American authoritarianism has a long history. What can it tell us about Trump and the battle for America’s soul?

By Emma Shortis, RMIT University

If you select “virtually any date in US history, it would be possible to find the same poisonous ingredients [… that] percolated violently to the surface on January 6th, 2021,” writes journalist and historian Nick Bryant in his new book, The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.

Over two centuries ago, in 1787, Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and principal author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

The quote has been repurposed by Donald Trump’s supporters: you can even buy a MAGA T-shirt emblazoned with it.

According to Pew, “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines – and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point in the last two decades.”

This often leads to the conclusion that Trump, especially, is uniquely unprecedented in US history – as is the particular threat he poses to American democracy. It seems contradictory, but this is both true and untrue.

Trump, and the movement behind him, is both new and old; times are unprecedented but also, to historians of America, frighteningly familiar. Bryant, a historian by training, meticulously makes sense of these contradictions, methodically unpicking the mythology of US history to clearly argue that Trump – and his support – is the product of that history.

President Joe Biden has repeatedly said this election cycle is nothing less than a “battle for the soul of America”, and that this is why he’s compelled to run again, aged 81. But as Bryant so clearly outlines, that battle has been raging for centuries. In the context of its divisions and inherent violence, is it even possible to argue America has one “soul”?

The battle is, and perhaps has always been, over which soul – which version of America – should reign supreme, and who gets to decide.

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