Trump Has Made America Great Again
Equally a Canadian, I sit at the edge of my seat every election dark in America.
Even though it is not my country, like many, I feel the magnitude of what's at pale in a country increasingly divided over issues of race, gender, the economy and the coronavirus pandemic.
While this has been the narrative of the past four years, America has always been a nation divided. This division was thoroughly examined in the New York Times 1619 Project, which sought to reframe the land'south history by placing plantation slavery and the African American feel at the centre of American history.
Despite historical facts, what has made the Trump era unique in its divisiveness is the way in which his presidency has been marked by a stark failure to disavow white supremacy while discrediting African American attempts to reclaim their identify in American history. He condemned the 1619 Project while paradoxically claiming that he has washed "more than for the African American community than any president with the exception of Abraham Lincoln."
While we may not know the winner of the election for some fourth dimension, what was articulate on election dark is that Trump did better than pollsters predicted. Why was this race so shut?
Different ideologies
Trump and Biden could not be more different in terms of ideology. But when information technology comes to nostalgia, both candidates relied on a similar notion of returning America to a different fourth dimension.
For Trump, "Brand America Bang-up Again" has not merely functioned as a political slogan, it has besides morphed into a boxing weep for his followers who yearn for a past that has never existed.
Through repeated invocations, the slogan is not only a reference to the by just as well a "construction of feeling" — a term cultural theorist Raymond Williams coined in the 1950s. The term describes the paradox between the reality of people's lived experiences — with its intangible and undefined parts of cultural life — and the official, material and defined forms of guild.
In other words, MAGA has zilch to do with policy — hence why Trump's re-ballot entrada had undefined policy objectives — but everything to exercise with how and what his followers "feel" and think about MAGA.
Biden also has a brand of nostalgia and has played on the trope of an industrial America of yesteryear, where people work hard, love their families as they do their neighbours. Information technology's a place where "honest Joe" can admit that some of the neo-liberal policies of the Democratic Party that he endorsed, including the 1994 crime nib, might have harmed African Americans — the very people whose votes he needed — but for which he, unlike Trump, is at least able to apologize and show some modicum of empathy.
Biden'southward selling point, and then, was that "at least" he cares. Was that plenty to win over African Americans?
Black men iffy about Kamala Harris
Even with Kamala Harris, a Black woman (who too identifies every bit South Asian) on the ticket, African Americans take been divided virtually her loyalty.
While Black women were excited virtually Biden'south choice, many Black men were not. That wasn't considering of policy decisions as a California senator, but because of her erstwhile job as California's attorney general, and before that, equally commune attorney of San Francisco where, under her tenure, Black people made upwardly less than eight per cent of the metropolis's population just accounted for more than 40 per cent of police arrests.
So different the narrative of community organizing and activism that was attached to Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential run, a narrative that seemed to supersede his work as a senator, Harris'southward past has seemingly overshadowed her Senate work, fifty-fifty every bit her votes have been in assistance of Black America.
The closeness of the 2020 election has much to do with the way in which both Trump and Biden have invoked an imagined by, a narrative that suggests America needs to perpetually await back instead of looking forward.
Looking backwards
Obama's 2008 slogans — "Change we can believe in" and the chant "Yes We Can" — were so powerful because they projected an air of possibility well-nigh the future, that things could better and that voters had the ability to brand it happen.
Trump's "Make America Keen Again" and Biden'due south "Boxing for the Soul of America" accept null to do with the voters or their power to create a future; instead, both slogans send the same message — at that place was a fourth dimension in America where things worked, where the nation was untainted by division, and that it must return to.
This human activity of forgetting reality past clinging to a fictive, aureate-days by is reminiscent of the title-rails of the 1973 pic The Way Nosotros Were, starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. The vocal, performed by Streisand, was a huge hit, No. 1 on the Billboard Year-Cease Hot 100 singles in 1974.
Almost people don't recall that Gladys Knight & The Pips also released an R&B cover of the same song in 1974. In the collective memory of The Way We Were, the song belongs to Streisand; it's difficult to even imagine anyone else singing that song. In other words, people forget details, only what gets remembered is the iconic. Streisand is an icon. (Knight's an icon in her ain correct, merely primarily among African Americans.)
Trump is iconic
Similarly, Trump is an iconic effigy whose fan worship has managed to literally trump the Republican Political party itself. He has convinced his loyal following to cling to the past because information technology was simpler and so, and it gives people a chance to live out that simplicity — however fictional Democrats believe it to be — over and over again.
Our memories of the past do not thing; what matters in the Trump era is the rewriting of every line of actual historical fact. Biden has relied on empathy and sentiment to win back the presidency, to bring back a kind America with his numerous folksy "Bidenisms" while Trump has done what nobody thought was possible — he has dislocated the citizenry to the point where many likely tin can't remember what the U.Southward. was like before 2016.
While Trump likes to evoke Lincoln'south proper noun, it was Lincoln who famously said: "A house divided against itself cannot stand up."
America is divided. Only the question is, when the dust clears and the ballots are all counted, will information technology still aspire to go the nation information technology so desperately tells itself (and the world) that it can exist?
Source: https://theconversation.com/trump-has-made-america-nostalgic-again-for-a-past-that-never-existed-149449
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