The Opinions - Make America 1897 Again

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

What can the 1890s tell us about 21st-century problems and a second Trump administration? According to the Opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie, quite a lot. In this episode, he speaks with Aaron Retica, an editor in Opinion, about what the 19th century and Donald Trump’s surprising new favorite president can tell us about our shifting culture.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Aaron Reddica. I am an editor at large for the opinion section of the New York Times. I'm joined today by one of our columnist, Jamel Bowie, who writes about politics, often putting it in historical context. He's been doing this for a long time since he got here, but it feels particularly relevant in this moment as we see Donald Trump. of all people, turning to the past in a new and really a little bit surprising way, instead of talking about what's great about America, making America great, he's not talking about the 1950s when he grew up,

but he's talking about the late 1890s. Jamel, welcome. Oh, hello. Thank you for having me. I want to start with Donald Trump's newfound love of William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States. He name-checked him in his inaugural address. And we will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs. He wants to rename Donali Mountain in Alaska, Mount McKinley, which, you know, was not changed by some kind of woke fiat.

Jamal, what is going on? Like, why are we talking about McKinley? I think to start, I don't think Donald Trump has any broad vision that he is trying to invoke when he mentions William McKinley. Like, I think it strains crudility to think that Donald Trump has thought seriously about William McKinley in a systematic way. I think what's mostly happening here is that he is, for a variety of reasons, familiar with the name William McKinley. sees McKinley as maybe sort of an important and prominent Republican president and wants to associate himself with McKinley. There are also substantive things that McKinley did that I think Trump is attracted to, like, for example, tariffs. But I think this is less citing McKinley as a, you know,

as an example in the way that you might be trying to emulate and more like citing McKinley as a totem to state your aspirations for the kind of influence you think you want to have. I think for us as political observers, the late 19th century is just an interesting period in general because it bears more than a few similarities to our own moment. It is a time of just rapid, cultural, and economic and political change in the United States. It's a time of mass immigration and the emergence of a substantial backlash to that immigration. It is a time where there are new, huge concentrations of wealth in industries that did not exist, you know, 20, 30 years prior. And the owners of those industries of those companies, the possessors of that wealth had large amounts of close to unchecked political interests.

influence. So there's a lot there that is not the same, but relevant to us. The idea that the Gilded Age is something we should be aiming at, right? It's something that I found kind of amazing, right? And somehow we have gotten to a place where the idea that it's a new Gilded Age is almost a positive. So what is it about McKinley for Trump? Like, what is he seeing here? So in addition to McKinley's sort of use of tariffs. I do think 90% of it is just that. Trump is sort of monomaniacly obsessed with tariffs. But the other thing is that the McKinley era marks the real beginnings of, blossoming of, you could say. It's not positive, but you know what I'm saying, of American imperialism.

It's the point in which the United States is, you know, we fight the Spanish-American War and occupy Cuba. It's when we begin our occupation in the Philippines. We are making interventions into Haiti. Puerto Rico, too, right? Puerto Rico. Guam. Right. Sort of the extended American territories

that most people are familiar with these days, we come into possession of them during this period. And it's primarily an effort to open up new markets, obtain new raw materials for American domestic industry. So it's not a key feature of Trumpism to be super subtle, right? So there were up right in front at the inauguration. You know, there's Elon Musk. There's Jeff Bezos.

There's the guy from Google. Just Mark Zuckerberg, like an amazing array of, we'll call him tech capitalists. And he is explicit, Trump is explicit in his joy and triumph over them. Well, as everyone always says, bending the knee, right? He said the other day that when he came around the first time, you know, no one was his friend, and now everyone wants to be his friend. So I want to get into some of the theories that are animating all this that you've been writing about. But like, what is happening here? Like, what are they all doing there?

What is he doing with them? Like, how ominous is this development help us? Trump's sort of like they didn't want me back then, but now they want me. It just reminds me of the lyric from Still Tipping by Mike Jones. The song when I was popular when I was a teen. The line is back then. Back then, hoes didn't want me. Back then, hoes didn't want me.

