Ideas | How can Trump fail

It was a time when the national character was being shaped not by the corporations of Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia but on the frontier, by the savages, the nobodies. The powerful experience of westward expansion, described by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, gave America its power, its equality, its lack of interest in high culture and customs. you do. The West was swept by a wave of hucksterism – the spirit of circus owner PT Barnum more than that of aristocratic novelist Henry James.

It was a golden age of arrogance, of the long legend of Paul Bunyan. It is also an era of Americanism that should be tempered by honor. Many Americans believed that God had given a sacred task to his new chosen ones, to complete history and bring a new heaven to earth. (Like how God saved Trump in that Pennsylvania field so he could complete his holy mission of deporting more immigrants.)

Herman Melville unapologetically captured the nationalist fervor in his book “White Jacket”: “We Americans are the peculiarly chosen people—the Israel of our time. Predestined by God, expected by mankind, important from our ancestors; and great things we feel in our souls.” Walt Whitman joined the chorus: “Have the old races ceased? / Does he bow down and finish his studies, tired beyond the sea? / We take the job forever. There is no confidence like the confidence of youth, for a person or a nation.

I can see why this image of a wild, raw, yearning America appeals to Trump. Sometimes it is said that Trump appeals to the left, the losers of the information age. And that is a nationalism full of ambition, courage, hope and forward thinking. (It helps if, like Trump, you pick out a few little details about 19th-century America from your photos — like, you know, slavery and Reconstruction.)

Perhaps the biggest appeal of the century for Trump is that in those days America was fiercely anti-establishment. On the other side of the Atlantic there used to be empires – Europe. Every once in a while, Europeans like Fanny Trollope (herself a novelist and the mother of a celebrity) visit America and turn their noses up at the obscene greedy people they see here. English writer Morris Birkbeck summed up his view of the American mentality this way: “Get it! Win! Get it!” Americans prided themselves on defying the snobs with their clean style, classy society and inherited luxuries.