The Third American Founding We Must Prevent
Over the course of President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, many Americans across the political spectrum have stood by idly waiting to see whether his actions would fulfill his rhetoric. They have tacitly given Trump the benefit of the doubt and, for many on the left, they have also continued to rest assured in their belief that his administration’s ineptitude will result in his eventual political self-destruction. Many of these voices expressed this opinion during his first term and, despite Trump’s return, they still believe that his self-destruction is inevitable.
Even now, many liberals still don’t take President Trump seriously enough and still view his rise to power as an episode in a vacuum of history, rather than as a continuation of a cycle of American history and Western Civilization that produces genocide, ethnocide and systemic oppression. These attitudes and responses misunderstand the meaning of what is occurring, which is nothing less than a third founding of the American nation-state and empire based on the original founding of America rooted in racial domination and division.
Today in Washington D.C., nobody models the danger of political naivete more than Senator Chuck Schumer who openly promotes bipartisanship and an eagerness to collaborate with a Republican Party that has wholly become the vehicle for Trump’s agenda and the MAGA movement. Sen. Schumer compromised with Republicans on the budget, and even expressed confidence that the Republicans could help oust Trump. Despite being the Senate minority leader, he has been a subdued voice ever since, yet alarmingly many liberals still hold similar sentiments.
The every-day Americans and political leaders who simply believe that Trump will go away and that things will return to “normal” in the next two to four years are tragically behaving like Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain during the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s. Now infamous in the historical record as the greatest political blunder of all time, Chamberlain did not take Hitler’s military ambitions to invade other countries seriously. Chamberlain thought he was the smartest bureaucrat in Europe and that the best approach was to appease Hitler, allowing him to invade Czechoslovakia in 1938 on Hitler’s promise that once he claimed part of Czechoslovakia for Germany, he would make no further aggressions and invasions into other countries.
While U.S. Senator Schumer has become the leading example of this Chamberlain-reminiscent posture, it has become a common naivete among the left which should have mounted a full-throttled resistance by now. Instead, much of the left continues a conventional form of left-right binary oppositional resistance—for progressives, a reflexive, classically-siloed, issue-based push back to specific Trump policies. The left wants to fight against and stop policies that they object to, but an adequate resistance movement has to be more than just fighting against objectionable policies, but fighting for good policies, and a sustainable and nurturing society.
Due to this lack of clarity, Democrats are left to react with bureaucratic and technical critiques of Trump’s policy moves instead of calling out the foundational ideas and overall intentions of the Trump Administration.
And to further undermine the potential of a resistance that actually meets this historical moment, there are many people within the American left who, lacking historical analysis and context, privately harbor mixed feelings about Trump’s actions, quietly applauding him as the great dismantler of federal bureaucracy—an anti-federal government sentiment that has been long-shared by parts of the left and right beneath the surface of everyday American politics.
These responses to Trump in his first 100 days not only fall short of seeing the forest behind the individual trees, they set us up to repeat history in the worst possible ways. To understand President Trump’s agenda and intentions we must both look at how the Nazi agenda played out in Germany of the 1930s and also at the American Cycle which explains specifically how and why America is repeating its own history.
The Rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party
In 1918 in the wake of WWI, Germany had formed a liberal democracy which came to be called the Weimar Republic. Adolph Hitler found his political voice in outrage and resentment against this liberal democratic state, saying that Communists and elites had “stabbed Germany in the back” by conceding defeat in WWI and creating a government full of “traitors” that was against the interests of the German people.
Over the course of the 1920s, Hitler’s message slowly took hold with more and more Germans, in particular its young men. After a series of elections, the Nazi Party eventually won the greatest share of seats of any party in the Reichstag, the legislative body of the Weimar Republic. In 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of the nation and declared the end of the liberal democratic state he had organized against in the streets of Bavaria for over a decade.
Adolf Hitler’s Speech February 1, 1933, two days after becoming Chancellor.
The Weimar Republic was a progressive German government for its time where the rights of workers to collectively bargain was foundational and a cultural renaissance thrived. An 8-hour work day was established as well as health insurance for workers and their families. Government programs were also created to protect children, the sick and vulnerable and to care for veterans of WWI. This was all funded by a very progressive tax on the wealthy. Berlin meanwhile became a global beacon for art, science, philosophy, architecture, cinema, music and it pushed the boundaries of traditional gender norms.
This new progressive start for Germany was what Hitler railed against and, once in power, quickly overturned. Chancellor Hitler killed the Weimar Republic by creating the Enabling Act shortly after taking office. This allowed him to rule by decree and nullify all pre-existing laws at will as a dictator. The new Nazi government replaced the Weimar Republic’s government programs with new national projects focused on elevating German nationalism and pride, projecting belonging and prosperity through Nazi social clubs, and boosting German industry in order to quietly prepare the nation for war. Meanwhile, Nazi stormtroopers terrorized and assassinated Communists and leftists while vandalizing and destroying Berlin’s progressive institutions and gathering spaces. After years of demonizing Communists, leftists and the cultural renaissance, Hitler had the full backing of the German masses to carry out this violent dismantling of the Weimar Republic.
