Sound Familiar?

    Sam Tanenhaus is an American historian, biographer, and journalist who writes often for The New York Times and the New York Review of Books.  His biographies include those on Louis Armstrong, Whittaker Chambers, and William F. Buckley, Jr., which he’s currently working on.  He has received both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for his work.

    In a recent essay in the Book Review section of the Times, Tanenhaus asks “if there is a useful precedent for this most unpredictable of election seasons.”  He rejects references to 1978 when the Republicans had to settle their differences at a divided convention, and to the riotous, violent Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968.  Instead, he turns to 1936, the year Franklin Delano Roosevelt was lining up to run for his second term, a year when populist demagogues were also in evidence in American politics.

    In 1936, Tanenbaum writes, “the country was lifting itself out of the Great Depression, helped by the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, but the climb back to prosperity was long and slow, and a mood of populist unrest began to steal across the land.”  He then cites to the description of the period offered by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.:

        The followers of the demagogues mostly came from the old lower-middle classes, now in an unprecedented state of frustration and fear, menaced by humiliation, dispossession, and poverty.  They came from provincial and traditionally nonpolitical groups in the population, jolted from apathy into near-hysteria by the shock of economic collapse.  They came, in the main, from the ranks of the self-employed, who, as farmers or shopkeepers or artisans, felt threatened by organized economic power, whether from above, as in banks and large corporations, or from below, as in trade unions.  To a considerable degree, they came form the evangelical denominations; years of Bible reading and fundamentalist revivalism had accustomed them to millennial solutions.  They were mostly men and women of native-born old-immigrant (Anglo-Saxon and German) stock; if [Father Charles] Coughlin’s [right-wing] Irish Catholic supporters seemed an exception, the exception was more apparent than real, for the Irish were beginning to see themselves as part of the old immigration rather than the new.  In sum, they seemed to represent Old America in resentful revolt against both contemporary politics and contemporary economics.

Sound familiar?


References:

Sam Tanenhaus, “What  Do This Season’s Political Books Tell Us About the Election?”, New York Times, Book Review Section (June 16, 2016).

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval 69 (Houghton-Mifflin 1960).

We Have Been Warned

     Anne Applebaum  is a well-regarded journalist and author.  She studied at Oxford and the London School of Economics, married a former Foreign Minister of Poland, and is an expert on Eastern Europe and Russia.  She wrote about her view that Britain’s decision to leave the European Union is a warning to America in her bi-weekly foreign affairs column in The Washington Post three days after the British referendum.  Here, in part, is what she said.  Pay attention.

        I do realize that it’s facile to talk about the impact on a U.S. election that is still many months away, that it’s too simple to say ”first Brexist, then Donald Trump.”  But there is a way in which this election has to be seen, at the very least, as a possible harbinger of the future.  This [British] referendum campaign, as I wrote a few days ago, was not fought on the issues that are normally central to British elections.  Identity politics trumped economics; arguments about “independence” and “sovereignty” defeated arguments about British influence and importance.  The advice of one-trusted institutions was ignored.  Elected leaders were swept aside.  If that kind of transformation can take place in the U.K., then it can happen in the United States, too.  We have been warned.

Applebaum’s right.  We have been warned.