Over at The Junto I wrote about the 1844 National Convention planned by the Mormons for Joseph Smiths presidential campaign. This is an outgrowth of my current research on the political culture of Mormon Nauvoo, which I promise is a lot of fun. In this particular post I talk about what these conventions tell us about America’s developing party rituals during the antebellum period. A taste:

There are many striking things about this sequence of events. But what stood out to me was the importance of political parties and organized mobilization. In 1844, political conventions were less than two decades old, and Americans were only just becoming accustomed to organized parties dominating the national landscape. The Anti-Masonic Party in 1831 was the first to hold a national convention, and the Democratic Convention in 1840 was the first to adopt a platform. These practices were a result of the Jacksonian impulse to expand decision-making power to a broader array of delegates. The platforms were meant to systematize national principles and policies. Even in Mormonism, where authority was based in a top-down structure, and even when it was obvious that Smith would gain the support of those in his faith, Smith’s followers elected to mimic national precedent by holding a series of state conventions, climaxing in a national convention. And even if they didn’t have an official platform, they at least had a series of resolutions meant to permeate national publications. Such a process would assure a democratic election. This attempt at expansive organization displayed the increasingly organized nature of American campaigns and electoral proceedings.

If you think this is fun, wait until my essay on the Council of Fifty, which will come out in a few weeks. It will go live as the Joseph Smith Papers Project publishes, for the first time, the minutes from that secretive organization. Be excited.

In today’s polarized and partisan environment, it is sometimes difficult to remember that deep-rooted political debates are a natural outgrowth of democratic system. These divisions are a reflection of a healthy democracy, even if they often leads to frustration. In fact, the American government was founded on the premise of partisan debates. And unless you are a myopic sociopath, you probably have friends on both sides of the partisan divide. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Even if I fundamentally disagree with a lot of GOP politicians and their supporters, I (usually) think they are (mostly) good people. If America could survive and thrive under the Thomas Jefferson and John Adams clashes, then it’d be naive to expect something else today. That’s democracy.

This year’s presidential election does not fit that model, though. First of all, this is not, primarily, a fight between political principles. As people ranging from Charles Krauthammer to Barack Obama have noted, Donald Trump is barely a Republican and he certainly isn’t a conservative. He has been denounced by a growing number of GOP figures who recognize that he is not one of their own, and worry that his election would be more disastrous than continued Democratic governance. (Indeed, there’s enough GOP denouncements of Trump for an effective attack ad.) It’s telling that the last two Republicans to hold the presidential office, as well their most recent nominee, refuse to endorse Trump’s candidacy. Trump flaunts his divergence from many of the Republican Party’s most important policies, and given his penchant for changing opinions he can’t be relied upon to fulfill his promise to nominate justices friendly to conservative principles. Though some in the GOP retain some form of misguided loyalty to him, Trump will never display a reciprocal commitment, and in fact will burn the entire institution to the ground if it helps his egomaniac quest.

But I don’t think the political angle is the most dangerous aspect of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Donald Trump is an affront to American values, regardless of what political party you affiliate with. Just in the course of the last year he has accused Mexican immigrants of being murderers and rapists, dehumanized women (see here, here, here, and here, though the list can go on for quite a while), promised to ban an entire religious faith, accused Muslim citizens of harboring terrorists, attacked a grieving gold star family, joked about assassinating either Clinton or her judicial appointments, made fun of a disabled reporter, made up non-existent details to escalate a political controversy, seemed eager to aggressively use nuclear weapons, suggested defaulting on national debts, jokingly(?) invited Russia to hack confidential state secrets, was not aware of Russian’s invasion into Ukraine, suggested that the only way he’d lose the election would be if it were rigged (an idea he’s repeated specifically about Pennsylvania, a state he’s polling behind in every measure), facilitated a sign-up sheet for goons to patrol election booths, promised to force the military to commit war crimes, claimed a federal judge could not be trusted due to his “Mexican heritage,” suggested women should be punished for having abortions, frequently incited and escalated violence at rallies, and refused to release his tax returns. And these are just the things I remember off the top of my head before my fingers got tired. (You can get a larger list here.)

