Often attributed to Mark Twain — perhaps mistakenly, since no historical source shows he actually made the statement — “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” is a common and apt refrain when discussing the connection between historical perspectives and current events. By drawing on knowledge of what happened in the past, and why, we are better able to understand the flow and direction of the history collectively created in each new day.
“Past Rhymes With Present Times” is a series by Lloyd S. Kramer exploring historical context and frameworks, and how the foundations of the past affect the building of the future.
We’re living through a strange era in which our national government is trying to destroy ideals and institutions that have shaped much of America’s social, cultural, and political history since the 1960s or even the 1930s.
These post-1960 transitions include the development of increasingly multicultural and multiracial public institutions, the immigration of workers and families from Asia and Latin America, and the advancement of women in almost all spheres of professional and economic activity. There has also been growing tolerance for diverse religious beliefs, same-sex relationships, and long-term partnerships outside of marriage.
At the same time, however, these transitions have provoked a powerful countermovement to stop and reverse such changes by overturning the multiculturalism of America’s civic culture. In most general terms, the political and cultural actions of Trumpism have constructed a new alternative to what the Declaration of Independence calls the “unalienable” rights and “self-evident” truths of human equality.
Trumpism is therefore not “conservative” in the classical sense of a movement that seeks to conserve or carefully reform what currently exists. Its theorists and policymakers are instead promoting a radical reaction against the expertise, multicultural institutions and expanding civil rights that have transformed American public life over the past 70 years.
The MAGA movement has thus become the most recent example of recurring reactionary efforts to destroy the legacies of the eighteenth-century’s “Enlightenment rationalism” and political struggles for human rights and self-governing institutions.
The demands for equal rights in the American and French Revolutions gave rise to an early nineteenth-century monarchical restoration in France and a late nineteenth-century “white supremacy” restoration in North Carolina—where the abolition of slavery was a long-deferred extension of the revolutionary ideas that Americans had declared in 1776. The MAGA reaction against post-1960 America, in other words, can be compared to nineteenth-century reactions against the ideals and upheavals of the earlier Atlantic Revolutions.
Wilmington, N.C. massacre, 1898: Armed militiamen in front of the burned-down “Record” press building. (source)
The Ideological Origins of MAGA’s Reactionary Radicalism
Historians such as Laura Field and Mark Lilla have begun to examine the intellectual history of a movement whose leaders are now embracing authoritarian arguments for a post-democratic America and promoting one-sided religious and anti-immigrant conceptions of American nationalism.
One early influence on radical, right-wing views of “the world we have lost,” for example, emerged from the writings of Richard Weaver (1910-1963), who was born in Asheville, worked briefly at NC State University, and later spent summers in the North Carolina mountains while teaching at the University of Chicago. Weaver’s book, Ideas Have Consequences (1948), as Laura Field describes it, argued that “modern thought is inherently corrosive” because it lacks a “transcendental moral orthodoxy.”
This anti-modernist perspective has spread widely among the MAGA cultural influencers who believe the United States can only be restored to its essential political and religious foundations when its people recognize the universal transcendent truth of biblical Christianity. If truth is defined as transcendent, universal, and Christian, it becomes logical or even imperative to ignore or repress educators, scientists, Muslims, and Christians who wrongly hold different views.
This condemnation of modern thought and multicultural education, however, has gained emotional and political power through its fusion with a rising hostility for immigrants who bring diverse religious and ethnic traditions into American society. Here, too, the radical reactionary perspective carries a North Carolina story because one of the key critics of America’s racial and cultural diversity, Sam T. Francis (1947-2005), received his PhD in History at UNC, Chapel Hill, in 1979.
Francis later became a journalist for right-wing publications in which he blamed America’s cultural and political elites for the nation’s cultural decay and lamented the deleterious influence of non-European immigrants. As Mark Lila notes in a concise summary of his ideas, Francis advocated a white-led “culture war” that would require a “populist-based presidency able to cut through the present oligarchical [cultural] establishment
Arguing for racist views of the American crisis in books such as America Extinguished: Mass Immigration and the Disintegration of American Culture (2001), Franics vehemently proclaimed America’s “white essence” with themes that others could link to Weaver’s critique of “corrosive” modern ideas.
Although Trump does not read books, his intellectual allies at the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation have drawn on writers such as Weaver and Francis to create an apocalyptic view of America’s national decline that justifies Trumpism, condemns universities, and implicitly connects MAGA ideas with reactionary movements in Restoration France (1815-1830) and post-Civil-War North Carolina.
The Reaction Against the Enlightenment and the French Revolution
The political actions and (often violated) ideals of the American and French Revolutions asserted that all human beings have unalienable rights and that self-governing institutions best protect human freedoms. Both revolutions replaced long-existing monarchies with new republics, yet the theories of equality and national self-government generated a reactionary critique among nineteenth-century American slaveholders and French royalists who restored the Bourbon monarchy after 1815.
