Some people might try to tell you that it’s a banana.
They might scream “Banana, banana, banana” over and over and over again.
They might put BANANA in all caps.
You might even start to believe that this is a banana.
But it’s not.
This is an apple.
—CNN COMMERCIAL, SHOWING A PHOTOGRAPH OF AN APPLE
IN HIS 1838 LYCEUM ADDRESS, A YOUNG ABRAHAM Lincoln spoke to his concern that as memories of the Revolution receded into the past, the nation’s liberty was threatened by a disregard for the government’s institutions, which protect the civil and religious liberties bequeathed by the founders. To preserve the rule of law and prevent the rise of a would-be tyrant who might “spring up amongst us,” sober reason—“cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason”—would be required. To remain “free to the last,” he exhorted his audience, reason must be embraced by the American people, along with “sound morality and, in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.”
As Lincoln well knew, the founders of America established the young republic on the Enlightenment principles of reason, liberty, progress, and religious tolerance. And the constitutional architecture they crafted was based on a rational system of checks and balances to guard against the possibility, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, of “a man unprincipled in private life” and “bold in his temper” one day arising who might “mount the hobby horse of popularity” and “flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day” in order to embarrass the government and “throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”
The system was far from perfect, but it has endured for more than two centuries thanks to its resilience and capacity to accommodate essential change. Leaders like Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama viewed America as a work in progress—a country in the process of perfecting itself. And they tried to speed that work, mindful, in the words of Dr. King, that “progress is neither automatic nor inevitable” but requiring of continuous dedication and struggle. What had been achieved since the Civil War and the civil rights movement was a reminder of all the work yet to be done, but also a testament to President Obama’s faith that Americans “can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams,” and the Enlightenment faith in what George Washington called the great “experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”
Alongside this optimistic vision of America as a nation that could become a shining “city upon a hill,” there’s also been a dark, irrational counter-theme in U.S. history, which has now reasserted itself with a vengeance—to the point where reason not only is being undermined but seems to have been tossed out the window, along with facts, informed debate, and deliberative policy making. Science is under attack, and so is expertise of every sort—be it expertise in foreign policy, national security, economics, or education.
Philip Roth called this counternarrative “the indigenous American berserk,” and the historian Richard Hofstadter famously described it as “the paranoid style”—an outlook animated by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” and focused on perceived threats to “a nation, a culture, a way of life.” Hofstadter’s 1964 essay was spurred by Barry Goldwater’s campaign and the right-wing movement around it, just as his 1963 book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, was conceived in response to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s notorious witch hunts and the larger political and social backdrop of the 1950s.
Goldwater lost his presidential bid, and McCarthyism burned itself out after a lawyer for the U.S. Army, Joseph Welch, had the courage to stand up to McCarthy. “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Welch asked. “Have you left no sense of decency?”
The venomous McCarthy, who hurled accusations of disloyalty throughout Washington (“the State Department harbors a nest of Communists and Communist sympathizers,” he warned President Truman in 1950), was rebuked by the Senate in 1954, and with the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik in 1957 the menacing antirationalism of the day began to recede, giving way to the space race and a concerted effort to improve the nation’s science programs.
Hofstadter observed that the paranoid style tends to occur in “episodic waves.” The anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party reached its height in 1855, with forty-three members of Congress openly avowing their allegiance. Its power quickly began to dissipate the following year, after the party split along sectional lines, though the intolerance it embodied would remain, like a virus, in the political system, waiting to reemerge.
In the case of the modern right wing, Hofstadter argued that it tended to be mobilized by a sense of grievance and dispossession. “America has been largely taken away from them,” he wrote, and they may feel that “they have no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions.”
In the case of millennial-era America (and much of western Europe, too), these were grievances exacerbated by changing demographics and changing social mores that had made some members of the white working class feel increasingly marginalized; by growing income inequalities accelerated by the financial crisis of 2008; and by forces like globalization and technology that were stealing manufacturing jobs and injecting daily life with a new uncertainty and angst.
Trump and nationalist, anti-immigrant leaders on the right in Europe like Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Matteo Salvini in Italy would inflame these feelings of fear and anger and disenfranchisement, offering scapegoats instead of solutions; while liberals and conservatives, worried about the rise of nativism and the politics of prejudice, warned that democratic institutions were coming under growing threat. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” written in 1919, amid the wreckage of World War I, experienced a huge revival in 2016—quoted, in news articles, more in the first half of that year than it had been in three decades as commentators of all political persuasions invoked its famous lines: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
The assault on truth and reason that reached fever pitch in America during the first year of the Trump presidency had been incubating for years on the fringe right. Clinton haters who were manufacturing nutty accusations about the death of Vince Foster in the 1990s and Tea Party paranoids who claimed that environmentalists wanted to control the temperature of your home and the color of cars you can buy hooked up, during the 2016 campaign, with Breitbart bloggers and alt-right trolls. And with Trump’s winning of the Republican nomination and the presidency, the extremist views of his most radical supporters—their racial and religious intolerance, their detestation of government, and their embrace of conspiracy thinking and misinformation—went mainstream.