Extremism has always been part of mainstream America: historian

Ideas53:59The extreme in America’s mainstream

"This is the hardest lecture I've ever given." 

That's how historian Leonard Moore described his final lecture at McGill University in Montreal, where he taught popular — and powerful —  courses on American history for more than 30 years. 

The topic of his final lecture was, as Moore put it, "the really difficult present." He spoke about the deep polarization in the United States, his home country, and the sense that for him and many other experts, the upcoming election between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump may be the most pivotal in U.S. history.

It was an emotional farewell to teaching, featuring insights and anxieties about where the United States may be headed, and was attended by members of the public and friends, family and generations of former students.

Here are some excerpts from Leonard Moore's last lecture.

"The nation has become divided profoundly and powerfully by this ethnic nationalism, by this sense of grievance, by this kind of irrational, passionate belief that somehow the nation has been sold down the river by, I don't know, people like me, or woke people, or think of whatever term you want. People who teach about the history of racism or African American history in the United States, and on and on. 

If you haven't heard about Trump's 2025 plan that has been hammered out by the Heritage Foundation, it's frightening: it essentially is a plan to disassemble the American civil government and reassemble it with loyalists to Trump's extreme right-wing ideology. It could affect almost every function of the American government, and could deeply affect the criminal justice system. 

My biggest fear is that Trump will do what he evidently wanted to do very often during his first presidency and that is invoke the Insurrection Act, which will allow martial law in the United States.

So this is truly a unique and frightening moment, whether you want to call it fascism or whatever you want to call it. It's a grave danger to American society and given the state of the world, it's a great threat to the entire world, in my view."

The extreme in America's mainstream

"The big question is why are people open to what Trump is saying? What has taken place that has made that a possibility, made the destruction of democracy a possibility in American life? 

I would start with the civil rights movement and what happened in the United States after 1965, how the civil rights movement led to an explosion of awareness of citizenship issues, not just for African Americans, but for many Americans, for women, for other ethnic groups in the United States, for Indigenous people, for people who had a different sexuality other than the norm.

On and on across the board, this was a period of upheaval where people were asking basic questions and the place of pluralism in American society. And during the civil rights movement, after the civil rights movement, the opposition to that idea remained powerful and strong, and it is at the root of the extremism that we are seeing today in American politics…

The extreme is embedded in the mainstream of American life. And it always has been."

Historical contingencies 

"In the late 1840s and early 1850s, it looked like the slave power in the United States was in total control of the American government. They passed a fugitive slave law that forced every county sheriff in every state across the United States, to pay attention to the possibility of runaway enslaved people in their town. Otherwise, their lives could be ruined by prosecution, from failure to enforce. In so many other ways, in the 1850s, it looked like the slave power in the United States could not be defeated. 

Then by the end of the 1860s, not only had slavery been defeated, a second founding of the Constitution had been written that was intended for the express purpose of doing something that nobody could imagine in the 1850s… African Americans had become citizens of the United States in a way that benefited all Americans.

And the 13th and especially the 14th and the 15th Amendments opened the door to a whole new idea of citizenship in total contrast to this anti-democratic right-wing vision of America that I've been laying out. No one saw it coming."

The Arc of the moral universe

"Almost everybody has heard one version or another of a quote attributed to Martin Luther King [Jr.] and the civil rights movement: that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. King was paraphrasing the words of a 19th-century abolitionist. And he was using those words to try to inspire people caught up in the danger and the trauma and the challenges of the civil rights movement in the late 50s and early 1960s. 

But what I would like to do is let you hear the original version by Theodore Parker, the abolitionist, in something he wrote in 1853:

'I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see, I am sure it bends towards justice.'  

The thing I like about it is that it puts [in] qualifications. It doesn't make it seem like: well, you just have to wait around and justice will happen when the arc of the moral universe gets done bending. Parker and countless other Americans, white and Black, tried to bend that arc in an era before the Civil War, and the cost of all of that was enormous.

I think his life shows that you have to act to bend the moral arc. You can't just wait for it to happen. It's not inevitable. It's something you have to fight for. So I think that quote brings that out even more than King's paraphrase. 

The other thing about it that I really like is that it emphasizes how difficult it is to know what the arc of the moral universe is. It's hard to calculate. It's hard to figure out. It's complicated. I think studying history is the best tool we have to try to come to grips with the wisdom of a better path forward, the best way to move forward, and to know the complexity and the difficulty and the challenges that lay ahead." 

*Excerpts have been edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Melissa Gismondi with additional help from Tom Howell. 

Listen to the full lecture by Leonard Moore by downloading the IDEAS podcast from your favourite app.