Donald Trump's new "American Midnight" is upon us

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Donald Trump’s new “American Midnight” is upon us
Historian Adam Hochschild sees echoes of post–World War I repression today

By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published October 14, 2025 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) These days, time often feels like a flat circle, where the past, present and future are collapsing into a disorienting blur as President Donald Trump and his supporters escalate the collapse of our civil society, institutions, norms and democracy. Many are framing this moment of political vertigo as a new Red Scare, a 21st-century McCarthyism. But this is only partly true.

In his award-winning book “American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis,” leading historian Adam Hochschild draws a parallel to an even darker and more perilous time in American history: A century ago, in the years following World War I, when President Woodrow Wilson’s administration and its allies crushed dissent by targeting newspapers, imprisoning political rivals, inciting political vigilantism and engaging in a mass deportation campaign to root out supposed communists and socialists, and other “undesirables,” in America.

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History is being whitewashed, and there are now literal thoughtcrimes that the Trump administration and its allies are enforcing. What is the role and obligation of the historian in these troubled times?

The ability to see history clearly is precious. And that, too, is something Trump is trying to ban — telling the Smithsonian, for instance, that its institutions emphasize slavery too much. We need to fight to preserve our right to see history clearly, without superpatriotic blinders. To see the good, the bad, the previous Trump-like demagogues, here and abroad, and to take inspiration from fights for justice that have been successfully fought.

Nothing is more important at this point than looking closely at exactly how, in the past, major countries moved from democracy to dictatorship — whether, for example, [Adolf] Hitler taking power in Germany in 1933, or [Vladimir] Putin doing so in Russia in the early 2000s. We need to familiarize ourselves with every phase of that process so we can recognize it when it happens here. An early signal that it is indeed happening here is Trump’s eagerness to get troops on the streets of cities where he is unpopular. Dictatorship always has the threat of armed force behind it.

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Why is McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the 1950s the go-to reference point — and warning — for so many political observers? The post-World War I crackdown, which was in many ways much worse, is generally ignored.

No country likes to remember embarrassing periods of its history. McCarthyism is remembered so well because it was finally extinguished by the mainstream: Congress censured McCarthy, and Eisenhower criticized him. So, its end is easy to celebrate as a triumph of reason and of middle-of-the-road politics. But no such thing really happened to end the post-[World War] I crackdown, and nothing brought back to life its principal victims: The Socialist Party and the [Industrial Workers of the World], both of which were in effect crushed for good. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/10/14/donald-trumps-new-american-midnight-is-upon-us/