Just a handful of those issues should disqualify a person for the presidency, regardless of their political positions. To still elect Trump with that record will demonstrate that a majority of Americans don’t care about facts, decency, and knowledge. But even those aren’t the only non-political dangers represented by a Trump victory.

One of the most real and imminent threats posed by Trump is a validation and amplification of our nation’s worst societal ills. His well-documented—and truly, irrefutably clear—history of racism, bigotry, and misogyny will justify atrocities against millions of our citizens by those who look to him as a guide. A generation of children will grow up with Trump as the image of their nation and model for their actions. Frankly, it will not be safe for minorities to live on our soil. If the man in the White House can call them “rapists” and accuse them of enabling terrorists, it is hard to fathom what they will face within their own neighborhoods. Numerous footage from Trump rallies display this amplifying effect. In important ways, the cultural ramifications of Trump’s victory are even more ominous than the political. To claim that the Republican Party can withstand a Trump presidency because there’s a chance he’ll help push through Republican policies is the utmost display of cultural privilege and demonstrates an utter detachment from the struggles faced by millions of Americans; it prioritizes theoretical victories over tangible atrocities. At the same moment we are once again hearing the crucial reminder that #blacklivesmatter, Trump’s election would confirm that their lives—as well as the lives of Muslims, hispanics, or any other ethnicity that makes up our beautiful multicultural community—actually do not matter at all.

Now, speaking to my Republican friends, I know that the Democratic alternative is, well, less than ideal. Hillary Clinton might very well encapsulate the very progressive establishment you detest, and you may picture her as the embodiment of the corrupt establishment. (Though I’d strongly disagree.) But Clinton’s “wrongness” still falls within the common political spectrum indicative of our democratic system. That is, even if you disagree with her, you will survive her tenure, just as you’ve survived Obama’s. There are checks and balances to limit the destruction inflicted by these types of political problems, as long as they fall along the acceptable spectrum.

Hell, given the traditional trends of our political history, the Republican Party will be in great position to unseat Clinton in 2020, as long as they nominate a non-crazy candidate. But throwing your support behind Trump only validates his cult within the party, which in turn will prolong the important conversations necessary to once again make the GOP a healthy and responsible political body. Republicans still have to choose what direction they will take in the next generation—the grievance-based exclusive retrenchment of a Ted Cruz, or a more sympathetic and outward-facing perspective of a John Kasich—but that conversation can only be started after the “Trump Train” has been conclusively derailed. A result that in any way validates Trump’s inane and demotic approach will merely furlough this necessary evolution, and suspend the type of political interchange between the parties that is necessary to make our democratic system strong.

You still might not be able to pull the lever for Clinton. You might be planning to vote third party or write-in your dream candidate. (For Utahns: Romney. For New York: Hamilton.) And my friends on the far left, who are legitimately concerned with Clinton’s war hawkishness and Wall Street coziness, might similarly dread the thought of voting for the “corrupt establishment.” I sympathize with that. But whether you are on the right or left of Clinton, if you are in a swing state, I kindly ask to reconsider your support for non-Clinton options. You have already done half of the work, given that you’ve decided to not vote for Trump, thereby resigning yourself to the possibility of a Clinton presidency. Now just consider going the rest of the way to assure that we will never see a Trump presidency, or even another Trump-like presidential campaign. It may not be “voting your conscience,” but I can’t think of many things that sooth your conscience more than keeping a demagogue out of the White House.

This is why this election is not primarily about politics. Or rather, it’s not primarily about democratic politics, anyway. Our democracy is based on principles that are genuinely under threat by the possible election of a bigoted, ignorant, racist, misogynist, and vindictive megalomaniac. This is not a democratic battle between liberalism and conservatism, Republicanism and progressivism. I look forward to those debates to re-commence in 2-4 years, but that’s not where we are now.

Rather, this is a battle between democracy and demagoguery, and to view it any other way reflects a limited understanding of the overall implications of our actions as well as an abdication of our moral duty.

