Trump the Redemptionist: The Coming American Armageddon

But as we know all too well these days, there are no longer any “standard interpretations”—a phrase that makes any right-winger reach for his revolver, to invoke another famous right-wing complaint about mainstream small-r republican values. Down South, that never was the interpretation of the Second Founding. In the South, it meant destruction and occupation and, most of all, the transfer of political power from the wealthy class that had held it for 200-plus years to people who had been their property.

That was the Southern interpretation of what we call Reconstruction. And so the South countered with its own narrative, Redemption: the return of white supremacy and the re-subjugation of the Negro, enforced through newly written state constitutions and through the violence carried out by groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

We’ve been locked in the battle between Reconstruction and Redemption ever since. No single American has embodied the Reconstruction narrative more fully than King, who, a century after those amendments, finally and courageously brought the country face to face with the ways in which even those bold amendments remained unfulfilled, thus helping to bring about full legal equality—and paying with his life for doing so. And surely no one has represented the Redemption side of the argument more than Trump. To say that is not to attempt to associate him with cross-burnings. But Trump represents, and pledged in his inaugural address to enforce, the American tradition that is handed down to us from the Redemption movement.