I've been reading a bit about how discredited causes are remembered. Specifically, I had my eyes opened by Susan Neiman's simultaneously scholarly and deeply personal 2019 book,
Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil.
Neiman compares how Germany has gone about confronting its Nazi past with how the United States has confronted the legacy of slavery. The comparison turns out to be a good deal more complicated than most of us would like, certainly the "most of us" who like to believe we're on the "right" side of history. To be an admirer of Hitler today is monstrous, no question. Yet to say that Germany has successfully grappled with Nazism and its legacy is ... well, contentious. Not all Germans believe that, and the skeptics have compelling reasons for their doubt.
Yet if Germany has had a difficult time looking itself in the mirror, the United States largely has kept its eyes closed, at least until recently.
Neiman observes that much of this country's problem grappling with the legacy of slavery arises from its refusal to examine a good century of its history, namely, the period between the end of the Civil War and the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. When skeptics of systemic racism complain that slavery ended over a century ago, they take advantage of popular ignorance of Reconstruction and its backlash, the so-called "Jim Crow" era. Some historians contend that the latter era's brutality, which included lynching and mass murder, merits a more brutally honest name, like "neoslavery". I can't argue with them. To paraphrase an observation made by Martin Luther King, Jr., chattel slavery ended in 1865 but African Americans weren't truly freed for another century. If more of us understood the truth of neoslavery, how thoroughly it ground AFrican Americans down under a web of legalized terror and economic exploitation, we'd give short shrift to the willfully obtuse argument that "slavery ended over a century ago and we should move on".
So both Germany and the United States still have work to do, coming to terms with the horrific legacies of their pasts. The United States has a lot farther to go in its own journey than Germany, though.
With all that in mind, I wonder: what will our descendants a century hence make of this era's legacy? (I'm limiting myself to considering the United States from here on.)
In our time we've seen a good forty percent of the country (the actual number varies depending on context but forty percent seems to be a good overall estimate) descend into political madness. There is no other way to characterize the reactionary (not conservative) embrace of the corrupt, cartoonishly dishonest, and venemous Donald Trump. Just this week, he reasserted his dominance over his would-be challengers for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — by being indicted in New York State.
The sheer number of verified and verifiable lies that Trump has told since he announced his candidacy in 2015 utterly disqualifies him as an authoritative or trustworthy source of information about anything. Yet millions of otherwise sane Americans repeat his assertions — echoed and embellished by far-right media and social media — with absolute confidence.
At one time I believed they were doing so purely out of spite, as a rhetorical middle finger to those of us who still have some trust in the mainstream media and, more broadly, in expertise and truth. Yet the vast majority of those millions have put their money and their health where their mouths are. They have repudiated the consensus of the medical and public-health communities that the vaccines against CoViD-19 are safe, and have refused to be vaccinated. They have done so because Trump, among others, has assailed the vaccines as toxic, or as sinister vectors for mind control.
It's worth remembering that (1) Trump himself got vaccinated, though he did his best to conceal that fact, and (2) Trump at least nominally presided over Operation Warp Speed, the government project that led to the vaccines' development. Yet millions of Trump's followers have repudiated the vaccines anyway.
To trust a compulsive liar — one who doesn't even follow his own (bad) advice — does not make sense. It makes no sense to me, and it won't make any sense to our descendants a century from now.
I remember the horror of the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in which hundreds of cultists committed suicide at the direction of the cult's leader. That was my first brush with what I've since discovered is a real vulnerability in the human psyche, one that explains adherence to horrific ideas not just by hundreds, but by millions. Sometimes the right — or rather, wrong — person comes along, able to convince a lot of people that they should put their complete trust in him. (It's almost always a man.)
Forty-five years on, we still don't have much of a handle on how cult leader Jim Jones gained his hold over his followers. I wonder if, a century from now, science will be able to explain that, or the power of our own time's literal cult hero, Trump.
Or will our descendants a century from now still struggle against the enduring, toxic legacy of the delusions Trump and likeminded allies have spread? Will his deluded message live on in a new "Lost Cause" narrative, perhaps fused with the old one that is one of the Confederacy's most evil legacies ("evil" because it tries to deny historical truth)?