I already blogged a little about Nancy Isenberg’s excellent White Trash, and I have a semi-substantive review of it scheduled for Wednesday, but one specific point has been sticking with me since reading the book. It actually dovetails with another excellent book I read this summer, Alison Bashford and Joyce Chaplin’s The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus (Princeton UP, 2016), which looks at Malthus’s famous Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) and examines how the text had a global context and was primarily addressing questions posed by the colonization of the new world. (In brief: while Malthus’s controversial book did indeed draw from and speak to the debates over poor people in Britain, it was also focused on colonization efforts throughout the Pacific and Atlantic worlds, and had surprising implications for inter-indigenous encounters and ethics. It’s a model of how global intellectual history can and should be written.) Anyway, both books interwove an important lesson: many of the individuals now identified with the enlightenment were very interested in sex. And not just sex, but the participants, relatedness, and remnants of sexual relationships.

To be blunt, enlightenment thinkers were concerned with who bred with who, how often that breeding occurred, and what happened with the new breed of children. And “breeding” was a common and potent way of describing it, because they believed human populations could be identified, analyzed, and controlled just like animals. (And both these books demonstrate that the American continent offered a new canvas on which to draw new hypotheses.) In a way this shouldn’t be surprising since the enlightenment has long been cast as an attempt to naturalize and mechanize modes of knowledge, dissecting what was previously sacred and other-worldly. But it is still sobering to see the legacy of these intellectual developments: a cold calculus to control human society. It can never be too frequently reminded that these “liberal” and “progressive” thinkers also gave birth to scientific theories of, say, racial segregation, let alone racism itself. And in Isenberg’s book, one can see how southern thinkers built on these ideas to conceive of a perpetual poor class beyond the reach of redemption.

This mixed legacy is certainly part of the enlightenment’s paradoxical role in the birth of modernity.

(Side note: I’m really excited for Caroline Winterer’s forthcoming book on the American enlightenment. Given her past work, it should be fantastic.)

I’ve been slowly making my way through Dan Vogel’s excellent 8-volume(!) annotated History of Joseph Smith and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Smith-Pettit, 2015). This is an excellent resource for scholars of early Mormon history, as it helps peel back the layers of one of the most problematic yet significant sources in the LDS tradition. It is a good reminder that we need to consider the context in which historical sources were first created. One particular example stood out to me this morning. 

The winter of 1844-1845 was a tough time for Mormons in Nauvoo. A year previous they were calculating a way to elect Joseph Smith president as a last-ditch effort to redeem America, only to see their prophet killed in what they believed to be a state-sponsored conspiracy. They therefor lost faith in the American government. Ironically, it was at that time that those who were working on the Church’s manuscript history, which had been in progress since 1839, was trying to cover the Saints’ expulsion from Missouri. That is, they were forced to once again deal with the narrative of being kicked out of one state even as they were preparing to be kicked out of yet another. When Willard Richards penned this preface to the 1839 portion of the record, he probably felt it just as pertinent for the dawn of 1845:

Tuesday, January 1st, 1839, dawned upon us as prisoners of hope, but not as sons of liberty. O Columbia! Columbia! How art thou fallen! “The land of the free, the home of the brave.” “The asylum of the oppressed.”–oppressing thy noblest sons, in a loathsome dungeon, without any provocation, only to have claimed to worship the God of their fathers, according to his own word and the dictates of their own conscience. (3:229)

Vogel dates this editorial insertion to February/March 1845. Richards probably believed life was repeating itself. (Though in both cases, the “without any provocation” might be a bit biased…) It struck me how penning this history must have worked to re-live it at a moment where the pain and frustration was only compounded. It probably intensified their animosity, and framed future experience. 

As True Detective put it, time is a flat circle. 

I don’t know if we’ve ever seen a presidential campaign unravel like Donald Trump’s has in the last couple days. One of the downsides of the #TwitterAge is that there is smart commentary coming fast and furiously (also dumb commentary, but ignore that), and it is hard to keep track of it. Here are two threads from the past 24 hours that I thought were especially incisive and, in the second case, terrifying.

The first, a thread from journalist Judd Legum on the politics of endorsing and unendorsing Trump, and why many GOP politicians are now stuck in a corner of their own making.

The second is a much more terrifying thread, this time from John Noonan, who did national security for both Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney. This is one of the many examples of why opposing Trump is more than just a political issue–it’s an issue of national and global safety.