Tag: nativism (politics)

Precursors of Trumpism in American Culture: The Great Gatsby

Donald Trump’s brand of “nativist populism” is prefigured very clearly in the 1925 classic American novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the subject of several film adaptations. The anxiety in the Trump movement is called “The Great Replacement” (i.e., white people supplanted by minorities—American non-whites will “link up” with Mexicans and Chinese, stealing the place, property and role of white people). It has never occurred to these people that most of the world’s population is non-white. In The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband, represents this anxiety.

He links these fears to the anxiety that “the sun is getting hotter.” (That is, he’s being threatened cosmically too, not only by racial demography.) His fears are not of “climate change,” based on something rational, but obsessive and maniacal “threat assessments.” They mirror the “irrational clusters of threats” of Trump and his voters, who “want to be paid in advance forever for their being white, Christian and American.” They demand “racial tenure.” This Tom Buchanan syndrome may be considered a type of “globalization backlash.”

Tom Buchanan lays it out in the novel:

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?…Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved…This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or those other races will have control of things…The idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”

(The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1)

“…Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have marriage between black and white.”

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.

“We’re all white here,” murmured Jordan.

Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

(The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7)

The Brexit phenomenon in the United Kingdom is not identical but does overlap (i.e., the “left behind” people in England want “historical ethnic-national tenure” and a kind of re-segregation).

How to See Fundamental Tension in the World Easily

People-Class Part II

A few years ago, in 2006, there was a first rate movie called The Last King of Scotland with the great black American actor, Forest Whitaker, playing barbaric Idi Amin Dada Oumee who destroyed the life of the Asian community in Uganda in the 1970s.

This great actor later appeared on the TV talk show, The Charlie Rose Show. Charlie Rose and Whitaker were discussing the movie and Rose denounces Idi Amin as the mad barbarian he was.

But Whitaker objects and says, “You gotta keep in mind, Charlie, that more than 90% of Ugandan commerce was in Asian hands and the situation was not viable.”

We have here a simple way of seeing our world more clearly since commerce is a cosmopolitan activity of business people whereas “ethnonational” considerations (expressed by Whitaker) are tribal and backward or inward looking and not conducive to cosmopolitanism.

Somebody once made the quip that the world, country by country, is divided into the tribal “ethnonational” Serbs (so to speak) in conflict with the “cosmopolitans.”

In this vocabulary Trump and Trumpism are “Serbian.” He will decide who is and who is not a “real American.”

Go back to our essay on the concept of “people–class” and all the attendant genocidal murders. (Uganda under Amin being the example we’re mindful of here).

Ethnonationalism (e.g., “Serbian” style anti-cosmopolitanism) is of course exactly what is at war with cosmopolitan or internationalist global trends and commercial chains which makes it nativist. Populism refers to that connected sense that the elites (in the worst case, “The Davos Crowd”) are trying to destroy the real people (e.g., “Trump’s America”) via their internationalist or cosmopolitan attitudes and behaviors.

Thus the movie The Last King of Scotland and the discussions it engendered are very “canonical” or educational in laying forth this “civil war” everywhere.

Thinking of a group as a “people–class” tells you that Idi Amin or Rwanda 1994 belligerence (i.e., ethnonationalism) is being stoked by politicians to create “hatred opportunities” like Trump did. Trump’s idea was to use hatred as a “wave maker” that he could ride. The Trump voters created a nativist/populist cult figure in Trump. He would protect them from the outside world and globalism by ethnonationalism.

Forest Steven Whitaker (born July 15, 1961) is an American actor, producer, director, and activist. He is the recipient of such accolades as an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a British Academy Film Award, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.

After making his film debut in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Whitaker went on to earn a reputation for intensive character study work for films such as Bird; Good Morning, Vietnam; The Crying Game; Platoon; Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai; The Great Debaters; The Butler; Arrival; and Respect. He has also appeared in blockbusters such as Panic Room, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story as Saw Gerrera and Black Panther as Zuri. For his portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the British historical drama film The Last King of Scotland (2006), Whitaker won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Wikipedia