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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: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/trump-and-the-borderers/477084/ https://twitter.com/JasonSCampbell/status/1253420326471385089
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. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/trump-and-the-borderers/477084/
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: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/trump-and-the-borderers/477084/
