It's all about Making McKinley Great Again. Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
If America’s 45th presidency was founded on the promise of Making America Great Again, Donald Trump’s priorities appear to have shifted for its 47th. Now, in part, it’s about Making McKinley Great Again.
It’s been more than 120 years since William McKinley played a starring role in American politics — but this week, that all changed. There he was, making a surprise appearance in Trump’s inauguration speech: the ghost of McKinley, still in mourning after seeing his name removed from the highest peak in North America by Obama. “We’re taking it back,” Trump declared in response.
Until Monday, McKinley, the Ohio Republican congressman who became the nation’s 25th President before being assassinated by an anarchist in 1901, had become a footnote in American history. Today’s Democrats hope that each president will be the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while small government conservatives have made a cult of tax-cutting Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan. McKinley, meanwhile, is rarely remembered, seemingly overshadowed by his flamboyant and media-savvy successor, Theodore Roosevelt.
And then came Trump, the unlikeliest of historians, with his ode to the man who made “our country very rich through tariffs and through talent”. To many of his critics, Trump’s remarks were a surprise; to students of history, they were not. After all, McKinley and Trump are unsurprising bedfellows. They both became president in eras characterised by increasing great-power rivalries and trade wars — and both offered tough remedies in response.
During the 1890s and 1900s, Britain, the world’s first industrial superpower, was being eclipsed by the rise of the United States, Germany, Russia and Japan. All these nations used protectionism and state capitalism to catch up with British industry — and the US was no exception. Inspired by their heroes, Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay, Republicans from Lincoln to McKinley styled themselves as economic nationalists committed to using tariffs to protect America’s “infant industries” from foreign competition, while inviting British and other foreign investment in American factories. Nicknamed “the Napoleon of protection,” McKinley declared: “I am a tariff man, standing on a tariff platform.”
Nor do the parallels stop there. Just as with the rise of industrialised China today, Germany’s ascendency at the turn of the century scrambled global political alliances. Until the late 19th century, the US had viewed Britain as its greatest strategic threat — so much so that, in 1867, the US purchased Alaska from Russia to keep it free from British influence or control. But the unification of Germany four years later changed all that. Faced with an Imperial Germany that made no secret of its ambitions in the Caribbean and Pacific, the US and Britain agreed to a strategic rapprochement.
Crucially for America, it was the senior partner in this relationship. Over the next half century, the US nudged the British fleet out of the Western hemisphere, forced Britain to terminate its treaty with Japan, and, after the Second World War, pressured Britain into dissolving its empire to the benefit of American investors and exporters. If much of this was achieved by McKinley’s successors, it was only because he was the man who decided their direction. In 1923, Calvin Coolidge, his successor as a Republican president, gave McKinley credit for the transformation of American grand strategy: “His vision now beheld his country first, but it reached beyond our own shores. He sought in trade and commerce a world relationship. His last public utterance, made at Buffalo, advocated reciprocal trade relations, which he knew had no basis without protection. At the same time he urged an Isthmian canal to unite our own coasts with the Latin-American Republics.”
Today, China has assumed the role of Imperial Germany a century ago, with its economic rise inspiring defensive protectionism and calls for soft containment among its great-power neighbours, Japan and India. So too with America: at his inauguration, Trump warned that “China is operating the Panama Canal” and threatened to impose a 10% tariff on Chinese-made goods. And nor was it empty rhetoric. Chinese companies now operate ports at both ends of the Panama Canal, while other state-backed Chinese investors have been involved with negotiations with Nicaragua’s anti-American regime to build a Nicaraguan Canal.
And yet, some in America still refuse to recognise this reality — and deride Trump’s calls for tariffs as inflammatory. After all, for American thinkers in the idealistic tradition of Wilsonian liberal internationalism, such as John Ikenberry and Robert Kagan, realpolitik is inherently immoral. Instead of playing by the traditional rules of power politics, they insist an “enlightened” US should transcend power politics altogether. Great-power rivalries should be replaced either by collective security, under the auspices of the League of Nations or the United Nations, or — in the neo-conservative version of Wilsonianism — by the US, acting alone as a benevolent, all-powerful Globocop that polices the world.
