A Three-Minute History of the U.S.

Moral of story: Trump didn't come out of nowhere

Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”¹ In the shocking first four months of Donald Trump’s second presidency, we seem to be bending backwards at alarming speed. Nevertheless, or perhaps for this very reason, I’m clinging to the belief that the arc of the moral universe does bend toward justice.

But it doesn’t do so on its own.

That is, more or less, where the following comes from. It was inspired by a much shorter comment I posted on Joyce Vance’s May 17 Substack column “When the Cuts Hit Home.”² If this is in TL:DR (too long, didn’t read) territory for you, (1) I get it, because I subscribe to more Substacks than I can read, and (2) the key message is U.S. democracy was in trouble before Trump came along, and racism and money have a lot to do with it.

From where I sit, here’s what U.S. history looks like to me:

A brave band of white men declare independence of the British crown. When they proclaim that “all men are created equal,” they do not mean enslaved men or Native men, and they certainly do not mean women. Against all odds, and with considerable help from the French, they win a war and establish a republic.

The fledgling republic has a deep fissure running through it. Several fissures, in fact, but slavery is the big one. It bedevils us to this day in so many ways, including the 2nd Amendment and today’s Republican Party.³

The North wins the Civil War, but the South wins the peace.⁴ Fortunately for posterity, i.e., us, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are added to the Constitution between one and the other. White Southerners destroy democracy in their region, the Northerners are nothing to brag about, budding industrialists crush unions, and the robber barons and their friends crash the economy — several times.

See the pattern? The rich and greedy destroy democracy and/or crash the economy, then the federal government, prodded by “we the people,” rushes in to patch things up.⁵

The multiple crashes of the late 19th century help bring on the reforms of Progressive Era, roughly the 1890s to the 1920s. In 1890 we get the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which aimed to curb monopolies and other practices beloved by the rich and greedy. This is strengthened in 1914 by the passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act and the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission.

The terrible death toll of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in March 1911 prompts legislation to improve working conditions for factory workers, many of whom are recent immigrants and/or female, and helps spur the growth of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU).

Then comes World War I and with it the Russian Revolution. This leads to a massive freakout about communism, socialism, anarchism, and labor organizing in general, especially among the rich and greedy.

It also exacerbates white supremacist violence against Black people, which has been surging since the end of Reconstruction in 1876 and the rise of Jim Crow. Across the South, monuments to Confederate military leaders peak during this period.⁶

The Roaring 20s open with the anti-immigrant, anti-leftist Palmer Raids (November 1919 and January 1920). Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are arrested in the spring of 1920 for murder connected with an armed robbery on April 15. They are convicted in July 1921 but not executed until August 1927. J. Edgar Hoover and what will become the FBI begin their rise to power in 1924. This is not unrelated to the anti-leftist hysteria.

Oops, almost left out Prohibition, the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It takes effect on January 16, 1920. Since liquor is no longer legal, organized crime and American ingenuity, e.g., moonshine and homemade wine, leap into the breach. The 20s keep roaring until — wait for it — the rich and greedy once again crash the worldwide economy in 1929. Good times, right?

Starting in 1933, the FDR and the New Dealers set out to repair the damage. Thanks to those white Southern Democrats, things don’t change much for Black people. (Since they never have meaningful opposition, Southern Democrats in the Senate amass lots of seniority, which translates into lots of power, like committee chairmanships.) And in yet another case of déjà vu, the rich and greedy jump in crying “Socialism! Communism! Government tyranny!”

After World War II things go relatively OK, at least for white people. Black people are mostly excluded from the benefits of the GI Bill and from the postwar housing boom, both of which play a crucial role in the rise of the white middle class.⁷ But the war also strengthens resistance to de jure (by law, as opposed to de facto, in practice) segregation. After several years of litigation, brought by the NAACP with Thurgood Marshall as lead counsel, the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) outlaws racial segregation in public schools. After a year-long community boycott, begun when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to yield her seat to a white person, Montgomery, Alabama, integrates its buses in December 1956. As a result of persistent sit-ins, lunch counters are starting to be integrated by 1960.

