Celebratory History, Reckoning, and Backlash
I spent last week in Portugal, mostly in Lisbon with some side trips. I was struck by the extent to which museums and the like celebrate the age of discovery without much acknowledgment of the impact of colonialism. The Maritime Museum in Belem is a vivid but hardly unique illustration. It is through and through a celebration of Vasco da Gama and other Portuguese explorers of the 15th through 17th centuries. Even more strikingly, it is a celebration of colonialism. Among a great many artifacts, displays, and reproductions, I saw exactly one small wall display acknowledging any role of Portuguese seafarers in the slave trade. And that display downplayed this role, first by noting (correctly) that slavery in Africa pre-dated Portuguese export of enslaved Africans to Europe and the Americas and then by highlighting eventual 19th-century efforts by Portugal to combat the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The treatment of slavery at the Maritime Museum and elsewhere in Portugal reminded me of what I encountered as a child in America in the early 1970s. Docents, re-enactors, and displays did not exactly hide or deny the existence of slavery, but they surely did not highlight it and occasionally recognized it almost as a feature of the natural landscape. I distinctly remember a trip to Monticello during which the tour guide illustrated the inventiveness of Thomas Jefferson by pointing to a system he devised for an indoor bathroom without plumbing; she casually mentioned that at the end of the process, an enslaved person (she said “slave”) would remove the excrement. A little online research reveals that there is some historical uncertainty about how all of this in fact worked, but those details do not concern me right now. My point is simply that even as recently as the 1970s, Americans acknowledged the existence of slavery but seemed unperturbed by its centrality to the lives of our national heroes.
In the United States, much has changed since then. For example, official materials at Mt. Vernon highlight without whitewashing the extent to which George Washington’s wealth and power were built upon the backs of the people he enslaved. Understandably for an institution devoted to the life and work of the preeminent founder of the nation, the official Mt. Vernon site also spotlights Washington’s achievements, but there is not a lot of excuse-making or euphemism. The movement to rename military bases and schools and to remove statues of Confederate generals from places of honor is of a piece with this sort of belated acknowledgment of the fact that genocide (of the native population), slavery, and other forms of oppression are more than mere footnotes in our nation's history.
At least for now. The MAGA movement, "anti-woke" activism of the sort spearheaded by Florida, and broader backlash risk undoing much of that progress. Meanwhile, the attack on the symbols of anti-racism is of a piece with the policy backlash also entailed by those reactionary movements. That backlash is global, so that even nations that have for a long time recognized their problematic histories have seen nationalist movements that seek to return to a mythic view of the nation. Germany's AFD is probably the most alarming of these movements--mostly because of the centrality of the repudiation of Nazism to the post-WWII German state--but it is hardly unique.
More than any other issue, immigration is the unifying thread among right-wing populist movements in the U.S. and Europe. But beneath that unity lie a range of different concerns. In Europe, the targets of anti-immigrant sentiment include persons from the respective countries' former colonies, workers from poorer EU countries living in wealthier ones (think of anti-Polish sentiment as part of the impetus for Brexit), and refugees (mostly from the Middle East). The U.S. anti-immigrant rhetoric targets persons crossing the border with Mexico but extends to nationals of just about every "shithole" country.
The centrality of xenophobia to backlash against anti-racism (what we might call "anti-anti-racism") complicates its relationship to the revival of celebratory American history. After all, the descendants of enslaved Black Americans are not immigrants but natural-born citizens. Aware of that fact, Trump has sought the votes of Black Americans in his own inimitable way by asserting (falsely, of course) that immigrants are taking "Black jobs." Certainly no racial group is immune to the appeal of the demagogue. But overall, the effort is a relatively minor cross-current in the MAGA movement, which regards Black Americans whose ancestors came to this country involuntarily over three centuries ago as part of the mass of "others" whose stories are mostly to be excised from the heroic myths.
What all of this portends for the future is uncertain. In the U.S., much depends on the outcome of the election and (if Trump loses) the success or failure of the attempted post-election putsch. Taking a longer view, much also depends on economics.
With the exception of Greece, the only EU member states with lower per capita GDP than Portugal are former eastern bloc countries (and three such states have higher per capita GDP than Portugal). In Portugal, one has the sense that the lionization of da Gama and the other explorers who were central to the country's wealthy past is not so much a backlash against any kind of national reckoning but a response to its decline since 1755 (the date of the Lisbon earthquake). Other things being equal, it takes a self-confident country to admit its past sins.
In the U.S., nothing captures that reality more clearly than the phrase "make America great again." The MAGA movement assumes a loss of glory. For Trump, born in 1946, the 1950s through early 1960s (before the achievements of the Civil Rights movement and the cultural upheavals from the middle and final years of that decade) appear to be the last time that America was great. That was long before any sort of national reckoning with the evils of our past. Thus, MAGA perfectly encapsulates backlash against such a reckoning.