But neo-Wilsonian globalism failed disastrously when it was attempted by both Democrats and Republicans between 1992 and 2016. America’s European and East Asian protectorates became free riders on its security guarantee, while American soldiers fought and died in Middle Eastern “forever wars” under the banners of “the global democratic revolution” and “the rule-based international order”. One reason that Trump is President is that the American public is tired of paying the bills for foreign adventurism.
Nor did a globalised free-market economy materialise under America’s “benevolent” leadership, as those within the Clinton and Bush administrations once promised. Instead, the US and Europe opened their domestic markets, only to be deindustrialised by the predatory trade practices of China, Japan and South Korea — often with the aid of American capitalists willing to sacrifice their nation’s security and prosperity for quick profits and lower wage bills.
Faced with this challenge, Obama — with the help of his Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) — sought to bind America’s European and East Asian trading partners in a single trade bloc that excluded China. In his first term, Trump adopted a far more unilateral approach, threatening the use of tariffs against America’s Canadian, European and Asian allies as well as China — and Biden followed suit. In short, the bipartisan consensus in favour of post-Cold War globalism was waning even before Trump. While the ghost of McKinley was awoken on Monday, it had been stirring for decades.
The challenge for Trump is that McKinley’s ghost will have to contend with other ghosts in American politics. Many members of his own Republican party are guided by the spirit of Ronald Reagan and his optimistic vision of free-market globalism. In their own seances, most Democrats still take guidance in foreign policy from the liberal internationalism of Woodrow Wilson, even if he has been officially cancelled because of his regressive views on race. It remains to be seen whether Trump’s neo-McKinleyism can defeat zombie Reaganism and zombie Wilsonianism.
Whether Trump succeeds or fails, we would do well to remember that the ghost of McKinley was stalking America long before this week. Restoring his name to a mountain in Alaska may be a nice touch. But more fitting would be an epitaph similar to that laid down by Sir Christopher Wren. You can still read it on the floor of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.
“If you seek his memorial, look around you.”
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SubscribeThere will be serious consequences from remaining Denali to McKinley. PBS would have to retitle its kids show to “Molly of McKinley“.
I think my favourite thing about McKinley was how kind the guy was said to be. His wife Ida suffered from mental illness and what sounds like epilepsy and he took great care of her, having her placed next to him at presidential dinners (first ladies usually sit at the other end of the table) so he could help her if she became agitated or poorly during the meal.
If she did have a seizure, one of the things he would do to try and restore her was put a hankerchief over her face. Then he’d just continue whatever conversation he was having with whatever statesman while Ida sat there having this seizure. It must have been quite bizarre to watch.
We are talking political posing here and the exact name McKinley doesn’t matter.
Obama made a political point by renaming the mountain Denali, Trump is making a political counter-point (that the posing of the Old Elite is done with).
I know quite a bit of history, but little of McKinley. I appreciate this author educating me. It’s perhaps ironic that the man he defeated in the election of 1896 left an arguably larger legacy than McKinley himself. For those who don’t know the history, that man is William Jennings Bryan, the hero and chosen avatar of the Populist movement.
When we examine history, we find the same issues crop up over and over again and are debated in much the same way. The only thing that changes is who’s on either side of the debate. The election of 1896 was in many ways the culmination of the first populist movement, as William Jennings Bryan, a fiery young orator from the rural Midwest, became the nominee for both the Democrats and the Populist party in order to defeat McKinley. By capturing the nomination for both parties, he effectively united them, pushing the Democratic party in the direction of workers, helping cement the party’s reputation as a party of the people. McKinley was a tariff man, a friend of big business. He courted companies and business tycoons directly for support against his reformer opponent. He was one of the earliest to do so and arguably established the precedent that would come to dominate politics over the next century. He ran a traditional and highly centralized campaign. Bryan was an inspiring and spirited orator who railed against moneyed coastal interests, a crusader who traveled about the country and appealed to the common folk, drawing large crowds with his fiery, combative, and often religiously inspired rhetoric. He appealed to farmers, laborers, factory workers, tradesmen, and other regular working class people. His famous “Cross of Gold” speech was essentially an argument for ending the gold standard and switching to silver, which would be essentially a fiat currency system (like the one used by every nation on Earth at present). McKinley’s campaign attacked Bryan as a dangerous radical and a threat to the economy. Bryan attacked McKinley as a tool of powerful industrialists, companies, and the moneyed coastal elite.
