The claim of the biographer is that history is better illustrated and understood through the prism of the single important life. Given Carr’s point that only some facts are historical, this inevitably means that most biographical writing is the account of the lives of great men and women. In that debate, the Caro and the Carlyle kept ganging up on the Carr with the proposition that the individual life changes the world.
Anger: An American History
priests qualified as the radical Muslim clerics of the day. From the pulpit came regular warnings that boatloads of nefarious Irishmen were set to disembark in Boston harbor, to establish Roman Catholicism in New England.
.. So great was the terror that year that grown men watched neighbors fly through the streets; they kicked at gleaming balls of fire in their beds. They saw hundreds celebrate a satanic Sabbath as clearly as some of us saw thousands of Muslims dancing in the Jersey City streets after 9/11.
..The toxic brush fires flare up with regularity. “Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire, and the dragoons of Marat; or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati?” asked Yale’s president on July 4, 1798.
.. The homegrown history in no way justifies the incendiary language. But it reminds us that the demonic plots are unlikely to vanish anytime soon. Anxiety produces specters; sensing ourselves lost, disenfranchised, dwarfed, we take reckless aim. “We have to be much smarter, or it’s never, ever going to end,” Donald J. Trump has warned of the war on terror. Amen. At least we can savor the irony that today’s zealots share a playbook with the Puritans, a people who — finding the holiday too pagan — waged the original war on Christmas.
A Donald Trump Nomination Would Fundamentally Change the GOP
It’s possible we are at the beginning of another political recalibration based on national identity. Already center-right parties in Japan and Russia and Israel have lurched in a nationalist direction. And where nationalists do not enjoy outright control, as in Hungary and Poland, they split the center-right coalition, as in France, the U.K., and Germany
.. Trump’s nationalism has far more in common with the conservatism of Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front, than with the conservatism of Ronald Reagan. Support for a “Muslim ban” is par for the course among European nationalists — by calling for it here all Trump has done is confirm how closely American politics resembles European politics. Reagan was an immigration advocate who signed the 1986 amnesty law.
Trump: The Man, the Meme
Yet while the frank demagoguery of Trump’s most incendiary statements makes these historical comparisons particularly tempting, he is just the most recent in a line of American politicians to be, in effect, Hitlerized. Hillary Clinton has been reimagined as “Hitlary,” and when Barack Obama, with his plans for extended health coverage, wasn’t being portrayed as the Joker, he was shown made up like the Fuhrer. Before that, it was George W. Bush who was Hitler. This may just be a particularly potent example of what is known as Godwin’s law, which has it, more or less, that every argument will eventually devolve into one side referring to the other as Nazis.
.. If every politician is like Hitler, than what do you call someone who isreally bad? Rosenfeld emphasized that he disagreed with Trump on nearly every issue, but said that there were plenty of homegrown versions of Trump’s kind of rhetoric readily at hand in the history of the United States, including the nineteenth-century Nativist movement, making a reach back to Berlin in the nineteen-thirties not only historically inaccurate, but unnecessary.
.. “The idea that Donald Trump is a Fascist or a Nazi artificially distinguishes him from the rest of the Republican field,” he said. “A claim that he is a Fascist means that the others are somehow qualitatively different. And while Trump is clearly more rhetorically extreme, he shares much in common with the nativism and nationalism of the other Republican candidates.”