The Here Where We Are. And It's Not Exceptional.
Eric Fromer famously said, ‘… the history we had been taught in school could not have produced the 1960s’. While this is prescient for his time, it is unambiguously accurate for ours, given the rapid political slide to proto-fascism from the rise of America’s right-wing populism. This argument rightly asserts that today’s political ecosystem derives specifically from America’s failure to face its past honestly. This failure is systemic, and it has been driven by an ever-shrinking majority willing to surrender accountability for America’s dark history of racial violence and gender inequity for the promise of economic comfort. This failure both created and perpetuated a myth of American supremacy and exceptionalism that is pure nationalist jingoism. This failure has clouded the judgment of generations to the inherent societal inequities that are foundational to the myth of America as the just, the free, and the global champion of democracy.
Its latest incarnation is right-wing populism exemplified by Trump and the MAGA movement. Right-wing populism is less a surprise movement than the planned result of a brand of politics designed by the GOP in the 1990s and honed to exclusionist perfection after the election of Barack Obama. American right-wing populism is powerfully intoxicating to the marginalized elements of America’s historically dominant demographic (white males) because it tells them that the economic anxieties that they face are not the result of late-stage capitalism but of multiculturalism; that their economic suffering is the result of a political and economic ‘theft of prosperity’ perpetrated by women, immigrants, and minorities. Poverty is not because there are no jobs, it is because of the ‘other’ who are not as qualified but have been gifted those jobs in an unfair quota system called DEI. This political rhetoric absolves both the corporate elites and blue-collar workers of any personal responsibility for an ever-expanding level of poverty and economic stagnation and purposefully places it at the feet of ‘othered’ groups, like the undocumented worker who is both too lazy to work and stealing jobs from Americans.
What makes this insidious is that the simple nature of its claims justifies the very real economic anxiety of today and ties them to an emotional response centered on fear. These irrational and unsupported fears are fanned by populist politicians who peddle both the dystopia of today and the fantasy of a tomorrow with a return to traditional family values. This creates a profound sense of disenfranchisement among white males, which is used to procure and secure political power, all in the name of an America that used to be great and could be great again.
The problem is that an honest assessment of America and its history explicitly disproves American exceptionalism. This patriotic fantasy imagined by right-wing populism is only sustained by the systematic whitewashing and sanitization of the nation’s past. This blind eye to history creates a fertile ground for populist movements that promise a return to a mythical, purer past that exploits anxieties about lost national identity and economic and social decline. A past when straight, Protestant white men ruled, and women and minorities were granted only silent lives out of the public sphere.
This sanitized version of history cemented a particular form of national identity, prioritizing a triumphalist narrative of American virtue and resilience. It is precisely this erosion of the sanitized exceptionalist narrative that has bred and emboldened right-wing populism. When the traditional, comforting story of American greatness begins to unravel because of marginalized voices speaking their truth, the result is a profound sense of disorientation and insecurity, particularly among those whose identity is closely tied to this idealized past. The modern GOP has expertly capitalized on this anxiety by offering a simplistic, nostalgic vision of “making America great again.”
MAGA frames the challenges facing the nation – economic stagnation, cultural shifts, loss of global standing – not as complex issues with historical roots, but as a result of internal corruption propagated by radical leftists who control the media and the Democratic Party who pushes an anti-American woke agenda of free migration, critical race theory, diversity, and gay, women’s, and trans rights that will all lead to the abandonment of traditional values.
Moreover, the populist appeal to a “pure” American identity often relies on an imagined past where social hierarchies were more explicit, and traditional values were supposedly unchallenged. This nostalgia for a perceived golden age implicitly or explicitly whitewashes the historical realities of inequality and exclusion that characterized those periods. By promising a return to this mythical past, populists offer a false sense of stability and order to those who feel dislocated by rapid social change and the unsettling revelations about their nation’s history. They provide an enemy – whether it be “globalists,” immigrants, or “radical leftists” – who are blamed for the current state of affairs and for supposedly undermining the “true” American way of life.
As we face the fury from the rise of right-wing populism in the United States, we must face the ugly fact that it is not an aberration, but a manifestation of the American past. We could not have gotten here if the sanitized narrative of American exceptionalism were true. And we are to blame. As a society, we have embraced and even celebrated that the nation’s identity was guided by the dream of manifest destiny, rather than the bloody reality of death, theft, and indigenous genocide. We have downplayed America’s injustices and celebrate a false image of the Statue of Liberty welcoming the poor, huddled masses yearning to be free.
The reality is that it is too late. Even as more critical and honest engagements with American history have gained traction, the vacuum of national identity it created will continue to empower those who rely on the simplistic, triumphalist story to secure power. Right-wing populists skillfully exploit the void, offering a nostalgic return to a mythical past of the honest American who takes up arms against injustice, even when that injustice is people simply asking for their land back, to be given fundamental rights to marry, protest, or choose for themselves what is right for their own health.
America was founded as a white dominated nation where even the poorest, least educated male was promised more than the richest woman and most educated minority. The system is merely doing its job and framing women, minorities, migrants, and the LGBTQ+ community as ‘others’, the internal and external enemies at fault for the nation’s moral and economic decline.