Trump’s Taterhill Hat: Our Continuing, Of Necessity, Un-Civil American War

“I had known this man since my birth. We were blood relatives. But I had never indeed known him. Suddenly, he was as ‘other’ as an other can be. I am certain now, as I was certain then, that a similar sharp moment of rupture was playing out all across the country; that I and my cousin were not alone in these first, jovially initiated but deadly serious salvos of the new, cold, American Civil War. I cannot recall our exact words, but I know I expressed horror that Edward would be voting for Trump even once, in that first, fatal primary. I had just moved South again from New York, and I knew who Trump was. I also knew who Clinton was and tried to express to my cousin the significance of the choice he was making . . . at which point in the call, Edward removed his gloves and revealed himself for what he is—among so many other things—a chauvinistic bigot.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Hapax Legomenon

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“[Donald Trump has] told us what he will do. It’s very easy to see the steps that he will take.  . . .  People who say, ‘Well, if he’s elected, it’s not that dangerous because we have all of these checks and balances,’ don’t fully understand the extent to which the Republicans in Congress today have been co-opted. . . . One of the things that we see happening today is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States.”—Rep. Liz Cheney, CBS Sunday Morning, 1 December 2023 

“It seems that former president Donald Trump is aligning his supporters with a global far-right movement to destroy democracy. . . .  [In] Durham, New Hampshire, Trump echoed Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s attacks on immigrants, saying they are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’—although two of his three wives were immigrants—and quoted Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attacks on American democracy. Trump went on to praise North Korean autocratic leader Kim Jong Un and align himself with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, the darling of the American right wing, who has destroyed Hungary’s democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship.”—Heather Cox Richardson, December 18, 2023

PENDLETON South Carolina—(Hubris)—March 2024—Blood has already been spilled in the second phase of the ongoing American Civil War. On January 6, 2021, many of us here in South Carolina were thinking back on April 12, 1861: the combatants’ uniforms were different, this time around, but the faces of “the Confederates” looked eerily familiar. They might have been my maternal cousins.

I was living, briefly, in central Florida during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, and, at some point before Clinton won the Democratic primary, my eldest maternal first cousin phoned me from South Carolina. 

Edward (I’ll call him Edward) was born in Greer* and has never lived anywhere else. (I, on the other hand, for what it’s worth, have a fair number of cancelled passports, from several countries. This fact does not automatically confer upon one a sense of internationality—many Russian oligarchs “travel widely”—but, in my case, I believe it has led to a “widening of my lens.”)

Edward’s and my conversation began in the light, bantering vein we have reserved for one another since my childhood, we cousins whose mothers emerged from tiny, rural, Townville, South Carolina, until the topic turned to national politics. 

Over the course of just a few utterances, then, I realized that Edward—and, so I knew that by extension, all of the registered voters in Edward’s family—would be voting for Trump in the primary, and intended to vote for him again in the presidential election.

An only child whose parents left the American South for Los Angeles (then, Greece, then Chicago), whose father died in 1972, and whose mother, in 1992, I realized, in one sharp moment, that I was about to lose (for all practical purposes) the only members of my family with whom I remained even tangentially in contact. 

My Greer cousins and I had reached an American Rubicon.

From 1950s California, I had visited my aunt, uncle, and cousins on holiday trips, and, later, been included at Thanksgiving gatherings at Edward and his wife’s Greer home. My aunt, Edward’s mother, had made dinner conversation in November of 2015 about its being a pity “our flag” had been removed from South Carolina’s capitol building but, by the time she said this, she was in her late 80s and to engage her in an argument seemed pointless.

However, this moment on the phone with Edward, then just a decade my elder, was different. He began by joking conspiratorially (and misogynistically) with me about Hillary’s unsuitability for office, but then grew deadly serious and loud, asking if I really wanted to live in a country that no longer “looked like us”: going on to say that “they” were taking over our culture and destroying “our values”; that Hilary would usher in an America where “we” were no longer in the ascendency, assuming I’d go along with him. 

I had known this man since my birth. We were blood relatives. But I had never indeed known him. Suddenly, he was as “other” as an other can be.  

I am certain now, as I was certain then, that a similar sharp moment of rupture was playing out all across the country; that I and my cousin were not alone in these first, jovially initiated but deadly serious salvos of the new, cold, American Civil War.

I cannot recall our exact words, but I know I expressed horror that Edward would be voting for Trump even once, in that first, “fatal” contest. I had just moved South again from New York, and I knew who Trump was. I also knew who Clinton was and tried to express to my cousin the significance of the choice he was making . . . at which point in the call, Edward removed his gloves and revealed himself for what he is—among so many other things—a chauvinistic bigot. 

