1. I’d honestly forgotten I’d written this half a year before Donald Trump was elected, until the good doctor reminded me of it. A theory of how Trump’s performance of masculinity reflects deeper cultural divides: theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
2. Trump exhibits the classic style of politicians who appeal to the Borderers—the folkways that took root in Appalachia—which is starkly different than the models of manhood embraced by straight-laced Puritans or genteel cavaliers. theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
3. A president with "intensely personal leadership, charismatic appeals to his followers, demands for extreme personal loyalty, and a violent antipathy against those who disagreed with him”? That’s David Hackett Fischer describing Andrew Jackson.
4. "He always believed in making the public serve the ends of the politician … Jackson never really championed the cause of the people; he only invited them to champion his.” Trump? No, this is the historian Thomas Abernethy, again on Jackson.
5. Bertram Wyatt-Brown: “[They] knew how to make commoners proud of their color and their social values. [They] offered no real reforms...Their “program” was chiefly inspirational—the sense that one could partake in the magic of brave fellowship for the redress of grievances."
6. That’s a marvelous phrase—the magic of brave fellowship for the redress of grievances. And it should be a reminder that many of Trump’s most distinctive features tell us more about persistence than change in American culture: theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
