From the Confederacy to The Gilded Age: Manisha Sinha on the "sorry history" that inspires MAGA

America has always been like this: a place of immense contradiction, promise and disappointment, where noble, progressives ideals are embedded in a founding document written by men who purported to believe that all are created equal, even as most claimed the right to treat other human beings as property and to kill and displace the original tenants of the land. We helped defeat fascism in Europe, Americans can rightly claim; we also helped inspire Europe’s fascists, who looked longingly at the United States’ reactionary tradition of genocide and racial segregation.

Whether the country is good or evil is the wrong debate: like most people, and every other nation on earth, it’s a bit of both. Progress has always come in uneven fits, with hypocrisies galore — killing Nazis while putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps — and a loud chorus of reactionaries claiming that every step toward fulfilling the promise of equal rights is itself part of the march to tyranny, classically liberal rhetoric perverted to defend white dominion over others as the true definition of freedom.

“It can be a depressing story if you look at the downfall and the kind of backlash and reaction to progressive change,” Manisha Sinha, a history professor at the University of Connecticut, said in an interview, “but it can also be inspiring to think about all the people who fought against injustices and inequality — and ultimately prevailed.”

Sinha merges the depressing and inspiring in her recounting of Reconstruction, when the U.S. emerged from a state of war as a flawed but budding multiracial democracy. Published on the eve of the 2024 election, “The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republican: Reconstruction, 1860-1920,” is more relevant today than its author would likely prefer. It’s not just that the concept of a true democracy for all is under attack, but that those waging the contemporary assault are pointing to this Gilded Age of reaction as their model for everything from tariffs to imperial expansion.

It can be utterly frustrating to read Sinha’s work and see that, while history does not quite repeat, the contemporary fights — over diversity and women’s role in society — sure seem to echo those waged by the liberals and conservatives of yore. But even in America’s darkest times, when its nobler aspirations were scorned in the name of white supremacy, the takeaway is: the seeds of a better tomorrow are being planted by those who refused to give up on this big, frustrating country, and refused to let the other side claim ownership of its history.

“We may be in a moment of backlash and reaction right now, but that doesn't mean that there isn't hope in terms of fighting against that,” Sinha told Salon. “I think American history shows there's always been a contest, even during what one historian called ‘the nadir of American democracy’ and Black freedom in the late 19th century.”

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Salon: Are there any lessons you think from the example of the abolitionists or the suffragists that people trying to resist the current backlash could take inspiration from? Do you think they had tactics that could be useful for activists today?

Sinha: Oh yes, I think there are a lot of sort of legacies and examples that we can invoke and rely on. I really think that sometimes a lot of radical activists do not realize that, in order to achieve their objectives, you have to be able to fight on principle but be pragmatic in building broad coalitions, and that's what the abolitionists did. They were for the immediate abolition of slavery and for Black rights, but they formed alliances with anti-slavery moderates and politicians who didn't want to go beyond the non-expansion of slavery.

But eventually, if you look at what happened before the Civil War and during the Civil War, you go from non-expansion of slavery to abolition — immediate abolition — which was the abolitionist goal, and eventually to Black citizenship, or what was called by W.E.B. Du Bois, “abolition democracy,” right? So if you think about it in that way, you realize that radical social movements should stand on principle even when they're in the minority, but that political change is possible only when you're willing to ally yourself with people who may not be as radical as you, but who are willing to unite with you against a greater threat. Another example from history would be the Popular Front era in the United States in the 1930s, when people on the left and liberals got together to fight fascism and authoritarianism and were successful in doing that. I think that's something that activists today should learn from — and also that, in order to preserve democracy, one should be willing to not just pay the price, but also be willing to evoke ideas that would actually appeal to the broadest group possible.

In a way, abolitionists did that by evoking the U.S. Constitution. They fought over the U.S. Constitution: Is it pro-slavery? Is it anti-slavery? But ultimately, they all wanted to uphold the guarantees of the Bill of Rights and civil liberties and uphold things that people could all agree on; something like our constitutional order, the rule of law. And if you think of many of the battles being waged today — whether it's immigrant rights or Black rights or voter suppression — you could invoke quintessential American values for change. And so I think that's what we should do; I think that's what the abolitionists did; that's what most of the civil rights activists did. You are radical in your belief in inequality, but you are pragmatic in trying to push through political change within our system.

Another group that you deal with extensively in the book — and some of these groups obviously overlap — is the suffragists. Post-Civil War, you discuss how there were certainly what we would call today kind of “intersectional” feminists, like Lucy Parsons, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. But on the other hand, as you well know, there were the likes of Susan B Anthony, and also some people that seem to have been even more genuinely white supremacist, who made the calculation that, you know what, we have principles too but we need to be pragmatic. And the best way to at least get some woman — white woman — the right to vote is to make an appeal that is specifically towards white people; in other words, selling out everyone who isn’t white in the name of pragmatic, moderate progress.

Do you see any parallels to that kind of debate that the suffragists had amongst themselves and the debate we see now with Democrats who might say, you know, with immigrant rights, trans rights — we don't necessarily oppose them, but the polls for us aren't so great right now, and there are other people that need defending. Do you see a connection between those two different debates?

That's a very good counter-example to what I was saying. I think the point of making coalitions of people who are moderates is, in fact, not to sacrifice your principle; to continue to be the radical Vanguard. And the history of the women's suffrage movement in the United States is illustrative of one thing: that is, at least the [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton/Anthony wing, first during Reconstruction, made expedient compromises because they were so angry at being left out of the Reconstruction amendments that they were willing to form expedient alliances with racist Democrats. Stanton is a bit of an elitist; Anthony actually comes from a more reformist, anti-slavery tradition, but she still makes those expedient compromises, which I think costs the suffrage movement.

By giving up the intersectional vision of the original abolitionist feminists, it leads to a divide in the movement. You get two competing organizations, and women's suffrage is kind of eclipsed for another 50 years. And so even though the 19th Amendment is modeled after the 15th Amendment that gave Black men the right to vote during Reconstruction — that's why I call it the last Reconstruction amendment — it was still passed in the shadow of the defeat of Reconstruction. And as the movement, you know, kind of grew in the shadow of the defeat of Reconstruction, they were willing to do more than make just expedient alliances with Southern white women, compromising on their principles by having segregated meetings, by sidelining Black women suffragists.

I think that is a problem that they bequeath to American feminism, and it's a real problem. Because when the 19th Amendment is passed, even though it has no racial qualification and it inspired some Black women in the South to attempt to vote, it still excluded them, for the most part, because of Black disenfranchisement in the South. So Black women really don't get the right to vote. As to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, I think, if anything, the history of the suffragist movement shows that you can make alliances with people, but you do not compromise on basic human rights.

I think that's something that most Democratic politicians should today understand, because it's easy to demonize and scapegoat a minority that is not liked or not understood by many people, but once you go down that road, it doesn't stop there. And so in this particular case, I would say that sacrifice of principle is something that the abolitionists, for instance, never did. They got into alliances with anti-slavery moderates, but they were like, “No, you may be for non-expansion, but we are still for abolition,” and that's why they are able to eventually push the non-expansionists towards abolition. But the suffragists, we see something different, and for all the compromises they made, they still didn't win the majority of the South because the South did not like the idea of a constitutional amendment or of even a federal law that would give women the right to vote, and they definitely wanted to exclude Black women. So in the end, they sacrificed principle for paltry or nonexistent gains, because most of the states that did not ratify the 19th Amendment were the southern states.

You have said that we are now living through the collapse of the “American Third Republic.” With the caveat that, as you know as a historian, history does not repeat, but there are echoes: Do you see the dominant, MAGA faction in American politics today as the successor to forces like the Know Nothings, the Confederacy and the Redeemers? Is that the same tradition rearing its head again? Or is this a new chapter in American history?

As a historian, I would say that the present and the future will always be informed by the past. And you're right: History does not repeat, but we cannot escape its legacies. Abraham Lincoln said, “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history” during the Civil War, and he was right. It's not as if it's the same forces or the same people, but I think in the United States, we do have competing traditions of interracial democracy — bequeathed by the abolitionists, by the Civil Rights Movement, by the experiment in interracial democracy in the south during Reconstruction — but we also have a traditional reaction against it, whether it was the pro-slavery, anti-democratic traditions of southern slaveholders. They use “states' rights” to defend slavery and, later on, ex-Confederates use it to defend Jim Crow and disfranchisement.