For the first time in my life, I saw what lay under the jovial, golf-playing, church-going veneer, though the golf-playing and the church-going, in The White South, are code for the whole megillah that is privileged, straight, white, middle-aged male chauvinism. Abruptly, I hung up the phone. Edward called back. I did not answer. For years, I did not answer.

Edward has been a devoted father, a selfless “booster”—does that word still resonate with younger readers?—of his community and his church. He has lost a young child to cancer. He has taken in and brought up the children of a sibling tragically killed in an accident. He has taught at the high school and college level and enriched the lives of countless students. He has spent, I reckon, half his life on the golf course. (It was through Edward’s late golfer-father that I first learned what a country club was.) And, since we last spoke in any meaningful way, he has suffered serious physical setbacks. 

A photo-Christmas card arrived from his wife this past year—no message; just a card—showing a picture-perfect, all-white, upper-middle-class, smiling, cis-gender, Baptist-Church-going, Upstate-South Carolina family. 

What is not self-evident in the photo is that both Edward and I share a great-grandfather who was a Captain of the Confederacy. And, if we delve into our family history, and not even too deeply, we would I know find owners of enslaved people.

What is also not “evident” in that Christmas card is that one member of that smiling group—now returned-to-the-South from abroad, and a married parent of small children—as a college student came out to me as gay, and expressed deep anxiety that the family in Greer could not, would never, accept this reality.

It became easier for this young man to return to the fold and bury himself alive than to embody a life despised by his kinfolk. 

Edward and so many others in South Carolina would seem to perceive themselves as besieged, as called upon to defend themselves against something. But what? Change, uncertainty, loss of status, a threatening new way of life? Black folks on the country club golf course? Mixed-race grandchildren? Spanish spoken in the classroom? And so they are now, I posit, rallying around a new “lost cause.” 

It is those who feel besieged in South Carolina who have kept in office, since 2003, a senator so devoid of character, so naked a quisling, and so clearly a hack for Trump that it boggles my mind that a state comprising 26 percent voters of color and 51 percent women has not yet risen up and rejected him. But, yes, South Carolina is gerrymandered: it was the only way securely to keep certain uppity voting blocs in their place.

Pivot now to the man for whom Edward and his family have voted at least twice. And “voting for” is, to my mind, a “verbal euphemism”: Edward and his brethren, and the family members voting along with them, have, I feel, conjured up Trump. And are conjuring him up again in 2024.

When they voted for him the first time, they may not have known what he was. They, we all, know now.

Sociopathic—some, psychopathic—strongmen such as Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Orban, Berlusconi, and Kim Jong Il, and, before them, a whole host of 20^th-century fascists, have used the same playbook, though the “look” of the book has now morphed to reflect 21^st-century technologies and audiences. 

Olivia B. Waxman interviewed Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, for Time Magazine in November of 2020. Said Ben-Ghiat:

If you see a new politician on the rise and want to know if this person has authoritarian leanings and could become a strongman, watch to see if he portrays himself as a victim. The cult of victimhood is a fundamental part of the strongman. And Mussolini started it off. They don’t represent their people like democratic politicians. They embody the people. They inhabit the people. They are the bearer of the people’s humiliations, their sorrows. Hitler did this expertly and that’s why, people felt, in his speeches, he was screaming out the pain that all of Germany felt. He was embodying Germany’s victimhood. The most successful strongmen have all known how to do this.

The term witch hunt that Trump uses was also used by Berlusconi; it’s also used by [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan. It’s very successful at getting people to feel protective of them. On one hand, these macho men are constantly portraying themselves as strong and alpha male, but through the victimhood thing, they try to appeal to people’s care for them, and people feel very protective of them.

On November 11, 2023, at a rally in New Hampshire, Trump told the crowd, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” He added, “The head of Hungary—very tough, strong guy—Viktor Orban. He didn’t allow millions of people to invade his country.”

Trump continued: “Nature is cruel; therefore, we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?”**

But no, my friends, that last quote was not by Donald Trump. It was, instead, spoken by Adolf Hitler, in 1942, a few years before my cousin Edward was born in Greer, South Carolina, and a decade before my own birth in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. (Later that year, my parents and I took up residency in Pasadena, California, my parents fleeing a part of the country that did not reflect their “radical left” values.)

In a December 12, 2023 post, Heather Cox Richardson wrote, in her Substack post “Letters from an American” (Note: bolding and italicization, my own):

Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, a professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University, explained in “The Conversation” what Trump is talking about. Autocrats like Orbán and Putin—and budding autocrats like Trump—are building a global movement by fighting back against the expansion of rights to women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people.

