“As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, while God is marching on.”
Julie Ward Howe, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”
Anna Moneymaker/New York Times, 7/3/20
So, there it is. In full megaphone mode. Heard from coast to coast and by all the ships at sea. The dog who once pricked up its ears at tantalizing whistles now winces-winces-winces under the bed with a hammer-on-anvil headache. Let the state-issued newsfeed proclaim without glitch or disconnect: on July 3, 2020, in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, near the small town of Keystone, South Dakota, standing in front of the stone faces of the first, third, sixteenth, and twenty-sixth presidents of the United States, Donald J. Trump, the cartoon-but-real, real-but-cartoon number forty five in that series blew a blaring bugle call to a Second Civil War against Americans who don’t like him.
The assembled crowd who loves him, loved it.
No need to infer, or extrapolate, or get exegetical about the announcement. There is no ambiguity to decipher. It was a blaring bugle call to a second civil war. The speech, at the time it was given, was largely a symbolic call to arms; there would be a battalion of digital warriors to answer the call in the realm of nebula. Nevertheless it stands as a demonstration that state-sanctioned malice now has an official podium and a place in our national discourse, tethered by tropes too numerous to count. The 4th of July. The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Mt. Rushmore. Openly authoritarian ideas are now in the sanctioned repertoire of our public discourse, sung in the tune of our major American melodies. But we also play our songs in a minor key, make no mistake, and depending who you are, these may be more painful to hear, the sharper ones, the sadder ones, the meaner ones, the ones that sing of imaginary injury and aggrievement and revenge. The no longer so hidden or latent antithesis to the major melody, to thee we sing: xenophobia, white supremacy and systemic racism, ugly exceptionalism, isolationism, anti-intellectualism.
Trump’s animus was all of the way out of the closet. Disambiguated might sing the self-satisfied chorus of coastal elites. As open and free as the Dakota sky in July, might sing the chorus of loyalists, who take in the mountain’s night air without a mask. And so, our leader’s exuberant, pandemic-denying celebration rally of the non-urban faithful (read: white), sat blithely, defiantly close to one another, happily taking all of it in. Happy Independence Day, one day early. Let’s hope your health insurance is up-to-date.
It’s all there in that speech. By greedy handfuls.
The savior of liberty will “expose this dangerous movement, protect our nation’s children, end this radical assault, and preserve our beloved American way of life.” He will root out the enemies and threats he finds in “our schools, our newsrooms, and even our corporate boardrooms.” He will wipe out those who would “transform justice into an instrument of division and vengeance and turn our free and inclusive society into a place of repression, domination, and exclusion.”
“We will not be tyrannized, we will not be demeaned, and we will not be intimidated by bad, evil people.”
“They want to silence us, but we will not be silenced.”
Anarchists. Angry Mobs. Agents of Chaos. Enemies of America.
By the end of his litany, Trump had performed a tried-and-true, American-as-apple-pie rhetorical sleight of hand. In all of the naked hostility of the speech, there remains this one bone for the decoders to chew on. How has the aggressor become the victim? How has the man with the mega-megaphone been silenced? The President with the Senate majority, blindly following him into ugly tyrannical corners of the kingdom, dominated and excluded? The ringleader with the biggest, greatest show on earth, cancelled?
This guy knows how spectacle works, drawing upon a common field of expertise among the totalitarian set. Now he has the expanded rhetorical field to match his authoritarian ambition. At the time Trump gave the speech, no one knew that this monologue was the first act of a play. No one knows how many acts of the play there will be, or whether it will be a tragedy or a comedy or a historical play or some generic hybrid of them all. It could be a morality play, depending how it ends. Probably not a satire. If we understood what the genre is, we might be able to channel our reactions in a way that makes sense to us. But this thing seems to be writing itself without storyboarding, and it is hard to know whether to cry or to laugh or to watch in a state of numbed astonishment.
In order for Trump to appear anti-authoritarian, the actual authoritarians must be someone else, somewhere else but not too far. The closer the enemy, the more effective the trick. Out of the bottomless top-hat, voila! We pull out a rabbit, let’s give this devious creature a name: “Left-Wing Fascism.” Those guys. They will revive our faltering sense of purpose, shore up our courage and fortify our identity. We have our protagonist, he’s named his antagonist.
Let’s sum it up: American Authoritarianism must appear as anti-authoritarian.
It is going to be one hell of a play, performed right here, on land stolen from the Lakota Sioux. Right here, in front of Mt. Rushmore.