Trumpism is merely the latest incarnation of the "Redemption" movement.
Opinion | The ‘Lost Cause’ That Built Jim Crow - The New York Times:
"'Strange things have happened of late and are still happening,' Douglass himself worried aloud in that last major speech of his. More than 200 years after his birth, I can’t help wondering what he’d say about the current state of affairs in our democracy. Horrified by the scourge of lynching a generation on from what was supposed to have been a 'new birth of freedom' for black and white Americans, Douglass, in surveying the devastating shadows cast over the sunset of his life, said that 'some of these' developments 'tend to dim the luster of the American name, and chill the hopes once entertained for the cause of American liberty.' He continued: 'When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or where the other may stop. The downward tendency already manifest has swept away some of the most important safeguards.'
"And then he posed a question still haunting us today: 'What’s next?'"
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