Although the monarchical restoration could not destroy all the earlier French aspirations for self-government and a more secular society, theorists such as Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) insisted that the divinely sanctioned monarchy should collaborate with a small social elite and use the universal religious truth of the Catholic Church to control France’s deluded people and national culture.
Maistre argued that monarchical power (linked to eternal religious truth) was the only force that could control a nation whose recent revolution had shown how modern beliefs in self-government, scientific knowledge, and human rationality led to violence and chaos. The sinful French people had ignored the eternal truths of kingship and the Holy Church, so God had punished the nation with suffering and bloodshed until France restored its divinely chosen king.
Lithograph of Joseph de Maistre from a painting by Pierre Bouillon (source)
Later French political movements rejected Maistre’s reactionary view of modern history and his argument for authoritarian royal power, but the current White House Deputy Stephen Miller has come back to ideas that Maistre would endorse. “The real world,” Miller recently explained in a Maistre-like interview, “is governed by power” and these are the “iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
For angry reactionaries like Maistre and Miller, modern ideas about human rights, democratic self-government, or the rule of law should be ignored because they have none of the real power that comes from the unrestricted actions of authoritarian kings and the unquestioning allegiance of their deferential subjects.
Maistre’s analysis of political violence and his desire to restore a previous society’s hierarchies and political absolutism flowed into wider anti-democratic ideologies that would reappear among modern European fascists and among white political leaders in late-nineteenth-century North Carolina.
These North Carolinians were surely oblivious to the ideas of Joseph de Maistre. They nevertheless shared his reactionary desire to destroy equal rights and democratic self-government when they restored a pre-Civil War racial hierarchy in which Black and Native peoples could neither vote nor hold public office.
The Reaction Against the Civil War “Revolution” and Equal Rights in North Carolina
The abolition of slavery and the precarious establishment of legal racial equality opened opportunities to develop a multiracial democracy in North Carolina after 1865. Despite the opposition of white North Carolinians who regained political power in the 1870s, Black men continued to vote; and they joined a “Fusionist” movement with disaffected white “Populists” during the elections of 1896 to win control of the state legislature and also establish a multiracial Board of Aldermen in Wilmington.
This extraordinary advance for Black political rights and interracial collaboration sparked an angry reaction from white elites. Organizing a scurrilous newspaper campaign and supporting vigilante “Red Shirt” groups who intimidated Black voters, white political leaders stoked racist fears of “Negro Dominance” and Black criminality with belligerent declarations that “North Carolina is a WHITE MAN’S state, and WHITE MEN will rule it!”
The white supremacists won crushing victories in the state elections of 1898, whereupon the state legislature enacted a Constitutional amendment that required “literacy tests” and proof of a “voting grandfather” before North Carolinians could register to vote. White registrars in each county soon disqualified virtually all Black voters, so that the number of registered Black voters in North Carolina fell from 126,000 in 1896 to 6,100 in 1902
Meanwhile, a white mob in Wilmington destroyed the offices of a Black newspaper, murdered roughly 60 Black residents in the city, and forcefully removed the Fusionist members of the Board of Aldermen in a coup that was more successful than the pro-Trump attack against the US Congress on January 6, 2021.
North Carolina’s radical turn-of-the century upheaval, in short, rejected equal rights and multiracial democracy as overtly as any reactionary in post-revolutionary France or fascist in modern Europe. And Black people were effectively blocked from voting in North Carolina until the 1960s.
Trumpism and Reactionary Radicalism in Our Own Time
The MAGA campaign to transform the United States thus replicates numerous patterns in earlier radical reactions as it strives to turn back many of America’s post-1960 social changes by challenging Enlightenment traditions of evidence-based knowledge, violating human rights, reducing the electoral influence of non-white voters, expelling immigrants, and portraying America as an Imperial power with authoritarian leaders.
The values of empirical scientific research and the anti-monarchical themes of the Declaration of Independence are generally ignored as the nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of its rights-based revolutionary struggle.
Trumpism therefore goes far beyond classical conservatism in its authoritarianism, its rejection of modern historical transitions, its assault on human rights, its hostility to the rule of law, and its desire to reestablish traditional gender and racial hierarchies. But a broader historical vision reminds us that reactionary radicalism cannot ultimately stop the inexorable processes of social and political change or restore a social world that has forever disappeared.
Photo via Lindsay Metivier
Lloyd Kramer is a professor emeritus of History at UNC, Chapel Hill, who believes the humanities provide essential knowledge for both personal and public lives. His most recent book is titled “Traveling to Unknown Places: Nineteenth-Century Journeys Toward French and American Selfhood,” but his historical interest in cross-cultural exchanges also shaped earlier books such as “Nationalism In Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities Since 1775” and “Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions.”
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