When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America

Abstract

of proof is on Gerstle here, and he completely evades it. Continuing his attack on Trump, Gerstle writes, “The ethnonationalist leaders, Trump included... wanted the planet to be governed by force rather than by international law and multinational nongovernmental organizations...” (277) OK, by what possible “international law” could multinational, non-governmental organizations “govern the planet”? But it gets even worse: Gerstle goes on to say that Trump was making real a vision of a future in which the US would withdraw from its “role its role as the world’s global policeman, and from its responsibility as the enforcer of liberal and neoliberal rules of global order.” In other words, the world Gerstle liked was being ruled by force: US force attacking countries that did not conform to rules of the global order created by the US and its allies. (See, for instance, Serbia: 1995 or Iraq: 2003.) And when he complains that Trump wanted a global order ruled by force, what he really means is that Trump was threatening to stop ruling the globe by force! In discussing the riot that took place in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, Gerstle writes that “The Trump mob had gone berserk... smashing the heads of policemen with fire extinguishers” (289). Once again, Gerstle presents no evidence for a claim. Doing the research that perhaps Gerstle ought to have done, I discover two sources for it: