After everything this country has been through, since Donald Trump and his denial of the elections, until insurrectionundergoing what prosecutors call the “politically motivated” attack on her husband Nancy Pelosi, still seems ready to elect candidates next Tuesday who deny the election results. Elections 2020.
There are 291 electoral deniers in the ballot.
And Trump, the biggest threat to democracy, He can come back in 2024.
It’s hard to believe even if it’s happening right in front of our eyes.
In an important speech on Wednesday night, President Joe Biden he described the denial of the election as “the road to chaos in the United States”.
“It’s unprecedented,” he said.
“This is illegal. And it’s un-American.”
But in truth, him extremism, racism and nationalism whites are not anti-American or unknown.
Personally I am fascinated by historical precedents and corollaries, by the ways in which events find ways to repeat themselves, not because of some strange insect in the cosmos, but because we humans are basically the same, unchanged, stuck in rotation. Our flaws and weaknesses.
The presidential election of 1912 offers some lessons for our current political moment.
William Howard Taft he had been elected president in 1908, replacing the wingman Theodore Rooseveltthe undisputed leader of the progressive movement of the time, which supported Taft’s presidential candidacy.
But Taft wasn’t Teddy.
Taft was, as University of Notre Dame professor Peri E. Arnold wrote, “a loving and kind man who wanted to be loved as a person and respected for his judicial temperament.”
I’m listening echoes beyond the differences between presidents Barack Obama and Biden.
At first, progressives seemed happy with Taft’s election, hoping it would simply carry on Roosevelt’s legacy.
But they soon became disaffected, as did Roosevelt.
It wasn’t that Taft was ineffective; he just didn’t do everything those progressives wanted, just like Biden didn’t tick the box on all progressive priorities.
Riding a wave of progressive anger, Roosevelt challenged Taft in 1912 and, when Roosevelt failed to get the nomination, ran as a third-party candidate, taking many of the progressives with him.
That split practically guaranteed that his opponent, Woodrow Wilsonhe would win, becoming the first president of the south after the civil war.
Wilson had not been a favorite to win the nomination of his own party; he only got it to card number 46 after negotiating quite a bit.
But once he got to the general election, he sailed to victory over the disputed liberals.
He would go on to campaign on an “America First” platform, which for him consisted primarily of maintaining the neutrality of the United States in World War I.
But as Sarah Churchwell, author of “Behold, America” told Vox in 2018, she was soon associated not only with isolationismbut also with the Ku Klux Klan, xenophobia and fascism.
In Wilson’s case, extremists took his language and twisted its meaning into something more sinister.
When Trump resorted to that language more than a century later, he started with the left and tried to pass it off for benign.
Of course, Wilson wasn’t Trump.
Trump is one of the worst presidents, if not the worst, this country has ever had.
At least Wilson, as the University of Virginia Miller Center notes, has advocated “limits on corporate campaign contributions, rate cuts, new and stronger antitrust laws, banking and currency reform, a federal income tax, direct election of senators, a one-term presidency.
He was a southern democratic progressive.
The fledgling NAACP actually approved it.
But there are disturbing similarities between him and Trump.
Wilson was a racist.
He brought to the White House the segregation sensibility of the south, where he had grown up and where Jim Crow was on the rise.
He allowed segregation to flourish in the federal government under his rule.
And although Wilson did not advocate closing all immigration, as long as immigrants were from Europe, he espoused xenophobic beliefs with fervor.
In 1912, he issued a statement, saying:
“On the subject of Chinese and Japanese immigration, I defend the national policy of exclusion (or limited immigration). The whole question is that of the assimilation of various races. We cannot create a homogeneous population of people who do not mix with the Caucasian race. “
It was Wilson who screened “Birth of a Nation” at the White House, a film that propelled the “Lost Cause” narrative and fueled the Klan’s resurgence.
Trump hosted a screening of “2000 Mules”, a documentary denied by a fact-checker that claimed to show widespread electoral fraud perpetrated by “mules” who filled the ballot boxes collected during the last presidential election, in Mar-a-Lake. , United States. that Trump called the Southern White House.
That film helped fuel the conviction of his followers in his lie about the 2020 election.
Allow me a brief parenthesis to analyze the dehumanizing language of the “mule”.
Mules were synonymous with slavery and servitude, and as such the confrontation between them and enslaved, and subsequently oppressed, blacks was routine.
Indeed, in “Her Eyes Were Watching God”, Zora Neale Hurston wrote that the black woman is the mule of the world.
Then came the invention of the “drug mule”, A phrase that first appeared in this newspaper in 1993.
It would later be used frequently in the media to describe Hispanic women.
Now we have ticket mulesa broad cabal of liberal actors bent on stealing the election.
Once you animalize people, by definition you have dehumanized them, and that person is no longer worthy of human treatment.
I say all this to prove it we’ve been here before.
We have already seen extremism emerge in this country, several times, and it often follows a familiar pattern: a party loses strength, concentration and cohesion; liberals become exhausted, disillusioned or fractured, allowing nationalist racists and conservatives to emerge.
Those leaders then tap into a darkness in the audience, which periodically falls asleep until it bursts again.
I fear too many liberals are once again trapped in the cycle, embracing apathy.
My message to all of them before election day:
Wake up!
c.2022 The New York Times Company
Source: Clarin
