Historical illiteracy has sustained Trump

When it comes to knowledge of civics and history, Americans are an embarrassingly ignorant people. David McCullough, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, “We’re raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate.” Statistics widely support this claim. In 2011, Newsweek magazine asked 1,000 Americans questions from the U.S. citizenship test. The study showed that 73 percent couldn’t say why we engaged in the Cold War and 29 percent failed to identify the vice president. The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a mere 36 percent of Americans knew all three branches of the U.S. government; 35 percent couldn’t name even one. This staggering unawareness of government and history among Americans seems particularly relevant in a time where one of the major candidates for the presidency evokes memories of the most deplorable individuals and events in our nation’s past. As his struggling campaign heads into the final months of the election season, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his surrogates have attempted to soften some of his stances. But, make no mistake, his words, actions and policies have consistently reflected the absolute worst in our history and no superficial pivot will change that. His recent meeting with the Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto only served to underline his historical ties to America’s most embarrassing eras.

Trump’s rhetoric of fear and division bares a striking resemble to that of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a man who engaged in an infamous witch hunt of alleged communists. Trump and McCarthy similarly employed fear-mongering and fiery language making many Americans unjustifiably suspicious of their fellow citizens. Both men accused groups of dishonorable behavior, from sympathizing with communism to publicly celebrating the 9/11 attacks, with sweeping statements and insufficient, even nonexistent evidence. Billionaire Warren Buffett noted that some of Trump’s comments regarding the Gold Star Kahn family reminded him of McCarthy’s tactics. Buffet directed toward Trump the famous question originally for McCarthy: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Trump’s proposal to ban all Muslims, which his campaign has clumsily attempted to moderate, seems awfully similar to the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law that has been deemed one of the most blatant forms of discrimination in our history. Yanan Wang wrote in the Washington Post, “The Chinese Exclusion Act is … the closest cousin to what Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump proposed.” Rarely has this type of lawful restriction on a certain group of people actually existed in the United States and, yet, Trump has called for a return to a similar policy.

Last week, in the immediate aftermath of his meeting with Nieto, Trump reinforced his hard-edged, anti-immigration message. Trump’s continual depiction of undocumented Mexican immigrants as dangerous and threatening is yet another example of the recurring xenophobia and nativism that has consistently plagued the United States since its inception. From the Irish and Italians to the Polish and Germans, nearly every major immigrant population has faced exclusion, intolerance and countless “need not apply” signs.  Trump’s language about Mexicans is an extension of this disgraceful pattern. The connection seems obvious between the glaring ignorance of Americans and the rise of Donald Trump, a man who embodies the absolute worst of our country’s past.

If only Trump supporters could see his similarities to those shameful periods and realize that supporting him is to align yourself on the wrong side of history. Like McCarthy, like exclusionary policies, like extreme nativism and xenophobia, Trump and his supporters will, in time, be deemed morally reprehensible. It is a pity that a sizable amount of citizens in this country will ultimately be forced to explain themselves to their grandchildren.