Now I'm hot holes all on me. I think this is very funny. And it's basically the dynamic that we're describing. Okay. Real answer now. Although that was a good one. I think, I think first of all, I think that's worth, sort of factoring into all of this.

It's just the fact that, like, Trump didn't win the popular vote last time. And so by not winning the popular vote, by entering office is sort of like a minority president, you could say. First, this, like, stimulated a lot of opposition against him. And I think he created the sense that he is an aberration, right? This is a weird thing that happened. It'll pass, and we'll get back to normalcy. We'll get back to business.

But while he's there, there's no need to kind of, you know, pretend like he's anything other than an aberration. So we can align ourselves with the opposition. We can align ourselves with the resistance, as it were, even if it's a nominal alignment, even if it's purely symbolic, and it's not going to harm us whatsoever. But now he's won. He won with the popular vote. He made a comeback, despite everything.

And I think this has created the sense that, oh, maybe this is just where the country is, and we have to get with the program. We have to get with the picture. In addition, there are real kind of... of material concerns for the tech industry as well. Over the last what decade, we've seen, you know, first it was blockchain, then it was NFTs, now we're at AI. And it's clear, it's clear to me at least, that they're looking for ways to profit. They're not making as much money as they want to. They're deploying all kinds of new things in hopes that those will be the thing that unlock a new amount of

value, and it's not clear that that's what's going to happen. And with Trump, you have an opportunity to tilt the regulatory environment in their favor. You have an opportunity to engage in the time-honored tradition of just like going to the government coffers to make up for the fact that your business isn't making money. So I think that's a part of it too, right? Like Elon Musk has major government contracts. Jeff Bezos is looking for major government contracts. Mark Zuckerberg and other, you know, Silicon Valley types wants the government to stay out of the way of AI development, which they hope will be the next big moneymaker. Sam Altman just announced he's willing to play ball with Trump as well and hope to get new investments in the AI. There's like, again, a very material concern happening,

but I do think there's also an ideological aspect happening here. And that is, going back to 2020, there you saw in Silicon Valley in the tech industry, tech workers, behaving like workers. And what I mean is behaving like people whose interests are not necessarily aligned with those of the owners, of the firms at which they work. And they're beginning to make demands. Our colleague, Ross, doubt that didn't interview

with Mark Andreessen, where Andreessen essentially says that he feared that there are mobs forming in the workplaces. That fear of workers making claims of exerting pressure of making demands on the basis of the fact that because they are workers, they can bring the worker the firm to a halt, I think radicalized a lot of Silicon Valley CEOs. And to some extent, this feels like rich owners of businesses opposed to worker militancy, you know, news at 11, dog bites man. But I think it's a real dynamic of it. And Trump is

nothing, if not virulently anti-labour. He loves to talk of the workers as a kind of cultural class, but when it comes to the actual interest of the working class, he is as anti-labor as they come. Right. So let's talk about the gilded and the gilded age was in part just this overlay of gold, right? And the Trump Tower, the Trump aesthetic has always been, you know, proto-regal in some way. And lurking behind all this, there is a, I was going to say theorist. I don't know if that's the right word. But lurking behind all this is a blogger who you just wrote about. He's not a front and center person.

He's someone who, as you put it, influences the people who influence Trump. And that is Curtis Yarvin. I want to talk a little bit about how his ideas fit into all this. Could you just talk a little bit about who he is and why he matters? Sure. I mean, he basically was a blogger who built a following with this argument that the United States was sort of under an oppressive liberal totalitarianism, that this had captured all the institutions of society, that this was a threat to progress, progress, meaning technological progress. of some sort that the push for equality or egalitarianism was undermining our technological future, and that the only way to arrest this and to put America back on the path to greatness

was to both run directly at that liberal totalitarianism and transition to the United States away from democracy, however flawed it might be, to something more like, a monarchy or an autocracy led by the tech elite. And to my mind, just like describing what he thinks explains why he became influential. Like you're telling wealthy Silicon Valley guys that they deserve to be the rulers. It's like, yeah, if I were a wealthy Silicon Valley guy, I'd be like, you know, I think this guy has some good ideas. I think he has some good thoughts. And I do think that much of it is writing style is, you know, filled with.

with esoteric references. He kind of writes as if he has access to secret knowledge. And that kind of thing also is very appealing to people. Like, he is an effective rhetorician in that he is able to capture the attention of the people whose attention he wants. And then, if not persuade them, then kind of bring them along with his train of thought. And where would his train of thought go? I mean, you talked about the material appeal, but what is the philosophical appeal of the rejection of democracy and a return to this kind of monarchy, this sort of tech monarchy?

