The Age of Trump Continues

I tend to avoid cable news, but when I got the news that Donald Trump had been indicted again, I fired up MSNBC like it was 2017 all over again. This reprehensible man is continuing his dominance of our public sphere, a position he has been in since 2015. Trump has been fading somewhat in the public eye, but today's events are a reminder that he never went away.

It has been eight years now, a ridiculous amount of time for a country's politics to be dominated by man so wretched and vulgar. This week I was talking to students and they told me the 2016 election was the first presidential election they were old enough to actually follow. I came to the depressing realization that they do not have a political memory of a time before our current insanity.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the Antebellum period the Age of Jackson, and others have spoken of an Age of Lincoln that followed. We have been living in an Age of Trump, one that like the other ages mentioned will outlast the man himself. He has set the tone for a dysfunctional politics rooted in a right-wing Leninism that justifies any rule breaking as long as it advances their ideology and power. Conservatives are not trying to push their movement in another direction, they are all vying to be the Next Trump. Ron DeSantis is only the most prominent example. 

The Age of Trump is also an era where democracy's guardrails have been shredded. Trump himself led a coup to stay in power. Not only is he still walking free, he is the front-runner for his party's nomination next year. We have reached a moment where nothing matters if you don't have any shame. I think here too of Ted Cruz, who stumped for Trump after he insulted his wife and father. Politicians like Lauren Goebert, Paul Gosar, and Marjorie Taylor Greene have become celebrities by being as crass and shameless as possible. They learned at the feet of the master. 

It is hard for me to see a way forward, because in the Age of Trump we do not just disagree about politics, we disagree about reality itself. Trump the liar and fabulist has cultivated a following that lives in an alternate universe. They reject vaccinations and believe the last election was stolen. There is no way to convince them otherwise.

Today's news is welcome evidence that the rule of law may still win the day. This being the age of Trump, however, the prosecution will only raise his esteem in the minds of his followers. To paraphrase James Joyce, this age is a nightmare from which I wish to awake. 

A Contentious School Board Election In My Divided New Jersey Town

I live in Maplewood, New Jersey. My family moved here from the Ironbound section of Newark after our apartment got too small i.e. the kids started to be able to walk. We were attracted by the relatively low home prices in a town that had a rail connection to the city (necessary for my job) that was also more walkable and less auto-focused than other suburbs. It was also more racially and socio-economically diverse and politically progressive than other towns in the region.

When we moved in I slowly started noticing the fault lines in Maplewood. Our neighborhood near the Irvington border is very mixed by race and class, but that's an anomaly. One neighborhood to the south of us is predominately African American and poorer than the rest of the town. Another, on the other side of the train station, is very white and full of massive million dollar homes. There is a mix of people, for sure, but only if you look at the aggregate numbers. The town itself is pretty segregated. This has inevitably led to de facto segregation in the schools. One of the elementary schools is majority black, and all the others are majority white. As more white families like mine have moved into town the school my daughters go to has gone from being very mixed to much more white than ten years ago. The situation was so stark in an ostensibly "progressive" town that the New York Times wrote an article about it.

The issues go beyond the segregation of different schools, they also extend to the combined high school (which also includes South Orange.) Tracking, as in many other places, has been applied in ways that benefit white students and hurt black students. There have also been claims of harsher discipline being applied to black students than white students. The new superintendent is advocating for an integration plan that will be implemented next year. There's a school board election on Tuesday, and as you would imagine with this background, it's very contentious.

There are seven candidates running for three seats. Five of the candidates are black (four of them women) and two are white (one of them a woman.) On the surface it's the kind of thing the town likes to talk up about itself. Beneath the surface, however, this is by far the nastiest local election I've ever witnessed. The fuel for the fire is social media and the many local Facebook groups in this town.

On these groups I have witnessed a constant, daily stream of invective directed not only one of the candidates, but also against other Facebook groups, especially a social justice group called SOMa Justice I am a member of (full disclosure.) Any candidate affiliated with that group is attacked as representing a "special interest." Every election a parents association dedicated to racial equity asks candidates to fill out a questionnaire which is then used to give the candidates ratings on a scorecard. This year a majority of the candidates flat out declined to do so. The questionnaire and its scorecard were both vehemently attacked online by the same people attacking SOMa Justice. In so doing advocates for equity just lost one of their biggest tools to hold candidates accountable.

A lot of these attacks are coming from a splinter group from the main local group, SOMa Lounge. (The acronym is for South Orange-Maplewood.) The splinter group is called SOMa Lounge Uncensored, touting its lack of moderation. As you can imagine, this has led to a kind of local version of 4chan. I know this because particularly outrageous comments have been screenshot and shared with other groups.

In the big picture there is a school board election in a town with a serious racial equity problem, but many of the candidates have been remarkably quiet about their opinions on this issue. Their silence, rightly or wrongly, has been taken as a sign by a brigade of internet trolls who are trying to tear down organizations fighting for racial justice in this community. I used to find the drama level of our local school board elections amusing but now I find it frightening. The Trumpist politics of destruction and resentment are everywhere in this country, including in this supposedly progressive, diverse town in New Jersey. Next year the integration plan is going to be launched. I need to get ready to get out there and fight.

Disney's Main Street USA and The Long Pre-History of Trumpism

Today I took my children to Disneyland. It was a lot more fun for me than I had anticipated, but I could not help but to analyze my experience through my knowledge of the park's history. We came in before opening at 7AM, which enabled us to walk into the Main Street area before the "rope drop" allowed us access to the rides in the park itself.

In the soft glow of an early California morning, the eternally scrubbed Main Street looked gorgeous. I knew that it was Walt's idealized rendering of his rural Missouri hometown in the early 20th century, an attempt for him to pretend he did not have an unhappy, disadvantaged childhood. (Disney and his works are always about fantasy as escapism.) The buildings were built smaller than a real main street of that time, which makes everything feel especially cozy.

I could not help thinking of the political meaning of this section of the park. This idealized main street does not have any saloons (as it would have had circa 1910), of course, or any traces of the immigrants who were coming to America in massive numbers at the time. Built amid the cultural reaction of the 1950s in Orange County, the very heart of the growing postwar grassroots conservative movement, Disneyland could not help but reflect its context, nor the political context Disney himself grew up in.

Main Street is supposed to represent a "simpler time," but to me it looks like what reactionaries in the 1910s and 1920s wanted America to be: white, native-born, rural, and teetotal. People of color are certainly present and otherized in the older rides, from the wild "Indians" in Peter Pan to the African "headhunters" in the Jungle Cruise.

The fact that the entrance to the park is a nostalgic tribute to an idea of America as a culturally homogenous place is very striking to me today in the age of Trump. I am not saying that Disney today is a Trumpist enterprise or that Walt Disney himself would have been a Trump supporter were he alive today, but rather that Disney's Main Street reflects an idea of America and the "good old days" that rhymes with Trumpism. In the 1950s Walt looked to the small town America of 1910 as the time to be idealized, while Trump and his supporters pine for the 1950s. The Trumpism of today, as many a historian will tell you, is rooted in a longer history of nativism and nationalism. You can find traces of it everywhere, including at Disneyland.