It appears that because we all learned the first few sentences of the Declaration of Independence, some of us think the Trump era is an aberration.

We are living through a period in which the Confederate separatists are ascendant. The ante-bellum South was a repressive society based on obedience and submission. The ruling class consisted of White slaveholders, who raped their women/property and beat their subjects of all ages. Those who resisted were killed or sold. The adultery and violence on the plantation warped the slaveholder’s wife and children.

In the Great Awakening of the 1820s and 30s, evangelicals in the North turned to reform: women’s equality, abolitionism, religious proselytizing. In the South, no outlet from obedience/submission emerged. Honor, growing out of Walter Scott’s novels of medieval English nobility, was the ruling class’ cultural delusion. (Mark Twain, in Life on the Mississippi, spends a couple pages on Scott: “Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.”) Preservation of slavery—by which Southern landowners and Northern bankers and manufacturers grew rich—was the priority.

In the 1850s, when slavery’s expansion was rending the nation, the Whig Party collapsed, and in its place rose the American Party—the Know-Nothings who opposed immigration of Catholics (primarily Germans and Irish)—and the Republican Party, which championed free Whites whose prospects were diminished by competition from slave labor. The Republican base included farmers from the former Northwest Territory and abolitionists from New York and New England, who rejected the Compromise of 1850 that allowed the expansion of slavery and obligated Northerners to return escaped enslaved people.

The Civil War Congress, freed from reactionary Southern states, expanded freedom and government action to promote prosperity: internal improvements (post roads, railroads), land grant colleges and the Department of Agriculture, which disseminated scientific techniques. The Union’s industrial superiority eventually subdued the rebellion, paving the way for Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, a war tactic that applied only to rebel states.

With the end of the war and Lincoln’s death, the Radical Republicans passed the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and forced the readmitted Southern states to accept them. But the Supreme Court began undoing them within a decade (an effort renewed with vigor this century). By 1876, Northerners had tired of the effort to ensure a measure of economic security for the freed slaves.

My college thesis delved into the Negro Migration of 1879 from the Mississippi Delta to Kansas. Thousands of freedmen boarded boats headed upstream, where they believed they could farm free from the terrorism of the Klan. Their hopes were illusive. The Kansans didn’t want them.

In the West, the federal government reneged on the treaties it had forced tribal chiefs to sign. The Homestead Act, with Lincoln’s signature, created a process to give Western lands to White settlers. The Army made it a practice to attack Indian villages at dawn, killing men, women and children as they slept. By the 1880s, the Army had removed the Indians it didn’t kill to ever-shrinking reservations.

In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. It banned Chinese laborers—who constituted a considerable share of the workforce that had built the transcontinental railroads—for 10 years. It prohibited Chinese residents from becoming naturalized citizens.

As America industrialized, workers sought to unionize. The barons, backed by the federal government, employed armed private security forces and sometimes federal agents to kill or jail labor organizers. In 1894 President Cleveland ordered the Army to break the Pullman railroad strike. The labor wars continued for a half-century. Over the same period, Jim Crow tightened his grip on the South, and the Supreme Court upheld separation of the races in the 1896 Plessy decision. In the North, federal and state governments ensured most Black people were confined to ghettos.

Out of President Wilson’s propaganda campaign in support of American entry into the Great War, the government sprouted J. Edgar Hoover’s virulently anti-communist FBI and the post-war Palmer Raids of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. More than 500 people were deported. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which banned Asian immigration and set annual quotas at 2 percent of a foreign nation’s U.S. population as of 1890. Eugene Debs, a Pullman Strike leader, labor organizer and five-time presidential candidate, was convicted and imprisoned for giving a speech opposing the draft. The Supreme Court upheld his conviction.

Three years into the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt rewrote the government’s contract with its citizens: protections for labor and consumers, the development of a social safety net, Social Security. Our timely renewal generated the industrial might and moral will to defeat fascism. The G.I. Bill and the construction of the post-war Western alliance ushered in a three-decade period of unprecedented middle-class prosperity (for White people). But amid the ideological conflict with the Soviet Union, the McCarthy era stained our new birth of freedom. Among the victims: government employees, homosexuals, Hollywood stars and writers, and the physicist who led the building of the atom bomb.

The Cold War had other aspects as the U.S. sought moral superiority: the Civil Rights struggle that culminated in Brown v. Board and the two civil rights acts a decade later, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which undid the 1924 law. Television’s reach required Americans to share a little to win the world over to their ways of being—though in signing immigration reform, President Johnson assured Americans that it would produce no notable change in their complexion. (Boy, was he wrong!)

Our willingness to project generosity didn’t last. We demonstrated our folly and capacity for atrocity in Vietnam. When We the People learned that the government had secretly expanded the war into Cambodia after candidate Nixon had promised a “secret plan” to end it, college students exploded in protest. National Guard troops opened fire at Kent State, and local and state police did the same at Jackson State 11 days later.

By 1978, we had begun building prisons faster than schools. The cost of college began its climb. Women’s rights began to ebb. The war on drugs targeted Black people, not White cocaine users.

In 2016 we elected as president a sexual predator—he boasted of it on tape we all heard. In 2024, after he had incited an attack on the Capitol that left police officers dead, been found liable for rape in a civil trial, and become a felon for his business practices, we elected him again, with a plurality of the vote. His victory in the South was solid. Southerners recognized him, but so did millions of others coast to coast. Their ancestors had marched to the battlefield to protect slavery, on behalf of predators.

Now that president is bombing fishing boats a thousand miles from our borders, sending the military into our cities and deporting people who’ve lived among us peacefully.

Tell me how Donald Trump is a departure from our history.