To finish the job of destroying the Weimar Republic and cement Hitler’s absolute emergency powers, the Nazi Party conducted a false flag operation, burning down the Reichstag and blaming it on the Communists. For Hitler, this completed the work of disempowering the legislature—much like today’s efforts by President Trump to rule by executive order and leave the Congress to rot as nothing more than a symbolic institution. The burning of the Reichstag also gave Hitler the final boost of anti-Communist outrage he needed to justify banning the Communist political party and rounding up all Communists and leftists in the nation which had been the main resistance to his agenda.
Once Hitler had full control of the German government, he commenced his genocidal campaign of Aryan expansion and ethnic cleansing, and he used American Manifest Destiny and the racial segregation of Jim Crow as partial justifications for his agenda. Germany’s war on the eastern front and campaign to exterminate eastern European Slavs, which they called Lebensraum or “room to live,” was based on Manifest Destiny—the American colonialist mandate to aggressively expand white settlement westward to the Pacific and southward into the heart of Mexico. Additionally, a popular book at the time that influenced Nazi policy and rhetoric was written by an American Ku Klux Klan member, Lothrop Stoddard, who himself also became a darling of the Nazi regime and spent time with them as an American journalist writing favorably about their aims. Stoddard’s book was The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man, and this book popularized the word Untermenschen or “under-man,” which the Nazis would then use to label and justify the extermination of non-Aryan people which they viewed as lesser beings.
Today, many Americans misunderstand President Trump’s agenda, believing his misrepresentation of it as a “much-needed dismantling of oversized and corrupted government.” This framing of America’s federal government echoes Hitler’s rhetoric, but it is also not new to America and goes all the way back to when former Confederates began attacking the new reconstructed American government that was formed in the wake of the Civil War—during the period of Reconstruction (1865-1877). By abolishing slavery, extending citizenship to Black Americans, and providing voting rights to Black men, Reconstruction radically altered American society, and this expansive agenda also greatly expanded the size and role of the federal government. For example, the Department of Justice and the Department of Education were created during Reconstruction.
The former Confederates who attacked Reconstruction also railed against the federal government, and labelled it and especially the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant as “corrupt.” They championed a states’ rights agenda, created the ideology of “separate but equal,” and terrorized anyone who opposed their views. These former Confederates called themselves “Redeemers” as they sought to redeem the original vision of America as a nation founded on slavery and racial ideology. They wanted to make the South great again by destroying the progress of Reconstruction.
President Trump’s attacks on federal agencies and norms are not about cutting waste or correcting bureaucracy gone bad but rather are an attack on America’s Reconstruction in the wake of slavery and an attempt to repurpose the American government for a new era of systemic racial domination and oppression.
President Trump’s intentions are not policy-based at all, but power-based, and this is hard for conventional American politics to grasp without looking further back into history. The Trump regime that is in the works now wants the power to take whatever it wants from whomever it wants in the name of American glory. Anyone who gets in the way of this power will be disappeared in one form or another, the most knowable version of this for now being deportation to El Salvador’s internment-like prison, the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT).
For Chancellor Hitler, once in power, the destruction of government institutions and norms was not an act of national maintenance to improve Germany, but a deliberate means to an end which was empire, war, and genocide.
The goal of President Trump’s MAGA mandate is similar; they aim to create a new American empire with an authoritarian and militaristic government that will dwarf the liberal government we have had in size and scope. Without a much bigger resistance and clarity of vision, today’s concerns over tariffs and the defunding of federal agencies will be long forgotten and eclipsed by much graver realities. Both American and European history tells us that once President Trump’s power reaches a tipping point, it may be unstoppable short of war.
Why America Repeats Itself & Why We Must Break the Cycle
At its core, the populism powering President Trump’s renewed imperial dream is fueled by racial ideology and domination. This is not a new agenda to the West and this is why both America and the West overall continue to show their inclination towards fascism because this agenda of division will inevitably result in terror and destruction.
The American Cycle explains the natural pattern that American society follows based on the racial ideology that was baked into it during colonization. When our nation was founded in 1776 by declaring our independence from Britain, slavery was already the driving force behind nationhood. Slavery was viewed as a natural institution and the two races beneath it were viewed as the natural order of things created by God. This social order and the institution of slavery formed the social, economic and political basis for the new nation to draft its constitution and form its government. When the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1788, slavery remained a significant part of this new nation and government.
