Hell, no
A few of us were out in the streets on Saturday at hundreds of anti-Donald Trump rallies across the U.S. and abroad. There were many discouraging words about our would-be monarch. (Not enough is made of the fact that as much as Trump loves to cosplay as a gilded nobleman, there is nothing of nobility in him.)
Social media lit up, of course, but the press this morning took little notice that from coast to coast opposition to the return of a king was visible and boisterous. “Nationwide protests” are nowhere on The New York Times front page. Look closely and you might spot 11 words about them at the bottom left of The Washington Post’s. (I’ll throw in a few more photos from Asheville’s rally below.)
It is of course a busy news and cultural weekend. Today is Easter Sunday, celebrated by Christians around the world. The U.S. Supreme Court issued an order early Saturday for the Trump administration to stand down plans to fly more ICE prisoners to a concentration camp in El Salvador.
Major outlets are still watching to see if Trump 2.0 will heed the court’s injunction or launch another round of Calvinball noncompliance-as compliance. And Saturday was the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution with those shots fired at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. Somehow, seeing living Americans revolt against a man crazier and meaner (in several adjectival senses) than King George III did not attract as much media attention.
Previewing Ken Burns’s new series on the American Revolution, Slate’s Henry Grabar begins with a quote from Thomas Paine: “The strength and powers of despotism consist wholly in the fear of resisting it.” (Review Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s comments on fear of speaking out.)
Grabar considers how the American Revolution, once considered “a conservative inheritance” now faces pushback from the left. Toby Sackton, a Lexington celebration organizer, hopes to avoid “a commemoration that doesn’t recognize the parallels between what was happening in 1775 and some of the things we’ve seen in the first hundred days of Trump.”
I met a former Republican at our local rally who sees clearly the parallels. John Tandler, a.k.a. The Soapbox Patriot, has begun traveling the U.S. and delivering a short speech in colonial garb that draws out those parallels.
Grabar writes:
In a speech in nearby Concord on Saturday morning, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey planned to make the parallel to current events explicit: “We see things that would be familiar to our revolutionary predecessors: the silencing of critics, the disappearing of people from our streets, demands for unquestioning fealty… Together, we will protect the freedoms that were won here. We will defend the rule of law. We will claim our freedom of speech. And we will not be intimidated by the words or actions of a would-be king.”
But sometimes the source material is so strong that it doesn’t need any editorializing. As the journalist Josh Marshall put it on this week about a different 200-year-old document: “Anyone who has read the Federalist Papers in their totality knows that somewhere between a third and a half of the essays are very specifically talking about Donald Trump.”
A powerful example of this phenomenon occurred during Donald Trump’s first year in office, when NPR live-tweeted, with no commentary, the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 2017. Some conservative users took it as an attack on Trump, and it reads much the same way today. “Cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world”? “Transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”? Americans may mistake those 249-year-old grievances for last week’s headlines.
One group of people who wouldn’t? Immigrants seeking citizenship, who are required to study the document for their citizenship test. Some will be in Lexington on Tuesday, when the 250thbirthday of that first skirmish concludes with a new tradition: a naturalization ceremony.
Lost in the current focus on the American Revolution is the fact that it is the history of only part of this continent-spanning nation. A friend raised out West reminds me that by the time the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, far to the west, Santa Fe, New Mexico was already the colonial seat of New Spain. Spanish, French, British and Russian colonizers of the west coast and Pacific Northwest were already writing their own history, one that’s not taught to school children. As if the only important American stories happened in the original colonies.
It is why when people complain to me about “the Democratic Party,” I might remind them that there is no The Democrats. There are 57 diverse party organizations (50 states, the territories, the District of Columbia and Democrats Abroad). The western states trickled into the union over nearly two centuries, each with their own charters and bylaws, local histories, and local languages and customs (not all of them European). The Democratic National Committee may organize the quadrennial convention and administer the national voter file, but it is not the One Ring that rules them all.
What unifies us, when it does, is a set of governing principles, equality under law, and faith in a more perfect union that is now under greater threat than since the Civil War (another Ken Burns subject). Some of us, it seems, are less committed to this country than they profess. They want a king again.
Hell, no.
(h/t DC, SR)
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