Russian leaders have been cracking down on LGBTQ+ rights for a decade with the help of the Russian Orthodox Church, claiming that they are protecting “traditional values.” This vision of heteronormativity rewrites the real history of human sexuality, but it is powerful in this moment. Orbán insists that immigrants ruin the purity of a country and has undermined women’s rights.

Riccardi-Swartz explains that this rhetoric appeals to those in far-right movements around the world. In the United States, “family values” became tied to patriotism after World War II, when Chinese and Soviet communists appeared to be erasing traditional gender roles. Those people defined as anti-family—LGBTQ+ people and women who challenged patriarchy—seemed to be undermining society. Now, as dictators like Putin and Orbán promise to take away LGBTQ+ rights, hurt immigrants, and return power to white men, they seem to many to be protecting traditional society.

In the United States, that undercurrent has created a movement of people who are willing to overthrow democracy if it means reinforcing their traditional vision. Christian nationalists believe that the secular values of democracy are destroying Christianity and traditional values. They want to get rid of LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, immigration, and the public schools they believe teach such values. And if that means handing power to a dictator who promises to restore their vision of a traditional society, they’re in.

It is an astonishing rejection of everything the United States has always stood for.

 

 

As my cousin nears the end of his life, and as I myself begin my eighth decade, I think back on summers spent in Greer, on trips back South from California, visiting with maternal relatives in the back garden of the humble bungalow belonging to my aunt and uncle, a home maker and insurance salesman. My cousins, their sons, went on to become a high-school teacher and a beer-deliveryman. Golf gave my uncle’s life luster; his eldest son inherited that same uncanny skill, and passion. One of my cousins finished his MA; the other descended into alcoholism. In almost every way but shared DNA, I was always, and am everything my cousins are not.

From California, my family moved to Greece, then to Chicago. My father, born in Brunswick, Georgia, taught psychiatric social work in the graduate schools of major universities and was on the faculty at McCormick Theological Seminary. My parents had a television show (“Bless this House”) on WTTW in Chicago. My father was a Fulbright scholar. My parents were lifelong registered Democrats and fierce advocates for social justice, Civil Rights, and the rights of children. Before his early death, my father was a consultant for the World Council of Churches and for VISTA. I was twelve when my father took a solo trip to East Berlin, the nature of which remained a family mystery. I have long wondered if my father played some role in reporting on life, and repression, in Russian-occupied Berlin, but I have now only the Kodachrome slides he took on that journey, and no further clues to what he was doing there.

Today, I live as an out, gender-queer woman in Pendleton, South Carolina, and my identity puts me on the front lines of anxiety and danger in “Trump’s America.”

I believe what the current polling says. I think there is a very real possibility that Trump will return to the White House, at which point I will be seen as “one of the vermin.” I am a woman, I am queer, I am a liberal Democrat, I am an atheist, I am pro-choice, I believe Black lives matter, and if Trump regains power, the republic to which I have pledged allegiance all my life will have been lost.

But that the children of two sisters from Townville could have given birth to Edward and me, to two people so fundamentally different in outlook and aspirations and natures . . . is just so, so “American.”

The Civil War in America never ended. It began at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston harbor, and my cousin Edward and I are fighting it still. 

At my age, I would like finally to retire from the field of battle and rest on my laurels, such as they are, living a quiet life with the people I love, albeit in a town where Lindsey Graham maintains an office.

But such is not to be, I fear.

As cited in the book, A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky, brothers Anthony and William McBeath fought on opposite sides of the Civil War, Anthony for the Confederate Army, and William for the Union Army. At the end of the war, both brothers returned home the same evening, William in a “resplendent uniform of a Major in the Federal Army,” and several hours later, Anthony in “rags with a ‘taterhill’ hat.” (Source: Wikipedia.)

And though, as a small child, I idolized my funny, golf-playing, clever, much older cousin from Greer, I now hope that, in November of 2024, the north, the Union, finally wins this forever war, once and for all. I will be doing everything in my small power between now and then to make clear to anyone who will listen what’s at stake in the next American presidential election, and I hope I live to see my cousin and Donald Trump wearing the taterhill hats they deserve rather than the uniforms of privilege and power this country has let them wear for far too long.

*I have changed names and geographical details regarding my cousin to protect his identity.

** The full quote reads: “Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?” Source: Adolf Hitler, quoted in Hitler, by Joachim Fest, Vintage Books Edition, 1974, p. 679-680.

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