However, thanks to the Civil War and Reconstruction chattel slavery was eventually abolished in America. The abolition of slavery was the culmination of centuries of resistance to slavery by the people of the African Diaspora and the abolitionist movements of the 1800s that they inspired in Europe and eventually America.
This grand moment of abolition in 1865 finally allowed America to form a government based on ideas of equality and friendship between the Black and white races. The period of Reconstruction lasted twelve years between 1865-1877 and was the first time that America created a legal system and institutions that were meant to serve all of its people. Prior to Reconstruction, there was no basis for federal law that applied to everyone and no Department of Justice, Department of Education or any civil rights. America’s reconstructed government and reconstructed constitution was the one that gave us liberty and a set of institutions to protect it and further it.
But the former Confederates and white supremacists opposed this reconstructed government and immediately set about to destroy it and return the nation to its original founding based on slavery. The Redeemers were the leaders of this original vision of America which eventually was institutionalized in the American Conservative movement: their goal is to conserve the principles of America’s founding. The Redeemers of the 1860s-1890s formed terrorist groups starting with the Ku Klux Klan, used violence to stop American equality and rallied against federal institutions and policies. They advocated instead for greater control at the state level and a smaller federal government because this dynamic made it easier for them to oppress their residents and still retain a disproportionate level of influence at the federal level.
The Redeemers eventually succeeded in erecting barriers to the realization of the reconstructed America and this led to the second founding of America based on its racial ideology—a nation formed this time on the basis of Jim Crow segregation. America entered this second founding at the turn of the 20th Century as a nation refounded on a more refined ideology of white supremacy and a new system of laws and social norms to enact it and enforce it.
The start of Jim Crow made the stages of the American Cycle visible because the cycle started to repeat. The first stage of the American Cycle is the Founding, which tries to marry democracy with the authoritarianism of racial division. The second stage is Abolition, which works to abolish America’s racial authoritarianism. The third stage is Reconstruction and this stage attempts to reconstruct American democracy into one without its entrenched racial authoritarianism. The fourth and final stage of the cycle before it repeats is the stage of Redemption/Regression, which is when America attempts to bring back our authoritarianism and recreate a new racially authoritarian state. Jim Crow became that new authoritarian state and America’s second Founding.
The resistance to Jim Crow in both the Great Migration and the Civil Rights Movement became America’s second Abolition, and American abolitionism extended into the 20th century as progressive Americans still worked to abolish the oppression of Jim Crow. Barack Obama’s presidency became America’s second Reconstruction and was defined by an expansion in the participation of people of color in American politics, institutions and culture that was on par with the first Reconstruction in these respects. Unsurprisingly, the conservative opposition to Obama, mirrored the agenda of the Redeemers and Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great Again,” espouses the same ideals as the former Confederates and white terrorist militias who formed the backbone of that movement.
America’s modern-day Redeemers want to create a Third Founding era, and anyone who embraces equality and opposes authoritarianism should want to break the American Cycle and prevent the creation of this new regressive era.
The Third Founding We Must Prevent
Today, President Trump and his MAGA movement have brought us into the second era of Redemption, once again attempting to return America to its original vision of a nation based on racial ideology and domination. If unstopped, the outcome of their doings will be a third founding of America based on this original vision where the domination of white men is absolute and a new order of systemic oppression is erected.
We can already see faint outlines of the third founding of America, a society where simply talking about race or gender is banned as “DEI talk” that will get your institution defunded, your family harassed and threatened, and perhaps you and your colleagues deported to a mass internment prison as “enemy combatants” or “terrorists.” Meanwhile, both domestic and foreign policy is being redesigned to enact white supremacy on a global scale. While the Trump Administration is blocking and removing people of color from the United States, he is creating a pathway for immigrants who represent “the plight of whiteness” narrative he is fabricating such as white South Africans who Trump claims are being racially oppressed by Black South Africans.
The head of the LBJ Foundation and presidential historian Mark Updegrove has already called Trump’s agenda “...the biggest rollback of civil rights since Reconstruction.” Updegrove says that “anti-wokism” is “essentially permission to accept racism.” These and other developments repeat the politics of the turn of the 20th Century and the first Redemption era that deliberately mischaracterized the abolition of slavery and Reconstruction as moments of corruption and a travesty that America would have to heal from. The tainting of DEI and wokism today are reminiscent of how the Dunning School at Columbia University promoted the Lost Cause mythology and set about to destroy the legacy Reconstruction and to produce a narrative of national unity through Jim Crow and white supremacy. This destructive narrative work succeeded and, in 1915, America’s first blockbuster movie—Birth of a Nation—was released to great fanfare and reception, telling the story of a nation betrayed by the abolition of slavery that was now endangered because of the freedom of Black people. This moment in America was preceded by an initial wave of terror during Reconstruction itself where an estimated 53,000 Black Americans were murdered by the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan and its spin-off organizations. Thousands more lynchings followed this first wave into the 20th Century and continued after the release of Birth of a Nation. The KKK was also reborn at this moment into a national membership organization with great federal, state and local political influence, a rebirth that was kicked off a few months after the premier of America’s first blockbuster film.
