The Other Rally at the Garden
Why have so many commentators ignored the most obvious historical antecedent for Trump's MAGA rally in New York City this past weekend?
I fear a Donald Trump victory next Tuesday (or whenever enough votes are counted to discern the winner). That’s because I fear what Trump will try to do, and succeed in doing, as president.
But also because I dread having to live through a revival of the “resistance” among leading left-leaning journalists, intellectuals, academics, and activists. Many of these people and institutions were gripped by a form of frenzied madness during the Trump administration, careening wildly from one hyped-up, exaggerated “news” story to the next. Rumors were often treated as fact. The capacity to stand back and assess events or conspiratorial speculation collapsed along with an interest in placing events in any kind of historical and comparative context. Hyperbole flourished, along with rates of reader engagement and unique views online. We were a country—or at least its most educated and informed citizens—having a nervous breakdown.
From early 2017 until early 2020, immersion in this seething stew of anxiety and barely contained panic was merely unnerving. But once the pandemic got underway, with all of those highly agitated people living in isolation and spending even more time than usual alone, doomscrolling as the president triggered them with surreal displays of ignorance and malice, things spiraled. We all remember the madness of those months, stretching from the late spring, just after George Floyd’s murder at the hands (or rather, under the knee) of a Minneapolis police officer, on down through the summer and fall.
One reason I responded so negatively last week to the Harris campaign’s turn toward a closing argument about Donald Trump being an incipient fascist dictator is that I doubt it will be politically effective. But there was another reason I didn’t really raise in my post on the subject. As such claims have spread from the campaign and its surrogates throughout the media over the past week, I’ve grown more agitated myself. Not because of Trump, but because of the reaction to Trump.
No, no, no—it’s happening again. Smart people are sounding stupid. Scholars and intellectuals are becoming hysterical. Why can’t we keep our heads? Why can’t we stay sober? Why can’t we avoid letting ourselves be trigged by words and deeds explicitly intended to trigger us? Why must we fulfill the wishes of the MAGA throngs and end up sounding like we’ve lost our minds in an acute anxiety attack? Why can’t we get a fucking grip?
In Search of Antecedents
At first I pondered a post on this subject focused on what struck me as the completely over-the-top reaction to news last Friday that Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos had quashed the newspaper’s already written editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. (I mostly agree with Josh Barro on the subject.) But then Trump’s carnival of vulgarity, racism, and xenophobia came to Madison Square Garden on Sunday afternoon and evening, and all the talk of Trump the Fascist coalesced into a unified front of historical analogies to Nazi Germany and, specifically, the pro-Nazi rally held at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. Even Heather Cox Richardson, professional historian and author of the second most popular politics newsletter at Substack (with millions of subscribers), made the connection:
The plan for a rally at Madison Square Garden itself deliberately evoked its predecessor: a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden…. About 18,000 people showed up for that “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.
But is that really the most illuminating comparison to Trump’s rally? Is this really the best a trained and accomplished historian can do? I doubt it. Because there is a more recent event held at Madison Square Garden that I saw hardly anyone discuss in all the flurry of commentary about Sunday’s Trump gathering. That includes Richardson, who in her eagerness to portray Trump as the leader of a fascist movement didn’t even mention in passing.
That event is George Wallace’s presidential campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on October 24, 1968.
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