is eerily familiar: Joe McCarthy’s anti-
communist crusade unleashed wild spirits.
Conservative thinkers decried the establish-
ment’s obsession with facts and called for a
return to pioneer-style truths. Leftists, homo-
sexuals and intellectuals were dismissed as
‘eggheads’; universities were ‘godless’.
Big money bankrolled a grassroots
movement against liberalism that was dom-
inated by housewives so angry that they
even irritated the Republican leadership.
Richard Nixon said: ‘I will not go and talk
to those shitty ass ladies!’ But he did, and
he owed his rise and rise to them. ‘Nixon-
land’, said the presidential candidate Adlai
Stevenson — a two-time Democrat loser —
is a ‘land of slander and scare; the land of sly
innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous
phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving,
the land of smash and grab and anything to
win.’ Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Politics in the 1950s was a morality play
acted out in the most immoral way possi-
ble, and the career of Joe McCarthy, madefamous by fear, was just as comic and trag-
ic as any of the men associated with Trump
today. When he’d run out of men to accuse
of spying for the Soviet Union, poor old
Joe died a washed-up alcoholic in 1957.
One sad, solitary figure at his funeral was
Robert F. Kennedy. McCarthy was god-
father to one of Bobby’s children, a testa-
ment to the kind of close relationships that
can develop between political opposites
behind the scenes.
Lepore’s vision of America is much clos-
er to the patchwork reality than Greenspan
and Wooldridge’s, but even this is too
black and white. She often casts the iden-
tity debate as Left v. Right, or liberal v. con-
servative, whereas the boundaries are more
fluid than that. Take the Alabama governor
George C. Wallace, who appears in the
book as a symbol of populism’s descent into
naked racism. It’s true that when inaugurat-
ed governor in 1963 he declared that he was
for ‘segregation now, segregation tomor-
row, segregation forever!’, and he certainlyran as a far-Right conservative for presi-
dent in 1964 and 1968. But Lepore doesn’t
note that in the 1972 Democratic prima-
ries he presented himself as chiefly a law-
and-order, anti-tax populist, and in 1973 he
even crowned a black homecoming queen
to prove he was no longer a racist (he didn’t
kiss her, as was tradition, insisting ‘The peo-
ple of Alabama aren’t ready for that’.)
By 1982, his last run for governor, Wal-
lace was shamelessly reaching out to blacks,
women and unions. Populism is in part
about responding to the needs of one’s con-
stituency, and as Alabama changed, so did
a leader who was once famous for his inflex-
ibility, and his story is far from an outlier.
The history of the American South is one
of change, power struggle, political bending
from Left to Right, negotiating race, and
all of this cannot be contained in one vol-
ume or by one narrative that at times feels
too neat — even if Lepore is a truly gift-
ed writer with profound insight into those
she writes about. Do read her magnificent
book, but just remember that it’s not the
whole story.
The definition of America is elusive,
which makes explaining Trump both easy
and difficult. We can say for sure that he is
one constant part of America: the pioneer
populist with a dose of xenophobia. But
we’d be blinkered — as too many European
commentators are — to suggest that he is all
of America or even most of it. Trump is an
unpopular populist whose approval ratings
are dismally low. He’s currently on a path to
defeat in 2020 (although that can change).
He got elected by clever strategy, by acci-
dent and because his opponent was another
egghead who just enough people couldn’t
stand to hand victory to an absolute ape.
The very sad thing is that Trump talks like
William Jennings Bryan but thinks like Dar-
win. Hopefully, America’s weak will survive
his presidency.Shining city on a hill: view of the Capitol
from the White House by William Henry
Bartlett, 1840BRIDGEMAN IMAGES