Had Ronald Reagan’s presidency only represented a correction to some apparent excesses, we would remember him as a Dwight Eisenhower figure. He would elicit yawns and little else. But that's not what happened. Instead, Reagan inaugurated the great white right-wing revanchement—a political movement dedicated to rolling back every gain that ordinary Americans had been able to achieve towards a system of fairness and economic security from the New Deal to the Great Society.
The good news is that old, frightened, greedy, angry white people have only been partially successful in establishing what Jack London (in a novel published 110 years ago) called "The Iron Heel." However, if they continue to have their way (and Brett Kavanausea is yet another tool in their box), Americans will see unprecedented shifts downward in social equality and economic security: the descent to a pre-New Deal America.
Let us eat cake.
The really disheartening part of the Kavanausea saga is that he couldn’t have done it without the support of women. And let us recall that it was a white Evangelical woman (Phyllis Schafly) who led the charge to defeat the ERA back in the 1970s. This is a phenomenon that we cannot afford to ignore.
In his brilliant treatise
"The Politics of Obedience and the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude," Etienne de la Boetie laid out how this phenomenon unfolds back in the 16th century (on the cusp of the modern era in Europe).
The painful truth is that it is only in rare historical moments that genuine political change can be effected. Having grown up during one of those rare historical moments, I made the honest mistake of assuming that I lived in a dynamic political culture, one where anything was possible. Taking the long view of history across geography and culture, however, one begins to see that the period from 1965-1975 in the USA (cue Bruce Springsteen’s "Born in the USA") was the exception that proves the rule. I was fortunate to be able to witness it, but I have since learned that I must not be fooled into thinking that I will necessarily see a time like that again before shuffling off this mortal coil.
Of course, as I have said before and will continue to say: History is the record of unintended consequences. The
Shahnameh ends happily (a Persian proverb). My advice to one and all in these troubled times is as follows:
We should avoid the cake, keep our powder dry (the price of liberty is eternal vigilance), take care of those close to us and the stranger in our gates, and with sober eyes see the extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds that pulse all around us for what they are.
Emerson wrote in his journal after the death of his little son Waldo: "I am Defeated All the Time; yet to Victory I am born." An apt motto for a Cheerful Nihilist.
