very much. Thanks for your time. >> You're very welcome.
Federico. Nice to be with you. >> How does president elect
Donald Trump make America great again? There are certainly
signposts, beginning with his promises of mass deportations,
tariffs and America First policy like not wanting the U.S. To
fund Ukraine. And how does this MAGA movement align with days of
yore? We turn to an expert on the 1940s and 50s UW-Madison
professor of journalism, Kathryn McGuire. And thanks very much
for being here. >> Thank you for having me.
>> So what are the historical kind of parallels to current
political issues in your mind loss of civil liberties?
>> There are two points for concern, I think. The first is
loss of free speech rights and free press. And so we have a
long history of passing sedition laws in this country, starting
with 1798. The alien and sedition Act, when John Adams
wanted to silence his political opponents in the
Democratic-Republican party. That one lapsed. But then again,
World War One, the Woodrow Wilson administration gets
another Sedition Act passed, and it's really a draconian measure
to punish anyone who speaks, not just against the government, but
even questioned the war effort, the draft, anything at all, and
was upheld by the Supreme Court. The second area is loss of civil
liberties by minority groups. And so one of the most
significant in the 20th century would be the internment of
Japanese Americans in World War two. And Franklin Roosevelt
accomplished that entirely through executive order. So we
need to remember that the president does have a lot of
power and that some of this happens through Congress, and
some of it happens through executive order.
>> So the America First Movement has been a populist political
theory through history. And in fact, it became Donald Trump's
kind of foreign policy doctrine as president. What does America
first hold? of the 1930s and was a movement
to keep the United States out of war in Europe, and this was
coming off the heels of World War One, when the United States
had participated in World War One and an effort to prevent
participation in World War Two. There established an America
First Committee in 1940. It ended up disbanding after Pearl
Harbor, but the sentiment never went away, and it was sort of
revived as a political party here and again. And it's really
about putting American security first in foreign policy. But the
so many of the spokespeople at the time and over the years have
been pro-fascist and been major cornerstones of the
America First movement. >> Small a small f. America
First has been pretty much the policy of every president who
puts American security first. The capital a America first
because that other part of it is already settled that the
president will put first in foreign policy. It really does
seem to be more about putting a certain type of America first.
And it's a white Christian nationalist America.
>> There's been a lot of talk about Donald Trump seeking
revenge against his political enemies and his words. The enemy
within. When a historian like yourself hears those words, what
kind of parallels do you see? >> It sounds so much like the
1940s and 1950s. The second Red scare and the Lavender Scare
that came along with it. So the Red scare is most of your
viewers will know is the effort to root out communists in the
federal government, but it really spread to other
institutions and businesses of people lost their jobs for
having just been associated with communism. And then the Lavender
Scare, which was eliminating any homosexuals from the federal
government and again, spread to other institutions. And so it's
really about any kind of subversion, political
subversion, or at the time, what was considered sexual
subversion. Now, Donald Trump has specifically mentioned
Marxists and communists. He talks about that a lot. He talks
about journalists as enemies of the state. And while I don't
think there would be a repeat of the lavender Scare, he certainly
considers trans people to be enemies of the state. And so I
think we often see these parallels between sort of
political subversion and traditional gender roles.
>> What lessons from history can we learn as we go forward?
>> I try to always remind my students of two things. One is
that history is not inevitable, and we don't know what's going
to happen. We can't predict it. Another is that it's not
linearly progressive, so we like to think of America as always
progressing, people getting more rights, but rights expand and
contract all the time. And the culture expands and contracts
all the time. So we saw this most recently with reproductive
rights contracting. We're also now seeing voting rights
contracting again. So keeping in mind that we're not necessarily