Jelani Cobb writes:

One measure of the numbing effect that the constant heedless and cruel assault on democracy and on simple reason that Trumpism has imposed upon American life is the fact that we no longer flinch at the word “unprecedented.” Now, a full decade since Donald Trump’s arrival on the national scene, we have reached a point where the violation of norms has become a norm in itself. At the same time, however, there has been a tendency to overlook the ways in which various of the President’s policies are consistent with those of some of the darker moments of American history.

Trump’s mendacity and conspiratorial reasoning, along with his contempt for journalism, recall the attitudes of Senator Joseph McCarthy—a connection that some early Trump observers attributed to the fact that the Senator’s chief counsel in the Army-McCarthy hearings, Roy Cohn, became something of a mentor to Trump in the nineteen-seventies. Trump’s incendiary populism mirrors the tradition of reactionary populists from Senator Thomas Watson to Governor George Wallace. The aggressive xenophobia of Trump’s immigration policies shares DNA with the anti-immigration raids launched by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer during the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson. The point is not simply that so much of what Trump represents is unprecedented as that, where his actions have echoes from the past, they are almost universally troubling.

Difficult history has been particularly significant in recent weeks, as the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis has come to increasingly resemble an armed occupation. The upheaval there is notable not only for the violence of federal agents who killed two American citizens—one of whom, Renee Good, was unarmed, and the other of whom, Alex Pretti, appears to have been disarmed of a gun he was legally permitted to carry before agents fired off at least ten shots—but for the recalcitrance of residents who braved below-zero temperatures to protest the government’s actions. The protesters’ sense of democracy, as they articulate it in interviews, the signs they carry, and the graffiti on public buildings, is all strikingly local. Note the frequency of the use of the word “neighbor” in people’s explanations for why they’ve taken to the streets. As a witness to Pretti’s death explained in a lawsuit filed against the D.H.S. Secretary, Kristi Noem, and others, “I’ve been involved in observing in my community because it is so important to document what ICE is doing to my neighbors. Connecting to your local community and knowing who your neighbors are is something I profoundly value.” This is not, of course, the first time that the enforcement of a federal detention policy has collided with a community’s sense of responsibility for its members, though the precedent is not comforting.

During the tumultuous period that preceded the Civil War, the United States passed a series of bills that came to be collectively known as the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise allowed for California’s entry into the Union as a free state, and outlawed the slave trade (but not slavery itself) in the District of Columbia. The most controversial element of the legislation, however, was the Fugitive Slave Act. Article IV of the Constitution already required that an enslaved person who escaped into a free state be returned to bondage, but the 1850 law created a federal bureaucracy to facilitate it. As the historian Andrew Delbanco notes in his book “The War Before the War,” a history of the national conflict over fugitive slaves, the Compromise “was meant to be a remedy and a salve, but it turned out to be an incendiary event that lit the fuse that led to civil war.” [Continue reading…]