Like, what have they done that would make you think, oh, yes, let's put them in charge of everything? I think it's just the mythology of Silicon Valley that obviously many of the participants in that world have sort of taken on. as being true and not simply, you know, marketing. The mythology of Silicon Valley as a singular place of genius, of technological advancements, singular wills, you know, pushing society forward. So I think just wholesale adoption of that mythology as true might make this appealing.

You know, part of Yarvind's work is sometimes winking at and often outright endorsing, you know, notions of racial hierarchies. all this idea that certain people are at the top, certain people are at the bottom, and this is the natural state of things. And I have no doubt that that is also appealing for some set of people who see themselves as part of a natural elite. When it comes to sort of how much one could operationalize this, you know, the path to making the United States a monarchy is a very difficult one. But, you know, giving undue influence to wealthy oligarchs. That's a thing you can do. Unravelling the kinds of regulations, laws, standards, constitutional settlements that have at least grounded

the United States for the last half century as a more egalitarian country is something you can do. So, you know, if you think of it less as, can you make the U.S. is a monarchy and more can you make the U.S. much less democratic and much more stratified across social and economic and political lines. But, yeah, you can do that. That's where we were 100 years ago.

That's where we were in the late 19th century. Right. So it comes back to that. So let's send on coming back to Trump. So, I mean, it's a sucker's game, right, to talk about what Trump's political ideology is. Like, what's going on in his mind. Like, you know, we talked a lot about McKinley. We talked about YARV, and it's nothing like Trump is sitting around reading all this,

thinking about it. And yet he is pushing hard to do exactly what you're talking about, right, that it's understood by everyone that everything's never going to be perfectly egalitarian. And yet the goal was to make it more egalitarian, right? And now if the goal is to make it less egalitarian, that part about Trump we can understand. But you mentioned earlier that in response to the concentration of capital and interests and the convergence in the late 19th century, an enormous number of, important movements that changed the way the 20th century was shape emerged, right? You had labor unions most of all, but also the feminist movement that led to women voting. But do you think there's any chance that this push in the direction of elites and elitism under the mask of populism?

And right famously Hamilton said that, you know, those who sought tyranny would first pay obsequious court to the poor. Is there hope that this will actually lead to some sort of American renewal as people realize they don't want to live like this? So I'm always wary of saying that anything must axiomatically lead to anything. You know, there's no, there's no guarantee that there is a kind of egalitarian backlash that might put the United States back on what I would think it's the right track. But I think it is true that however much our political system may become undemocratic, we remain a country with a very vibrant in democratic culture where political dissent and resistance, lowercase, are just a part of American cultural life. So as this agenda moves forward,

I would expect it to cede, you know, perhaps movements that are responding, directly to it, that are attempting to make good on an egalitarian promise, and I don't expect those movements to make some traction. The thing I think to remember is, is that the time from making traction to finding any meaningful success can be quite long. So you're about to list through some of the groups that emerge from this period. The NACP emerges in this period. And of course, it's a half century between the emergence of the NWACP and Brown v. Board. So this is all to say that like, you know, politics doesn't end. History doesn't stop moving. Things continue going. Human activity continues. Human agency is real. And so the people in power now will

overreach. People in power always do. And people out of power will respond to that overreach. And it remains to be seen what those responses look like, how they organize themselves, what they mean for us politically and culturally. But I think at the same time, It's important to remember that, although nothing gets forever, things can last a pretty long time. Okay, well, that seems like a perfect place for us, too. And Jamel, thank you very, very much for taking the time to talk to us and for providing your incredible insight to help us see where we're going. Oh, it's my pleasure.

If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Bishaka, Fiby Lett, Christina Samuelski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samueluski, and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.