Sweeping all before him, Donald Trump seems like a phenomenon entirely of our time. With his enthusiastic manipulation of social media, bloody-minded antipathy to political elites and incendiary rhetoric levelled at immigrants he is gleefully prodding at an open sore. Americans facing the grim realities of economic decline and the evisceration of the middle class lap up his bombastic calls to “take back our country” and make it great again.
But Trump seems, unwittingly or not, to be following the playbook of one of the most turbulent decades in American history – the 1850s, which I explore in my book Heyday: Britain and the Birth of the Modern World. The parallels with that time are startling, and highly instructive as we struggle to understand Trump’s amazing popularity. Riven by internal discord, fracturing political parties and dislocating economic change, that time provided a happy hunting ground for opportunists and shrill demagogues happy to exploit insecurity and fear.
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