By 1940, Jacobs’s tone had changed, stifled by the rise of fascism and America’s entry into a global war. At the ceremony to seal the vault, he made a very different statement: “The world is now engaged in burying our civilization forever, and here in this crypt we leave it to you.” His speech was recorded and placed in the vault before it was sealed. The Oglethorpe crypt was built during the heyday of time capsules, probably driven by the fear, shared by Jacobs, that humanity was on the verge of extinction, and by the desire to preserve something—a seed that would bloom after winter had passed.
If Trump Breaks Up the G.O.P., It Won’t Be a First
Only months ago, Senator John McCain of Arizona, a professed maverick Republican, was berating Mr. Trump for inciting the fringe “crazies.” Now he backs the presumptive nominee. “I believe that the Republican Party must maintain its viability as a party,” he said.
But what if the Republicans are no longer a viable national party?
.. The first momentous collapse occurred in the election of 1800, and nativism proved central to it. In order to suppress rising unruly democratic forces aligned with Thomas Jefferson, the dominant Federalist Party of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton stirred popular fears of a menacing enemy within, including immigrants friendly to the Jeffersonians.
.. In 1854 the Whigs, one of the two major parties, collapsed over slavery. But while some Whigs joined the antislavery cause, others switched to the nativist Know-Nothing or American Party, which for a time looked as if it would supplant the Whigs. Out of the chaos emerged a new antislavery party, the Republicans, which got Lincoln elected to the presidency in 1860.
.. After World War I, though, the old guard in the Republican Party, announcing a return of American greatness, regained the initiative, buoyed in part by a resurgent nativism that brought about the law drastically restricting immigration in 1924.
.. Yet when the crash of 1929 led to the Great Depression, conservatives had little to offer. The Republican supremacy collapsed in the election of 1932; the Democratic Party picked up the mantle of reform, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal shaped the contours of American government and politics for the next two generations. Between 1932 and 1968 only one Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, won the presidency.
.. The reckoning began to unfold with the election of Barack Obama, weeks after the crash, which signaled the impending defeat of the Republican culture war. By momentarily corralling the rebellious Tea Party movement, the Republicans regained control of the House in 2010, thereafter blocking much of the Obama White House’s agenda.
.. As the 2016 elections approached, old and new fissures began to crack open. The party’s base, including Tea Party insurgents and evangelicals, had become furious with a Republican leadership powerless to halt the growing diversification, racial inclusiveness and cultural openness of American life, which it associated with Mr. Obama. At the same time, the party establishment had nothing to offer hard-pressed, working-class Republican voters except discredited bromides about tax cuts, deregulation and plans to slash Medicare and privatize Social Security.
.. Should Mr. Trump and his followers consolidate their control over the Republican Party, they will have converted it into something that Reagan would hardly recognize. But no matter how the power struggle is finally decided, it is clear that the party of Reagan’s era, uniting free market, small government conservatism with white working-class cultural fears and resentments, has come unglued — and no Republican leader or faction seems capable of putting it back together.
Make America Great Again for the People It Was Great for Already
It seems safe to assume that, in the eyes of Mr. Trump’s overwhelmingly white male fans, America was greater a half-century ago. Indeed, it was pretty great — for them.
It’s not just that factory jobs were more plentiful or that women and minorities were largely kept from positions of power. Large national programs that radically changed the country kept America great specifically for white men. New Deal-era systems like Social Security and unemployment insurance; rules that demarcated minimum wages and maximum work hours and protected unionization; and the G.I. Bill at the end of World War II substantially transformed the country and created a booming middle class. But they all purposefully left out most women and minorities.
The Know-Nothing Tide
In the 1850s, at another moment of American unease, the Know Nothings swept Massachusetts and won mayoral elections in Philadelphia and Washington on a nativist platform to “purify” national politics by stopping the influx of Irish and German Catholics.
.. “South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.”
.. American isolationism is an oxymoron because America is a universal idea.