Evangelicals weren’t always the anti-choice, single-issue voters they are today. In fact, they used to be moderately pro-choice.
Believe it or not, the NRA hasn’t always been concerned with the second amendment. It’s purview was once limited to “firearms safety education, marksmanship training, shooting for recreation.” In fact those words were up on the facade of their headquarters in the 1950s.
Even the Republican Party has not always been the fervent anit-government organization it is today, opposing nearly all government regulation and spending (apart from the military). Huge spending projects were once the darlings of Republicans like Eisenhower.
All of these things began to change in the 1970s. Why did all these things, now foundational issues in American politics, have their beginnings in the same span of a few years?
It is because they are all reactions to things that happened during the years just prior: The civil rights movement and, to a lesser extent, the women’s liberation and gay liberation movements.
I believe we are all still living in the long shadow of the events of the 1960s and 70s. It has fueled American politics for my entire adult life. In fact, I will go so far as to say that the entirety of American conservatism for the last forty years has been one long backlash against those pivotal events.
It’s why the US has a broken healthcare system, underperforming schools, a pitiful minimum wage, no paid family leave, failing infrastructure, breathtaking wealth inequality, and a level of gun violence not seen in other wealthy democracies. It’s basically the reason why we can’t have nice things.
Here in 2022 I now believe that this backlash started our nation down a multi-decade path to destruction that is now coming to its conclusion. This festering problem had jet fuel poured onto it in the years spanning 2008 to 2016, the period of time during which a black family occupied the White House, a woman seemed all but guaranteed to sit in the Oval Office next, and same-sex marriage became the law of the land.
Trump and Trumpism, the mass delusions of both the Big Lie and Qanon, the Janary 6th insurrection, and the return of anti-semitic tropes like replacement theory, are the result of that jet fuel. Many of us now seem willing to abandon democracy itself in a last ditch effort to preserve a dying social order in which white men were in charge, white women below, people of color and LGBTQ folks at the bottom.
Yes it does seem like a last ditch effort, the last gasp of a dying worldview, but they say a cornered animal is the most dangerous kind. This is why I believe that this desperate effort may topple American democracy within the next few years.
As if this isn’t bad enough, there is one other maddening feature of this sad drama: we can’t even have an honest argument about it. While one side is quite rightly accusing the other of bigoted rhetoric and autocratic tendencies, the other side insanely insists there was widespread election fraud and even that satanist pedophiles secretly control the government and the media.
To say that we’re collectively in a weird place is an understatement. Anyone who says they know exactly how the next few years will play out is a fool. Those who believe that we’re just going to stumble our way back to normal, doubly so. Uncertainty notwithstanding, my money is on more political violence, more and larger social upheavals, and perhaps a new autocratic form of government.
Do you ever feel like you were born just in time to watch your 245 year old nation take a 50 year slide into self-destruction? I didn’t know what I was watching in the 80s or 90s. I began to think something was seriously wrong with American politics by the 2000s. By 2010 I started to suspect we were heading for a big conflict. In 2016 I began to wonder if this wasn’t the beginning of the end. In 2021, I became sure of it.
And it all started because around the time of my birth a bunch of black people, women and gays stood up and demanded social, political and economic equality with white men. Those events, and the backlash we’ve been living through for all these years, have led us to this end.