration’s deliberate policy of separating children from their mothers and fathers, Joe Biden responded in what would become his refrain over the next six years, “This is not who we are.” He was not referring to policy, but to a code of moral and ethical beliefs that he assumed Americans shared.

Joe Biden was mistaken. On election day, 2024, 61 per cent of white men and 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump. This is who the majority of white voters have become.

So, what is to be done? In his 1862 message to Congress as the war for the preservation of the union began, Abraham Lincoln told the nation: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion,” he said. “As our case is new, we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”⁴⁰Abraham Lincoln, “December 1, 1862: Second Annual Message,” Miller Center Presidential Speeches, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/december-1-1862-second-annual-message.

More than a century and a half later, Lincoln’s words speak to the present threat to American democracy and the values we once shared. The crisis has been in the making for over half a century. This and future generations now face the long task of reimagining what kind of America, what kind of world, is worth fighting for.

About the Author

Dan T. Carter is Educational Foundation Emeritus Professor at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of numerous books and articles including The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Louisiana State University Press, second edition, 2000) and Unmasking the Klansman: The Double Life of Asa and Forrest Carter (Athens, Georgia: New South Books, 2023)

About the Photographer

Tom Rankin is Professor of the Practice of Art and Documentary Studies at Duke University where he directs the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts. His books include Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (1993; Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre:  Photographs of a River Life  (1995); Faulkner's World:  The Photographs of Martin J. Dain (1997); Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible (2000). He edited and wrote the introductory essay for the book One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia (2013).  He is a member of the Southern Spaces editorial board  

Cover Image Attribution: Camden, Tennessee Christmas Parade, 1982 Billboard along I-65, Indiana, 1976. Photograph by and courtesy of Tom Rankin.

• fPolitics and Government
• fRace Relations
• fSocial Movements