Trumpism is an American value

American history makes a lot more sense when you realize that American ideals of freedom and democracy developed far more recently than most people think.

The story I was taught as a political science major went something like this: European philosophers like John Locke and Jean-Jaques Rousseau laid the foundation for our modern political system during the European Age of Enlightenment, an intellectual movement in the 1600's and 1700's that fundamentally changed the justification for who holds power. Rather than monarchs ruling because of the divine right of kings and clergy having a mandate from God, Enlightenment philosophers emphasized individual liberty and rights, arguing that a government's legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed. These thinkers drew on Ancient Greek examples of democracy plus their own critiques of monarchical and theocratic rule to create modern democratic values, which then inspired the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

In this story, European colonization of the Americas is an expression of these values. Here came the Pilgrims searching for religious freedom. There came downtrodden Europeans seeking a new life where anyone could pull themselves up by their bootstraps regardless of their birth. Sure there was slavery, but it was just because the colonists didn't know better yet. The story of America is one of continuing progress forward, grounded in values that have been the center of American identity since the first Europeans set foot on the continent.

But the story starts to break down when you look at the timeline. European colonists arrived in the Americas well before the Enlightenment began. The Spanish first gained a foothold in Florida in 1513, the English established Jamestown in 1607, and the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, but the first step toward Enlightenment political values, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, wasn't published until 1651. (And even then, its full throated endorsement of authoritarianism and monarchy horrifies modern readers). Locke's Two Treatise of Government, the source of Thomas Jefferson's famous "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" line in the Declaration of Independence, dates to 1689. Key works like Rousseau's The Social Contract, which articulated the basis for constitutional government, were published as late as 1762. The founding values of the American colonies were not those of the Enlightenment, but rather those of the theocratic and monarchical systems of Europe that came before it.

Historians David Graeber and David Wengrow describe this extensively in their book The Dawn of Everything. The earliest European explorers of the modern era were Spanish missionaries and conquistadors, bent on using force to convert and exploit the people they encountered. The Pilgrims were not bastions of pluralism defending freedom for all. They sought a place where they would have the freedom to force the community to conform to their religious beliefs, ban Christmas celebrations, and no longer be obligated to tolerate their Anglican neighbors. Graeber and Wengrow write:

[E]arly missionary or travellers' accounts of the Americas pose a genuine conceptual challenge for most readers today. Most of us simply take for granted that 'Western' observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlier version of ourselves.... But in fact, in many ways the authors of [European descriptions of the "New World"] were nothing like us. When it came to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty... indigenous American attitudes are likely far closer to the reader's own than seventeenth-century European ones.

Wait, what's this about Indigenous Americans? Graeber and Wengrow explain further. The fact that the European Enlightenment took place after European contact with the "New World" was no coincidence. They argue in their book that contact with the Americas was, in fact, its cause. Indigenous Americans encountered European settlements, visited Europe (sometimes as slaves, sometimes voluntarily), learned European languages and spoke to Europeans... and wow did they have critiques! Shocked by the conditions of 17th and 18th century Europe and its colonies – and drawing upon an advanced oratorical tradition – Indigenous observers were vociferous in their criticism. Graeber and Wengrow divide these critiques (evidenced by a variety of written records and oral traditions) into three buckets: that Europeans were unfree, that they were unequal, and that they did not take care of each other. In other words, that they lacked the "liberty, equality, fraternity" that would later become a slogan of the French Revolution. The Enlightenment, in this understanding, is European philosophers' response: an attempt to make the recommended changes while simultaneously finding a way to justify killing the people who made those critiques and stealing their land.

Oof. If American political culture ever seems like a deeply paradoxical amalgam of incredibly inspiring declarations of universal rights combined with horrific exploitation of human bodies, that's because it is. These are ideals powerful enough to shape continents, to outlive genocide, to fuel a determination to reach for them even in those who were explicitly excluded from their formulation. But throughout history, they have run up against a force just as powerful: exploitative economic systems that chew up bodies in their quest for profit. The adoption of the values in the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution did nothing to slow, for example, the rise of slavery. On the contrary, the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and its associated economic demand for cheap cotton powered a dramatic increase in both of the number of slaves and in the institution's cruelty. How could believers in the fundamental rights of man reconcile themselves to this? It was simple, if all people have universal rights, then the beings being exploited simply couldn't be people. Edmund S. Morgan's book American Slavery, American Freedom is an excellent analysis of how racism in the U.S. was not so much the precursor to slavery but its consequence, an ideological tool used to "justify" the horrors of slavery and prevent natural human revulsion from overthrowing the entire system.

The forces powering Trumpism, then, are not a new phenomenon at all. From its earliest days, colonial elites used coercion and violence to try to maintain a monopoly on wealth and power that did deep harm to ordinary people. The good news is that ordinary people have been working just as long to counteract these forces. Our work is to draw on this deep wealth of experience from history to take the next step toward a more just world.