An Historian's View of The Inauguration: Beware of the New Normal

Acclaimed historian and Brevard resident Dan Carter has tracked the causes of President Donald Trump's rise to power and identified his main threat to democracy: public acceptance.

A history lesson over lunch with historian Dan Carter

BREVARD — It was “habituation” that cleared the path for the destruction of democracy in Nazi Germany, historian Dan Carter said minutes before the inauguration of President Donald Trump.

Case in point, Carter said — the experience of a retired teacher interviewed for a 1955 book about the spread of the party’s ideology, They Thought They Were Free.

The teacher was concerned after Adolf Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship but suppressed his alarm because the new government’s initial acts were incremental enough to be met with resignation.

Basically, the teacher got used to them, Carter said, and remained confident that at some point the German people would push back, set limits, let Hitler know he had gone too far.

And then it was too late.

At a family dinner, the teacher recalled, his nine-year-old son excitedly said, “ ‘they’ve finally taken the Jew swine out of our class,’ ” Carter said.

“He knew it was over then.”

I invited myself to Carter’s home in Brevard to watch Trump’s inaugural address on Monday and receive some instant historical analysis. After all, as the author of, among other acclaimed works, the definitive biography of George Wallace, Carter knows as much as anyone about America’s weakness for divisive populists.

I got more than I bargained for. Turns out that Carter, at age 84, is still hard at work exploring this theme and recently completed the draft of an exhaustive academic article tracking the roots and hazards of Trump’s rise.

It says a lot about our current situation that what was once a surefire sign of a flawed and overheated political argument — a comparison to Hitler — comes off in Carter’s essay as accurate and measured, notably stopping well short of saying we’re on a march towards genocide.

“The United States is not the Weimar Republic and Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler,” Carter writes. But as it was with Hitler, “the process of first being appalled by and then gradually accepting (Trump’s) abnormal words and actions as ‘normal’ has marked his rise to power.”

On cue, the broadcast started with images of a cadre of establishment capitalist figures — Bezos, Musk et al — smiling broadly at the privilege of being welcomed into the Trump fold.

Then came an address packed with exaggerations, falsehoods and extremist proposals such as sending the military to the border to halt a “disastrous invasion” of immigrants. It was subsequently described by the New York Times as “relatively muted,” which, the groundwork having been laid by so many previous outrages, it probably was.

Later the same afternoon, Trump undid one of the most crucial re-assertions of legal normality since the end of his first term, pardoning or commuting the sentences of more than 1,500 people convicted of the attempted violent overthrow of democracy.

I could go on, but that’s enough to prove Carter’s point. The start of Trump’s second term, accompanied by the broad acceptance of his authoritarian impulses, marks the beginning of a new and dangerous era of American history.

I’d like to explore this somehow, some way in future NewsBeat stories. I’ll let you know more when I figure out what form this will take, so paid subscribers can decide if they want to continue to support this work.

But it will probably involve profiles of Trump backers and their communities in an attempt to get to the underlying sources of the President’s political appeal.

Of course, many of these causes have already been identified, and Carter documents several of them in his essay.

Prejudice is one. Though he writes that this is not as bitter or overt as it was in the segregation-era South, there’s no doubt Trump has capitalized on resentment against Black Americans, brown immigrants and gay, lesbian and transgender citizens.

There’s no doubt, Carter writes, that Trump has mastered the old, reliable politics of “pitting ‘us’ (true Americans) against ‘them’ (threatening outsiders).”

He’s taken another time-tested Republican strategy — fomenting distrust of government and institutions — to new levels. He has mastered the modern media environment, especially with his understanding that entertainment carries more weight than truth.

Which in turn has allowed him to convince followers suffering from the country’s soaring economic inequality that the solution is tax cuts for the wealthy.

Whatever the reasons, the results are unprecedented in American history, Carter said. Never has a president so completely dominated a political party. Never has a president been so dominated by his basest urges.

“There are no limits on his id, on his willingness to be cruel, to break the law . . . to be a felon,” Carter said.

The stark contrast with the past was illustrated when our conversation continued over lunch.

The meal, soup and open-faced cheese sandwiches, roughly duplicated one that former first lady Rosalynn Carter had cooked when Dan Carter visited Plains, Ga.

Dan Carter went on to recount his several personal interactions with Rosalynn’s husband, recently deceased former President Jimmy Carter, a leader so guided by conscience, by superego, that the most common criticism of him was that he was “self-righteous.”

How did we get from there to here in just a few decades? How did Trumpism become normalized? Just because Carter the historian can explain it, doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel the way we should all feel: shocked, dismayed and, as he acknowledged at one point, even mystified.

“I just don’t understand it,” Carter said.

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