There Was No Golden Age
There Was No Golden Age
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There Was No Golden Age
I like a good story. I think we all do. I like a good myth, like stories of the Greek gods. I know they are stories. They will not make me harm another human. But some myths are dangerous. Political myths. Racial myths. Cultural myths. These stories can make one person kill another person, or one group kill thousands of another. Because of a story.
In February 1912 Walter Edward Weyl published his book, The New Democracy. In chapter 2 of his book, he writes:
“When the course of events is not to our liking, and we long for something that we do not have, our most instinctive argument is an appeal to a former golden age. We claim that we once had this property, this right, or this democracy, which in later evil days has been wrongfully taken from us.”
Trump built his message to voters on “Make America Great Again.” MAGA. These four letters did the same work Weyl described in his paragraph. Trump knew the trick.
MAGA. It points back in time. There was a golden age in America. There was a better time for all Americans, mostly white Americans, and someone took that away from them. Wrongfully, as Weyl describes. Americans were entitled to this golden age. Americans are entitled to it. Weyl uses the word wrongfully. This word shows the entitlement he writes about. The man who says something was taken wrongfully believes it was his to begin with.
Who took this golden age? I do not think the name of the enemy matters. But you must name an enemy for the trick to work. The enemy is key to the myth that there was such an age. Trump named China and immigrants and Washington and Democrats and globalists and intellectual elites and Iran and keeps naming. He tells his supporters that he alone can fight these enemies and return his people to the golden age. He will give them back what they deserve.
Trump does not name the year or years of the golden age. Trump said ‘again’ and his followers could complete the picture. For some it might be the 1950s and for some the Reagan years and for some the time before their factory closed or the town they were raised in still had work and their fathers seemed happy and content and their mothers could buy food at reasonable prices.
But those images ignore that those times had hardships and wrongs and injustices and that those who lived in those times might never want to go back. Racism. Women who could not work or vote or open a bank account, depending on which golden age you pick. Or men who fed a whole family on one wage and had to fight in wars the government decided on. But Trump plants the image, the story. And people love a good story. Facts here do not matter much. The myth is important for Trump. It is the base of his trick.
The trick works because it lets people skip the hard thinking. The past is an idea. We seldom remember it as it was. If you are a child, you do not see your mother or your father cry behind closed doors. You do not see the sleepless nights they have. You do not see what they do not show you, and your understanding of the world is so little you miss most of what is real. And so you think back to the happy dinner time and the happy holiday and the new car dad bought and you say that maybe those were the better times.
It is easy to say ‘again’ and point to a place and time in the past that might or might not have existed. If Trump said, “we must build something new” he would have to spell it out. He would have to show he had a plan. He would have to show who will pay and how and who will build the new golden age and what this would look like, but he cannot. He has no plan. He had no plan. And because of this, he promises a route back to better times. Back to a golden age you pick.
The trick is old. Trump used it well and he used it better than anyone in American politics for a long time.