Linking Trump to old demagogues lets America frame racism as a past aberration

Evidence

It is funny, at least to me, that pundits and scholars identify Trump with a distinctive political lineage that excludes Reagan. The explicitness of his racism and the brazen way he has discarded the post–civil rights consensus about how to talk and not talk about race has led some to liken him to Strom Thurmond of the Dixiecrat Party in 1948 or to the racist campaign of George Wallace in 1968 or to Patrick Buchanan’s runs for president in 1992, 1996, and 2000. These are clear racist demagogues, and Trump stands among them. But in some ways, and perhaps it is intentional, such classifications are too easy. They suffer from the limits of melodrama, where good and evil are clearly discernible and heroes always come to the rescue as in the cowboy movies of old or the blockbuster Marvel films of today. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 507

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the melodrama critique as a tool for analyzing moral panics and scapegoating — when public thinkers prefer cartoon villains over structural truth.
• XREF: connects to: Trump-era racism was more overt than anything since the civil rights era