President Trump is setting a new course for history that the American Cycle inevitably facilitates without a continuation of Reconstruction. These are era-changing developments and, putting hope in Trump’s falling approval rating and waning public opinions over his policies, is surface-level politics that has little relevance in the wake of these tectonic shifts that follow historical trajectory. Trump’s attack on the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship are an attempt to regress American citizenship and belonging to its original white settler colonialism. Whether the repeal of citizenship for everyone born in America—a core pillar of the reconstructed constitution—ultimately succeeds or not, the reassertion of the white settler vision and culture for America is the basis for MAGA that will continue to undergird American social norms and institutions if unaddressed. This is the foundational white supremacy of our society that will never go away without a clear-eyed confrontation of its aims and a deliberate, ongoing reconstruction of what we believe constitutes American citizenship and social relations.
The third founding of America that Trump is taking us toward is a nation where MAGA becomes a permanent place of belonging for a wide swath of Americans, the ultimate big tent political home for all people whose lives are defined by resentment and negative feelings and are willing to surrender to a renewed vision of social domination by white men. The social conditions in America that have made MAGA so appealing thus far are not going away anytime soon. America as a whole is in a state of desperate searching for belonging, meaning and immediate relief to assuage a culmination of negative circumstances and feelings built up over the two thousand plus year history of Western Civilization. While these conditions alone do not necessarily produce authoritarianism, they do ultimately produce epidemic levels of despair and mass longing for saviors and escapes. Combined with the West’s problematic idea of freedom, these factors produce a deadly combination that leads to fascism.
America and the West have defined freedom as freedom from the other, including in the founding of the United States whereby white settler colonies won their freedom from the British crown. While the historic origins of this idea of freedom were understandable as a response to oppression, the idea of freedom from also became key to creating nations based on othering, social division and systemic inequality. Put into practice, freedom from creates an “other” who is seen as the source of one's problems and therefore the “other” must be deprived of their freedom in order for the practitioner to gain theirs. Historically, people of color and their allies have been America’s domestic “other” and Communists have been the foreign “other.”
The inherent division of freedom from leads to fascism, terror, genocide, ethnocide, and racial oppression. America’s founding principles are rooted in freedom from, so to prevent the regression that fuels the American Cycle, we must redefine how we understand freedom.
To begin transforming these conditions that lead to authoritarianism and fascism, we must facilitate a paradigm shift to a new definition of freedom that philosopher Barrett Holmes Pitner has coined as freedom with.
As the founder of the philosophy of Reconstructionism, Pitner explains that the era of Reconstruction had the spirit of freedom with whereby freedom was redefined as the product of being together as a society rather than divided and apart. The reconstructing of the nation in the wake of the Civil War attempted to make white Americans free with Black Americans. The progress of Reconstruction derived from a desire to be free with a group of people that America had previously defined as an other that white Americans needed to be free from.
This clash over the meaning of freedom has defined America’s culture wars since the founding of this nation, and our cultural regression continues to repeat itself due to the continued embrace of freedom from. If America’s idea of freedom continues to be from the other, our nation will always perpetuate systemic inequality and lend itself to authoritarianism.
Going forward, Democrats and the American left must work from Pitner’s new idea of freedom which views being with each other as the basis for a good life and a good society. As Americans suffer greatly from alienation and despair, freedom with is wisdom that will help us find meaning, belonging and goodness in being with each other in both our personal and professional lives, and can reconstruct American politics and society.
Becoming wise about what actually creates freedom will also be key to interpreting Trump’s intentions and transforming America so it actually progresses as a good society. If we continue to believe in freedom from, we will be more likely to believe the lies and deceit that Trump wields to obscure his intentions. Freedom from is the populist and fascist rallying cry that requires an other, an enemy, a scapegoat and a divided society. President Trump wants all Americans to be caught in a fever of freedom from, driven by emotions of outrage and fear at some other group of people.
Like his historical fascist predecessors, Trump is not actually trying to make a government that works better for the people as he claims, but to provide an endless cathartic release to our most negative feelings in exchange for absolute power to begin a third founding of America. We must take this seriously. President Trump is neither likely to self-destruct, nor a leader whose misrepresentations of his intentions are to be believed; he is attempting to build a racial empire in size, scope and levels of evil we have not seen for a century.
Fortunately for us, our era of Reconstruction laid the groundwork for a different vision of America where equality and friendship thrive and form the fabric and institutions of our society. As we mount a greater and greater resistance to Trump’s agenda, we can and must also ground ourselves in the era of Reconstruction and work to continue reconstructing America into a good place instead of the way the nation was originally founded.
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