Noah Berger/AP Photo
Between the pandemic and the protests, we can’t escape the feeling that we’re living through history and that the country is being altered.
Every presidential campaign is in part a debate about the nature of America: what it has been, what it is now, and what it should become. But seldom do we get as stark a contrast as we’re seeing right now.
When he first began preparing to run for president, Donald Trump made himself the country’s most prominent advocate of the racist “birther” theory; today he has become its most ardent defender of the Confederacy. “This is a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country!” he tweeted not long ago. Meanwhile, Joe Biden is leaning on a version of the American story that comes right from the man who made him vice president.
Let’s return for a moment to 2016, when first lady Michelle Obama stood up at the Democratic convention and drew a line from our nation’s founding shame to what she saw as its hopeful present. “The story of this country,” she said, was “the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.”
To anyone who had paid attention to her husband’s rhetoric over the previous eight years, it sounded familiar. For Barack Obama, the story of America was one of slow but inexorable progress, of ideals both noble and radical that created their own demand for centuries of work to realize them.
As he said while standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, “What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this, what greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?”
Biden describes America as “a union that constantly requires reform and rededication.”
At a moment of protest and upheaval, Joe Biden is trying to tell a similar story, to explain protests against racism and police brutality as part of the long work to realize the vision of the country’s founding. He describes America as “a union that constantly requires reform and rededication—and yes, the protests from voices of those mistreated, ignored, left out and left behind.” On the Fourth of July, he released a video beginning with the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that all men are created equal, and then went on:
We’ve never lived up to it. Jefferson himself didn’t. He held slaves. Women were excluded. But once proposed, it was an idea that couldn’t be constrained ... American history is no fairy tale. It’s been a constant push-and-pull between two parts of our character: the idea that all men and women, all people are created equal, and the racism that has torn us apart ... This Independence Day, let’s not just celebrate the words. Let’s celebrate that promise, and commit to work, the work we must do to fulfill that promise.
This was accompanied by images of civil rights protests, from suffragettes all the way through Black Lives Matter.
Biden seems very comfortable with this rhetoric, and not just because he heard it so often from Obama. Only now with his rather remarkable shift leftward (putting aside whether he has moved far enough) has it become clear that malleability was always a defining feature of Biden’s identity. He is eminently changeable, always ready to shift should he be pushed or persuaded or political circumstances alter. So at the end of his long career—so long it covers a fifth of American history itself—it would not be surprising if he looks back over that span and sees an arc defined by motion and change.
But for conservatives, the idea of American history as a story of change is repugnant. They recoil against any reminder of the past that is less than celebratory; when Michelle Obama gave that speech, they reacted with rage that she would even mention slavery (see here or here or here). And Biden’s Fourth of July exhortation to fulfill the promise of the founding? Newt Gingrich called it “the most anti-American speech ever given by an American presidential candidate.”
In so doing, the conservatives highlighted a particular approach to our history, one that says not only that the framers were nearly godlike but that talking too much about the ways the ideals of liberty and equality have gone unrealized is to make oneself an enemy of the country, even more than literally rebelling against America.
There’s no better embodiment of that idea of history as static and always having been virtuous in full than the statues we now argue over. When we consider a figure like Thomas Jefferson or Christopher Columbus, we’re not supposed to interrogate their life or try to weigh their contributions against their misdeeds. We don’t evaluate them in the light of our contemporary values. We cast them in iron and carve them in stone, never to be changed or challenged.
And now Donald Trump is embracing a kind of blood-and-soil version of American history, not only hostile to immigrants but so adamant about not re-evaluating history that he has become a champion of the Confederacy.
Trump understands well that his base is made up of people who feel that history has already left them behind.
Which makes a kind of sense, even beyond the simple and obvious racism of proclaiming it vital that American servicemembers train at bases named for men who waged war on the United States in the service of white supremacist ideology. Trump understands well that his base is made up of people who feel that history has already left them behind, and the more change we go through the worse it will get for them.
Between the pandemic and the protests, we can’t escape the feeling that we’re living through history and that the country is being altered. Your average 60-year-old Trump supporter is pretty sure that on the other side of all that, they’ll be even farther from the center of American life than they already feel.
That sense of dislocation was central to Trump’s appeal in 2016: the idea that the perfection of the past was being stolen by immigrants and minorities and young people and women and everyone who embodied change. In 2020, Trump is so committed to following the same strategy of fear and anger that he’s been transported back to 1968, making ads about chaos in the streets that echo those aired by the Nixon campaign, warning that “Your home will go down in value and crime rates will rapidly rise” if we don’t roll back fair-housing laws, and tweeting about “suburban housewives.”
As Trump’s attorney general said with a laugh when asked about how history will remember his corrupt interventions on behalf of the president’s criminal friends, “History is written by the winners.” But that’s only partially true. We’re at a moment when our history is being rewritten—edited, revised, amended, and reconceptualized. For some that’s a terrible threat, but at the moment it looks like their battle to stop it from happening will be one more lost cause.