Those traditions of reactionary authoritarianism are also with us. Even when you know you had the establishment of the New Deal, and after that civil rights, there were a lot of people who were critiquing that. And some of their criticisms sounded familiar to me, because during Reconstruction, a lot of southern elites critiqued the Reconstruction government for establishing a public school system, which they said was a big burden on taxpayers; they had taxpayers’ conventions. They were against big government; against what they saw as federal tyranny. So this kind of anti-government ideology, which was also linked with a sort of racist opposition to Black rights — that little poisonous brew has been in the United States for a long time and it rears up its head in the opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the rise of modern-day conservatism, which is now kind of devolved into the MAGA movement.

I would say, though, that when the January 6 insurrection took place, there were a lot of historians who were saying, “this is who we are,” and others saying “this is not who we are.” I didn't agree with either side. I mean, I think this is what we should not be; that we've been there in the past, and we made some changes, and we should realize that this is not the way things ought to be and we should continue to contest those.

In terms of MAGA, it seems to me their agenda is quite clear. It's anti-government; Trump — the Trump regime and Trump himself — seems to really admire the era of the downfall of Reconstruction, the Gilded Age; the age of robber barons, of unregulated, rapacious capitalism and open imperialism, when the United States acquired an overseas American empire after the Spanish-Cuban American war of 1898. This was, of course, all in the administration of William McKinley, whom Trump refers to and admires; he wants the mountain in Alaska to be renamed “Mount McKinley.” He was a tariff man, but this is the point when the Republican Party completely ceases being the party of Lincoln and anti-slavery and becomes the party of big business.

But the fact that the MAGA movement actually admires that period in American history, it seems to me that they're looking at it as a model, as a model when there was no government regulation, no worker safety standards. This is before the Progressive Era, and before the New Deal that made for government regulation of the economy and safe labor conditions, minimum wages and things like that; a recognition of unions. It's also the height of social Darwinism and the pseudoscience of race. It's also the height of Lost Cause mythology when the Confederate monuments are put up. The fact that [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth renamed Fort Liberty back to Bragg saying, “No, but it's not the Confederate General Bragg but some private corporal we dug up from somewhere else, but we are going back to Bragg" — or that Trump says Confederate statues are beautiful and that we shouldn't get rid of them — shows to me that they seem to recognize the ideological affinities between their own ideas and those of the past. So it's not the same thing, but it is certainly informed by that sorry history.

I wanted to pull a quote from your book that I think is particularly relevant here: “A racist thermidor resulted from the unwinding of Reconstruction, which involved not just the subjugation of African Americans and western Indians but also the exclusion of Asian immigrants. The rise of Jim Crow in the South and other internal regimes of racist hierarchy fed into the logic and momentum of US imperialism. These domestic developments were, in fact, the preconditions for the rise of an overseas American empire.”

I know you have said that when you were working on this book, you did not know at the time how relevant it would be. But particularly with Donald Trump talking about an expansionist agenda — not just the Panama Canal or Greenland, but maybe even Canada too and, of course, the Gaza Strip, which might host a Trump hotel — I guess I don't need to ask you to spell out the parallels here, but are you surprised that it seems to repeat this history more than history should? As you said, history does not repeat, but this seems to be following a playbook.

Yeah, well, I didn't think we'd be back to the age of formal imperialism, right? Trump admires not just McKinley, but he also has, apparently, a portrait of James Polk, who was responsible for the Mexican War and the annexation of large amounts of lands from Mexico. And let's not forget that Abraham Lincoln began his national political career by opposing the Mexican war as a land grab for slavery. So I think what we see today in terms of Trump, I didn't expect that; I could ill imagine, to tell you the truth, that Trump would even entertain these ideas of invading Panama, acquiring Canada and Greenland and other places, even though, of course, Reagan had invaded Grenada. There's a whole history of American invasions and occupations of countries in the Caribbean, in Central America, in Latin America, of intervention; we've had that history, but we've also had, since the Second World War, a formal commitment to the international rules-based order — at least we paid lip service to it.

