How Has President Trump Made America Great Again
As a Canadian, I sit at the edge of my seat every election night in America.
Even though information technology is non my country, similar many, I feel the magnitude of what'due south at stake in a country increasingly divided over issues of race, gender, the economy and the coronavirus pandemic.
While this has been the narrative of the by four years, America has ever been a nation divided. This segmentation was thoroughly examined in the New York Times 1619 Project, which sought to reframe the state'due south history by placing plantation slavery and the African American feel at the centre of American history.
Despite historical facts, what has made the Trump era unique in its divisiveness is the way in which his presidency has been marked by a stark failure to disavow white supremacy while discrediting African American attempts to repossess their place in American history. He condemned the 1619 Project while paradoxically claiming that he has done "more for the African American community than any president with the exception of Abraham Lincoln."
While we may not know the winner of the ballot for some time, what was clear on election night is that Trump did better than pollsters predicted. Why was this race so close?
Different ideologies
Trump and Biden could not be more than different in terms of credo. Merely when it comes to nostalgia, both candidates relied on a similar notion of returning America to a different time.
For Trump, "Make America Great Again" has not only functioned as a political slogan, it has as well morphed into a boxing weep for his followers who yearn for a by that has never existed.
Through repeated invocations, the slogan is not only a reference to the past merely likewise a "structure of feeling" — a term cultural theorist Raymond Williams coined in the 1950s. The term describes the paradox between the reality of people'due south lived experiences — with its intangible and undefined parts of cultural life — and the official, cloth and defined forms of society.
In other words, MAGA has nothing to do with policy — hence why Trump's re-ballot campaign had undefined policy objectives — merely everything to do with how and what his followers "experience" and think well-nigh MAGA.
Biden also has a brand of nostalgia and has played on the trope of an industrial America of yesteryear, where people work difficult, love their families equally they do their neighbours. It's a place where "honest Joe" can admit that some of the neo-liberal policies of the Democratic Political party that he endorsed, including the 1994 crime bill, might have harmed African Americans — the very people whose votes he needed — but for which he, unlike Trump, is at least able to apologize and show some modicum of empathy.
Biden'due south selling betoken, so, was that "at least" he cares. Was that enough to win over African Americans?
Black men iffy about Kamala Harris
Even with Kamala Harris, a Blackness woman (who likewise identifies as South Asian) on the ticket, African Americans have been divided about her loyalty.
While Black women were excited about Biden'due south choice, many Blackness men were not. That wasn't because of policy decisions every bit a California senator, just because of her former job equally California's chaser full general, and before that, as district attorney of San Francisco where, under her tenure, Blackness people made up less than eight per cent of the city's population merely deemed for more than than 40 per cent of police arrests.
And so unlike the narrative of community organizing and activism that was attached to Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential run, a narrative that seemed to replace his work as a senator, Harris's by has seemingly overshadowed her Senate work, even as her votes have been in aid of Black America.
The closeness of the 2022 election has much to do with the mode in which both Trump and Biden take invoked an imagined past, a narrative that suggests America needs to perpetually look back instead of looking forward.
Looking backwards
Obama's 2008 slogans — "Change we can believe in" and the chant "Yes We Can" — were and so powerful because they projected an air of possibility about the future, that things could meliorate and that voters had the ability to brand it happen.
Trump's "Make America Slap-up Again" and Biden's "Battle for the Soul of America" have nil to do with the voters or their ability to create a future; instead, both slogans transport the same message — there was a fourth dimension in America where things worked, where the nation was untainted by division, and that it must return to.
This deed of forgetting reality by clinging to a fictive, golden-days past is reminiscent of the championship-track of the 1973 motion-picture show The Fashion We Were, starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. The song, performed past Streisand, was a huge hit, No. i on the Billboard Year-Cease Hot 100 singles in 1974.
Near people don't remember that Gladys Knight & The Pips also released an R&B cover of the aforementioned song in 1974. In the collective memory of The Mode Nosotros Were, the vocal belongs to Streisand; it's hard to even imagine anyone else singing that song. In other words, people forget details, only what gets remembered is the iconic. Streisand is an icon. (Knight'south an icon in her own right, but primarily among African Americans.)
Trump is iconic
Similarly, Trump is an iconic figure whose fan worship has managed to literally trump the Republican Party itself. He has convinced his loyal following to cling to the past because information technology was simpler then, and it gives people a hazard to alive out that simplicity — still fictional Democrats believe it to exist — over and over over again.
Our memories of the by practice not thing; what matters in the Trump era is the rewriting of every line of actual historical fact. Biden has relied on empathy and sentiment to win back the presidency, to bring back a kind America with his numerous folksy "Bidenisms" while Trump has washed what nobody thought was possible — he has confused the denizens to the point where many likely tin can't think what the U.S. was like before 2016.
While Trump likes to evoke Lincoln's name, it was Lincoln who famously said: "A house divided against itself cannot stand."
America is divided. But the question is, when the dust clears and the ballots are all counted, volition it still aspire to go the nation it and so desperately tells itself (and the world) that it can be?
Source: https://theconversation.com/trump-has-made-america-nostalgic-again-for-a-past-that-never-existed-149449
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