When I started studying American history in the early 1960s, the field was still dominated by the “consensus” view propagated by historians like Daniel Boorstin (a former young Communist and later Reagan-appointed Librarian of Congress).
According to Boorstin’s version, American politics was exceptional (and exceptionally virtuous) because it had always centered around limited disagreements over shared values. Even the Civil War, he argued, in a popular book was a conflict over how to interpret the Constitution—not over irreconcilable social and economic differences like the French Revolution. (Boorstin was remarkably blind to our national fault line over race.)
Leftist historians have succeeded since the 1960s in replacing the “consensus” view with a “from the bottom up” conflict-oriented narrative emphasizing sharp differences in class, culture, and identity. The rise of Donald Trump—and, to a lesser degree, Bernie Sanders—suggests to me that they have not gone far enough in exploring how, not just the U.S. economy, but U.S. politics have been “globalized”—and not necessarily for the better.
Harvard sociologist Robert D. Putnam became famous for his book, Bowling Alone (2001), arguing that American discontents have less to with people’s economic deficits than with their declining “social capital,” i.e., their tendencies no longer to bowl together—or attend church together or join fraternal lodges and self- help groups and neighborhood associations, etc., etc. Putnam argues that declining social capital is in fact a global phenomenon which is now affecting the U.S. which previously had the uniquely rich associational life celebrated in the 1800s by visiting French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Now, Yoni Applebaum in the Atlantic finds polling evidence that Trump supporters are also “voting alone,” bereft of much of the social support networks that used to sustain working-class life.
Putnam’s book on “bowling alone” identified a widespread American malaise at the turn-of-the millennium. I fear, however, that what’s going on, as currently manifested by our political revolt of the discontented masses, may be deeper rooted and more dangerous.
What’s stick in my mind is re-reading perhaps the greatest travelogue of the twentieth century, Dame Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon recounting her journeys through Southeastern Europe on the verge of World War II. In the opening chapters, she puts in perspective the European-wide appeal of Mussolini’s—and Hitler’s—fascism by dissecting the psychology of faceless, voiceless men desperate to find ways to strike out—or identify with leaders who promise to do it for them. She gives a great deal of attention to Gavrilo Princeps, the Serbian nationalist who triggered World War I by assassinating Austrian Grand Duke Franz Ferdinand. But she goes further back to the period around 1900 which marked the rise of little-known, long-forgotten anarchist assassins who “made history” by specializing in blowing up European royalty. These set the stage for fascist strong men.
The same impulse—it might be called “The De Niro/Tax Driver Syndrome”—has been seen historically in the U.S. among most of the inconsequential little men who became famous for a season by assassinating presidents. Most including Lee Harvey Oswald “bowled alone,” though the well-connected John Wilkes Booth was something of an exception. Now, I wonder if this global impulse to be heard and felt by men feeling too small to even be stomped under the boot of history is behind the slavish adulation and cult-like following of Donald Trump. When his followers are interviewed at his rallies, some say that have faith in his miraculous powers “to make America great again”—but other imply that all that matters is that he will bring the current order crashing down, even if he has nothing to replace it with.
There’s also a remarkable disinterest in specific solutions among Bernie Sanders’ following, although I attribute this less to existential nihilism than to the naïve, historically ignorant faith in all-healing socialism absorbed by his young college-educated followers. Bernie Sanders’ nostrums are not going to turn the U.S. into a “safe space” protected from globalizing economic trends by insular socialist panaceas that allow under-employed college grads out of their parents’ basements—and out-from-under student debt—to see the light of day.
Nor will Trump’s protectionist economic nationalism return happy days to white working class men whose visions of raucous fun at Archie Bunker’s Tavern are fading further daily into oblivion. Frank Sinatra’s paeans to “Love and Marriage” have given place permanently to the mockery—or worse—of “Married with Children.”
All Eisenhower and Kennedy Era “mad men” can now do is howl as they disappear into that not-so-good night. But on the way out, their loud discontents and those of their baby bust sons, magnified especially by Trump’s trumpet, may cause great political mischief with ground-shifting reverberations beyond U.S. borders.
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