Trump is pretty brazen because he is not talking about the informal American empire. He's not talking about interventions; the U.S. government, of course, has intervened in other countries' affairs, and, in fact, overturned, democratically elected governments during the Cold War. He's talking about really old-fashioned, 19th century imperialism — wars of aggression and swallowing up smaller countries or less powerful countries. The United States will have a sphere of influence and we will cede Europe to Putin as his sphere of influence and feed perhaps Asia to China. It's a very 19th-century view of the world, and it's the view of the world that led to the First World War between nationalistic, imperialist, militaristic nations and which, of course, led to the rise of fascism and the Second World War.

You'd think that we are beyond all that. But the way that they nostalgically invoke that late 19th century period, and the way this global authoritarianism is in sync — in terms of not just invading, maybe, other countries and annexing parts of them, which is exactly what Putin is doing in Ukraine, and which Netanyahu wants to do in the Gaza Strip, simply eliminate the people of Gaza, it seems to be at this stage — that kind of mindset, that might makes right, is just so [retrograde]. Even when the US intervened [in the past], at least they had the sort of hypocrisy of saying, “Well, we are fighting for freedom or democracy,” but with Trump, that's not there.

It's a very 19th-century, old-fashioned imperialism. It's also a real denigration of anyone considered nonwhite. When Trump, in his first administration, said we should get, you know, immigrants from Denmark, he was evoking the 1924 immigration law, because it moved from Chinese exclusion to exclusion for all peoples, and also seeing southern and eastern Europeans as somehow “lesser whites,” and preferring northern and western European immigrants. That's the immigration regime he was referring to, and which changed after the Civil Rights Movement. In 1965 they revised that old, very racist immigration law; when people talk about people's IQs or where they're from, or denigrate the countries they come from or their culture and who they are, or characterize an entire ethnicity or group of people as somehow subhuman criminals not worthy of citizenship, that kind of talk really does replicate that era of pseudoscience and that era of social Darwinism that led directly to the rise of fascism, and so I find that talk very troubling.

And then that's why I feel it's not just the attack on the administrative state, which, of course, is happening now, and also these billionaires like [Elon] Musk wanting to literally capture the U.S. government and use it for his own private gain — those ideas are reminiscent of that time, but I think in a kind of warp speed manner. Because even the robber barons were not that bad; at least they endowed some libraries and foundations and fellowships and had some idea of wanting to pretend to some sort of cultural capital. But here, at this moment, we are in a regime with these billionaires who seem unaccountable to anyone and who think that they have basically bought the government of the United States and can therefore hollow it out from within.

I’m struck by your reference there to how this kind of post-Reconstruction, gilded, social Darwinist era kind of paved the road for fascism to come later. I wondered if maybe you wanted to weigh in on a somewhat tedious debate over the term “fascism.” I kind of think it's been settled, but in the past people have taken some issue with that on the basis that it implies that this is an imported, European phenomenon. People would point out that the Nazis were inspired by the racial caste system in the United States and of course, as you well know, we have a long tradition in this country of reaction. So I'm curious what you think of the interaction between U.S. reactionary movements and movements abroad, and just whether you think that the term “fascism” and the idea that America is informed by reactionary movements abroad is at all inconsistent with your reading of American history.

Another good question. As I say in my book, we have our own homegrown authoritarian tradition rising from this period and the establishment of racial apartheid in the South. I haven't really weighed in too much in this debate because, as I say, you know, we don't have to look at fascists in Europe. In fact, fascists in Europe, as you say, look to the Jim Crow laws of the South and the subjugation of Western Indian nations to inspire them and their race laws.

But I do think that there is a global element. I prefer to use the term “authoritarianism” to “fascism,” mainly because you think about “fascist” and you think of a very particular period in European history. You think of Mussolini; you think of Franco; and you think of Hitler — that very particular moment in European history. I think authoritarianism might work better in our times. To me, it is a global authoritarian movement with fascist roots. Clearly, a lot of these right-wing movements, from the AFD in Germany to Marine Le Pen’s movement in France, have actual fascist roots. The right-wing in Italy, too, actually has ties to the old fascism — a direct historical link, just like I think our right, the right today, is really inspired by some of these earlier forces of reaction in US history.