But the white backlash grows stronger, more violent, and more lethal, especially when a primary focus becomes voting rights but even when it isn’t. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963, kills four young Black girls and seriously injures a fifth. It shocks many who thought they were beyond shock. The ever-expanding reach of television brings the contorted faces of white supremacy into living rooms everywhere. White people outside the South are waking up to what’s been going on all along.

Led by a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, a Democratic Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and then the Voting Rights Act of 1965. At this point, encouraged by Nixon’s “southern strategy,” white Southern Democrats make a beeline for the Republican Party. There the influence of the rich and greedy is hugely augmented by the votes of non-rich white racists and, after Roe v. Wade (1973), sexists and misogynists, many of them professing Christians.

A few years later this powerful, diabolical alliance puts Reagan in the White House. The corporate tax cuts and the gutting of unions don’t help the white working class, but slavery didn’t either. Turns out the common bond of whiteness balances out a multitude of economic sins. Notice how Republican-run states are making it harder for citizens to vote? Notice how the Republican-dominated Supreme Court has kneecapped the Voting Rights Act of 1965? They can’t turn back the clock, so they’re doing the next best thing.

From there it's a pretty straight line to Trump's first election.⁸ President Obama did his best, but when he came into office, the rich and greedy had just crashed the economy *again* and the GOP had gone from bad to flat-out awful so his options were limited. In January 2021, the Biden-Harris administration took office under comparable circumstances, only this time the crash they had to deal with had much to do with the mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic — and the “rich and greedy” beneficiary was the previous president himself.

So why did 77 million USians vote for Trump again in 2024? None of the many serious deal-breakers broke the deal, not even Trump’s attempts to undermine and overthrow the 2020 election and the horror show of January 6, 2021. Everyone’s got a theory, and there’s probably some truth in most of them. I get why many people believe that the election was rigged: because the obvious alternative is that U.S. voters are that racist and/or ignorant and/or susceptible to campaign ads. In a way the election was rigged — by unlimited campaign spending and the existence of the Electoral College, not by stuffing ballot boxes or hacking voting machines.

I don’t want to believe that we got the government we deserve. The obvious, the only, solution is to prove we can do better.

Me and my sign at the April 5 rally @ Five Corners, Vineyard Haven. Sign by me, quote from a song by Susan Robbins of Libana, photo by Dan Waters.

NOTES

1. Quote Inspector traces the gist of this quote to “Of Justice and the Conscience,” a sermon published in 1853 by Theodore Parker (1810–1860), Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and Massachusetts native. As Parker well knew, the nation was hurtling toward dissolution and/or civil war at the time. “Things refuse to be mismanaged long,” he said in that sermon. “Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble.”

2. Joyce Vance’s Civil Discourse Substack is essential reading if you’re at all interested in the legal aspects of what’s happening now. A big bonus: She occasionally features photos and stories about the menagerie she and her husband live with in Birmingham, Alabama. It currently includes an adult dog, a puppy (both German shepherds), a cat, and several gorgeous hens, each with her own personality. Joyce is also the co-host, with Preet Bharara, of the Cafe Insider podcast, and a principal of the Sisters in Law podcast.

3. On the 2nd Amendment, see Carol Anderson’s excellent book The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021). On the Republican Party, check out a reputable newspaper if you have access to one and/or subscribe to a Substack or two or three.

4. See historian Heather Cox Richardson’s 2020 book How the South Won the Civil War on how this happened — and is still happening.

5. My first draft said “fix things” but, as we shall see, things do not stay fixed, so “patch things up” is better.

6. Another peak comes in the early 1960s, when the civil rights movement is on the rise and making progress despite, and in some ways because of, the lethal violence directed against it. These peaks coincide with the 50th and 100th anniversaries of the Civil War, but anniversaries don’t generally honor defeated insurrectionists and traitors, do they?

7. I’m currently reading Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein (Liveright, 2017). Highly recommended, especially if you’re not already familiar with the government’s role in segregating public housing, trapping people of color in inner cities, and making it hard for people of color to buy homes.

8. Yes, I’ve left out some serious contributing factors, notably the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 (during the Reagan administration) and the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (2010), which did away with the restrictions on campaign spending by corporations and unions. The 5-4 decision by the Roberts Court has been controversial since it was decided — the same year that the Tea Party election brought a horde of far-right Republicans into Congress. I have no doubt that both events were influenced by the election of the nation’s first Black president in 2008.