It’s not difficult to draw the lines of comparison here. One can see elements in common from Trump to Bryan and McKinley to Biden. What’s interesting is how the roles have largely reversed and the factions have changed. Now Trump, a Republican and a tariff man like McKinley, plays the role of Bryan, the fiery orator drawing great crowds or rural Americans and common folk to rail against the excesses of coastal elites and moneyed interests. It was Trump who, like Bryan, had to overcome opposition to change and reform within his own party and realign the party toward more populist goals. Biden/Harris got to play the role of McKinley, the tools of the establishment, the safe and the sensible choice. Then as now, the people are against the establishment, but the parties and the polices are mostly reversed.
The reason for the reversal is simple. That first populist movement was ultimately won by the people when FDR’s New Deal revolutionized labor and welfare laws, effectively checking the power of aristocrats, tycoons, and business leaders. There was no way any political force driven by elites could ever reverse the changes that FDR implemented, but time never stands still, and the wealthy and powerful never do cease to seek after greater wealth and power. When power and money encounters an obstacle it cannot overcome, such as labor laws and taxation backed overwhelmingly by the people, they seek other avenues.
Enter globalism, the free movement of money, people, and goods across national borders without cost or consequence. During the first populist movement, there were no multinational corporations. The fortunes of individuals largely rested in a single nation and couldn’t simply be moved about easily. Even the robber barons couldn’t simply pack up their industry, money, and assets and move it across the world. Now they can, and the results are plain for all to see. While such international conditions persist, the elites and multinationals need not heed the will of the people in any nation. Anytime a man cannot effectively be held accountable for his actions towards other men, it will cause problems. That’s just human nature. If all men were angels, no government would be necessary, but men are not angels, and governments exist for a reason, so that people can be held accountable for their actions by their peers. The existence of globalist conditions such as the free movement of people, goods, and money should be contingent on a global government that can hold everyone to account. Since the probability of that is basically zero now and for the foreseeable future, the channels of globalism have to be closed at least to the extent that the wealthy and corporations can be bound to the welfare of one people, one nation, and one government. That is, in essence, what populism should be about, getting corporations and tycoons to a point where they can be held to account and constrained by the laws passed by the elected governments of the people.
Through tariffs and immigration control, Trumpism is addressing two of the three major free movement questions, that of goods and of people. He probably won’t touch the free flow of money. That said, money was traditionally the easiest of the three to physically move across borders, usually because gold was a universal standard. Gold is heavy and not exactly easy to move in large quantities, but it could be moved even during the first populist movement. Oddly, in arguing for an essentially fiat money system, Bryan probably felt like he was pushing for less international money flow and greater control for national governments. At the time, such a system would have caused a lot of problems in international transactions. Bryan of course couldn’t foresee the advances in computing and telecommunications that allow the current system to work as it does. I personally would love to see more regulation and oversight when it comes to investments across borders, but that’s arguably already happening too as both governments and private citizens have started ‘de-risking’ their investment portfolios and governments have started curbing investment in countries that are hostile or openly opposed to US interests.
In short, populism won the first time, and it’s going to win the second time as well. There’s no group of elites or any ruling class that has ever been able to stand when enough people are against them. There’s a critical mass in revolutionary/reform movments that once achieved basically guarantees that even if the revolutionaries and parties themselves fail to overthrow the ruling class directly, they will still influence policy outcomes through the fear of rebellion and, in democratic nations, the normal political process of politicians appealing to voters. We’ve long passed that moment. We were probably already there when Brexit happened and Trump first got elected, but things are always clearer in hindsight. Now, the writing is on the wall and it’s time to work on getting to the new normal, a task that’s just begun.
Populism, like nuclear physics, is neither good nor bad; it depends on how it is used. William Jennings Bryant was dead wrong about the gold standard as well as about evolution (see Scopes trial), despite his views’ popularity. Tariffs likewise can be effective if used properly rather than embraced as a magic wand.