But I do think that the fall of Reconstruction and the fall of interracial democracy in the U.S. also had a global significance. It launched the U.S., or at least it made the U.S. join the race for empire. And all the people who were left kept saying that “we are no longer a republic.” And of course, our republic was founded on the dispossession of indigenous nations, but there was still at least an attempt to uphold republican ideas and ideas of citizenship, which they had to do away with. There were actual decisions that the Supreme Court had to say, “well, you know, the people of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, they do not come under U.S. constitutional protection, they do not get the guarantees of national citizenship of the 14th Amendment.” Like they had to actually exclude them from ideas of our constitutional republic.

I do think that these things are kind of connected. And there are a lot of historians whom I know, who are students of European fascism, [who] see a lot of linkages between the right, the MAGA right in the United States, and fascism. As a U.S. historian, I see many more connections with our own reactionary past. That does not mean that there isn't also a global resonance.

There are these global interconnections with the rise of the right-wing today; you can see them encouraging each other, attending each other's meetings and cheering on their particular favorite ideological candidates. I'm not one of those either-or people, but I can make a stronger case that we have our own homegrown traditions of reaction and authoritarianism that we need to take seriously.

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You just talked about the South and its kind of culture of authoritarianism that Lincoln identified. Of course, the Union won the war, and for a very brief moment, there was a military occupation of the South. But as you detail at length in your book, the people who were in the positions to shore up the gains of that progress seemed to blink at every key moment, like when the Southern Democrats and their allies in the Ku Klux Klan were terrorizing Republicans throughout the South. The federal government was well aware of it, but for various reasons, it did not intervene decisively and then, of course, Republicans lost those states, and then Reconstruction came to a close.

When you look at that and you see the ebbs and flows and how the periods of progress are punctured by the reaction, and the people on what I would call the right side of history don't seem to have the tenacity to hold on — why should I believe that, if this fever breaks, that we will be able to better prevent the future backslide? Is there any reason to think that we'll be better prepared and that we won't just be going through this cycle for the rest of human history?

Oh, well, you know, that's a big question. I think there is a moment during the Civil War when the political will is there to enforce Reconstruction in the South, right? There is that brief moment, relatively brief moment, even though it is contested by southern white elites from the get-go. You do have an attempt to even put down political violence with the enforcement acts and the establishment of the Department of Justice in 1870. But the experiment comes apart mainly, not only because of racial terror, but also the United States Supreme Court undoing many of the legal and constitutional gains of Reconstruction and the Republican Party itself changing in character.

You have the liberal Republicans who were arguing that we should not be interfering in the South and government should not interfere in the economy; they were called liberals like classical liberals laissez-faire people we would call conservatives today. So there are a number of things that come together. And they become increasingly sympathetic to southern planters who complain about Black labor, and they seem to adopt their elitist attitudes. But you know, it's not as if that overthrow — that lasted for quite a long time — was not contested. I mean surviving abolitionists, some abolitionist feminists, African Americans, other sort of labor activists, they continue to contest.

Even in the triumph of the worst, which is the age of robber barons and the age of rapacious capitalism and imperialism, even those things were being contested. You did have people forming the anti-imperialist league. You did have somebody like Mark Twain write really perceptively about the hypocrisies of that age. He's the one who coined “Gilded Age” and he's the one who said, “History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.” So you had people, you had Americans fighting against that, albeit they were not winning at that time, but that's how you build momentum for political change. That's why, even right now, things are so bad and the only people who seem to show courage are ordinary individual American citizens who are drawing lines. The people who are in power are not the standard bearers of change. This might sound very naive, and maybe I'm looking at rose colored glasses at a very, very dismal and depressing period in American history, but even today — like that, that young Korean-American student who, unlike her institution, Columbia University, and my alma mater, which is completely caving in and not defending academic freedom or even using their bloated endowment to fight for academic freedom and against these really authoritarian demands being made by the Trump regime — you have this one student who is suing the Trump administration and challenging the idea that she doesn't have any of the protections of the Bill of Rights. She's not a citizen, but a permanent resident. And we need to think about that.

We know that in the 1920s the U.S. government deported even American citizens whom they saw as a threat. And so we can go back to that dark place. I'm thinking of the Palmer Raids and the red scares, etc., that have happened in the past, but there's always been opposition to that kind of authoritarianism. And so I'm hoping that that's the case right now too. I wouldn't look for leadership from economic elites or even political elites at this point. It really has to be ordinary Americans, citizens, just standing up for our rights, because that's the only way to defeat authoritarianism.

