Make Slovenia Great Again

Although on May 9, 1865, US President Andrew Johnson declared the victory of the Union forces over the Confederacy, the end of the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery in the United States, Americans went on playing partisans and home guards for quite a few years. Johnson’s predecessor, the Republican Abraham Lincoln, had championed Reconstruction, a process that was meant both to help the impoverished South back on its feet and to give freed slaves, in addition to physical freedom, a modest dose of equality. To Johnson, a Democrat who inherited the White House as vice president after Lincoln’s assassination, even that seemed too much. His intention to put Black Americans in what, in his Democratic opinion, was their rightful place came to nothing after the 1866 elections, when the Radical Republicans won a majority in Congress. They promptly adopted the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, purged Confederate grandees from positions of power and guaranteed Black Americans all political freedoms, including the right to vote and to stand for election. This, of course, did not please the Southern Democrats, the representatives of white plantation owners, who had not only lost their free labor but were also forced to watch their former slaves strutting about under their noses—sometimes in uniform and carrying weapons—and even daring to elect their own representatives to positions of power, from local mayoralties to the US Congress. Those were funny, upside-down times. Republicans championed progressive ideas, Democrats wanted to turn the wheel of history back to the good old slave-owning days, and Black Americans believed the future would bring them freedom, equality and social justice.

The American partisans and home guards—pardon, Republicans and Democrats—pardon, opponents and defenders of slavery—were, as one would say in today’s terminology, polarized over these questions for more than a decade. The ones who came off worst in these exchanges of views were above all the newly freed Black people, who in the first years after the war were slaughtered across the American South like rabbits. On Easter Sunday 1873, in the town of Colfax, Louisiana, white plantation owners murdered more than one hundred and fifty Black members of the state militia. It was not a battle but an execution, since most of the victims were killed in captivity after they had already surrendered their weapons. Things were slowly getting out of hand, so Republicans and Democrats agreed on a reconciliation based on the arithmetic mean between their differing views of their recent history. In other words, they met halfway and agreed that from then on Black Americans would be equal, but segregated.

This principle, later confirmed by the US Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, underpinned a system that enabled and maintained racial segregation and the political and economic dominance of white Americans over Americans of other colors. All this lasted almost a century, until the mid-1960s, when the Democrats, now in reversed roles, decided it was time to put the historic reconciliation with the Republicans aside. At President J. F. Kennedy’s initiative, civil rights legislation was adopted that, at least formally, abolished racial discrimination in voting, employment and education. JFK did not live to see the law take effect: the year before, he met the same fate as Abraham Lincoln.

The story above is not just an interesting historical detail; it also gives us a code for understanding the present. It can help us answer, for example, the question of why the red baseball cap of the forty-fifth US president reads “Make America Great Again,” why the slogan is so popular with white supremacists and the alt-right, and when exactly, in their view, America was last great. You guessed it: back when everyone still knew and respected who could sit in power, who at the trough and who at the back of the bus. Trump’s cap is an excellent example of what Timothy Snyder, in his new book The Road to Unfreedom, calls the politics of eternity. Instead of a future, this politics offers a cyclical repetition of history in which the nation, or part of it, is always the victim. Time is no longer a line leading us into the future but a circle that keeps bringing us back to mythologized “injustices” of the past. Donald’s cap does not promise Americans that America will ever be great again; above all, it reminds them that for the (light-skinned) part of Americans, that greatness is gone. This politics offers neither progress nor hope, only defense against enemies lurking on all sides.

We, too, have politicians who swear by eternity. Like the Confederate grandees and cotton plantation owners of old, and their modern alt-patriotic soulmates today, our politicians of eternity are trying to change the outcome of a war they lost. They do this not because they want to leave the past behind in a spirit of reconciliation, but solely to change the present by reinterpreting history, and, in the spirit of ideas that were defeated once already, to seize power and rearrange it to their liking.

If they want to wear baseball caps decorated with slogans while doing so, I offer them a translation adapted to our circumstances: Make this country great again for me.