My husband's German, and he looks at what's happening here and it really makes him think of the rise of fascism in Germany. But I think we are at a different place right now. I think we should be able to mount an effective resistance. And I think of the 1850s, when slave owners pretty much controlled even the federal government, and then suddenly they didn't. I think we can't give up. We can't give up on the American experiment in democratic republicanism, especially on the eve of the semi-quincentennial centennial, the 250th founding anniversary.

I’m calling you from Philadelphia and I’m not really looking forward to the celebrations.

I mean, we have to be able to mark that. If there is a fall of the third American Republic, which seems to be in progress, maybe we need to be fighting for the fourth.

I wanted to ask you one last question. With the news that Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley are both going to Canada, it just got me wondering.

Oh they are? They’re leaving for Canada?

They are leaving for Canada. The University of Toronto.

Oh, this is news to me. I did not know that.

There's now, of course, a discourse about whether one is abandoning the fight or if it's more effective to fight from exile. I don't know. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts yourself as an academic. You probably don't think of yourself as being on the top of anyone's enemies list, but then a random woman I wrote about [the other] morning, a grad student at Tufts, got detained for speaking out about Palestine. She was a foreign national, but I guess my point is: Who can say who is safe from harassment by this administration? I'm curious what you think about, you know, academics leaving, and whether one can resist abroad and complement the domestic resistance.

Well, what's happening in terms of science is truly frightening, because, as I said, they're destroying the United States in terms of — we have a leadership position in science, in medicine and higher education, and that is being hollowed out because they are seen as somehow the enemy…. People have been talking about a brain drain. The French government is inviting American scientists.

Our universities are the envy of the world. Our scientific progress is the envy of the world, and they're destroying that. So you don't have to be on the right or left or middle or any way to understand very seriously that this is a threat to the republic and to everything — to intellectual endeavor, which is exactly how authoritarians operate, right? We have Supreme Court justices who want to go to the pre-enlightenment era, who invoke medieval law when it comes to women's rights; this is like pre-founding, and these guys are supposedly originalists, but in terms of our Bill of Rights, and in terms of the Reconstruction constitution, they particularly hate the 14th Amendment. They want to gut the republic.

So it's at various levels. It's at all levels. And as an academic, and as someone who has to hear somebody like JD Vance say the “professors are the enemy” and things like that, one does feel that you're living in very precarious times — that the next four years are going to be a very rough ride, and the only way one survives these authoritarian regimes is by opposing it. You know, my husband sometimes says that if we get deported, it'll be because of me. Because, you know, when people ask me, I give them my opinion. I'm no great political leader or some sort of influencer or anything like that. But as a historian, what I see today in the United States is extremely dangerous. And in fact, I'm hearing our friends in Europe, in Germany and elsewhere, saying that the United States is really no longer a functioning democracy if these things continue to happen. We are in times that resemble, I think, a little bit the past, but also in kind of new, dangerous times. And at one point, I don't think these forces can be compromised with. They have to be defeated politically.

Are you planning to stay put in Connecticut, or are you thinking, that if an opportunity arose elsewhere, you might take it for your own safety’s sake?

My husband and my children are all dual citizens of the European Union and the United States because they all got German citizenship through my husband. I only have U.S. citizenship. I had to give up my Indian citizenship in order to get it; there's no dual citizenship allowed between the two countries. And I feel that my fight is here. As an American historian, as a historian of the United States, of American democracy, and somebody who was just presenting at Ford's Theater where Lincoln was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer, I feel very invested in our experiment in democracy and representative government, and my views may be more to the left of you know many other citizens who are similarly invested in this project, but I feel my fight is here — that if I had to, if something comes at my doorstep, I will speak out against it. I think what's happening now, in terms of arbitrary deportations and concentration camps in areas beyond our constitutional protections, is un-American. It's against our rule of law. It's against our constitutional order, and everyone — any right-thinking person — should be speaking out against it. I'm seeing a lot of conservatives — some, not a lot, but a few of them who've not totally lost their minds to the MAGA cult — speak out against it. And I think we all need to, because it's a slippery slope. Frederick Douglass, I quote him in my book, he says, "once the wheels of progress start going backwards, you don't know when it's going to stop, and it's up to us to make it stop."