There is no pendulum even if you have no idea what "the right side of history" is.

 

Franklin Roosevelt.  The country he governed at the time of his death in 1945 wasn't the one he was elected to govern in 1932.

A friend of mine is fond of saying that history is a pendulum, it swings right, and then left, and then back again.  His point is that if you don't like the way history is going, or society, or politics, just wait, and it'll swing back.

Well, it sort of does.

But only sort of.  

It's more like a giant screw, or drill, it has left and right edges contacting what its going through, with that being history or time, I suppose, but it also keeps going in a direction.  Every once and awhile, the drill hits something hard and diverts its path, and its really hard, if not impossible, to get it going in the same direction.

We're about to hit something hard like that.  And my prediction is that it'll change things, permanently.

There have been things like that in the past.  The United States had one character from 1776 to 1860, but 1860 to 1865 changed everything forever.  Signs that something was going to happen were clear in the 1840s, and there were lots of arguments developing over it. But the Civil War brought the change and the United States in 1866 wasn't the same country it had been in 1859.  It'd never be that earlier country again.

The Great Depression is another example.  Going into the Depression in 1929 the country was pretty much the same country it had been in 1866. By 1945 it wouldn't be that country anymore.

Part of the hard spot, if you will, that the drill hit was just fatigue.  The Civil War not only defeated the Southern slaveholders, it fatigued the entire South to the point where it accepted defeat. . . for  time.  The Great Depression fatigued the entire nation to where it accepted changes in the role of government that it would not have before.

And like it nor not, we're about to do that again, or so I suspect.

Fatigue has certainly set in, in the general populace.

The country has been struggling since the 1970s over developments that happened post World War Two and which culminated in the late 60s and early 70s.  Since then, the pendulum, if you like that analogy, has swung back and forth.  But something really started accelerating socially in the late portions of President Obama's second term, brought about in no small part by the sitting Supreme Court.  A reaction in part to that but also in part to policies of the 1970s, including a high immigration rate, export of manufacturing, etc., all caused a slow burning populism to elect Donald Trump.

Trump's about to lose the election.  Amy Coney Barrett is about to go on the Supreme Court.  We're about to enter an era of political liberalism that's going to move the country permanently to the left, while at the same time one of judicial conservatism that will cause people to actually have to pay attention to their elected officials, who will have new powers in lots of ways they haven't since the early 1970s.

What that exactly does should be cold comfort to everyone.  Nobody is going to get what they want. Some people are going to be howling in frustration, as I hinted at that here:

At any rate, the atmosphere that's being created strikes me as one that is going to cause some pockets in the country to be hard to accept and I fear that many in the state will fit into that category, based on their statements.  At some point every American gets Presidential election results that are disappointing to them, sometimes deeply disappointing, but you accept that it occurred, move on, and work in some fashion for the future.  Not since 1860 has there been an election which a large number in the country refused to accept.  Important in that 1860 refusal was the existence of leadership that refused to accept it.  As we head towards the election, it's important that leadership exist again as it seems that some are being primed, accidentally perhaps, not to accept it.

If results go really badly for the GOP in this race, and they might, the reverberations locally will be "interesting" to observe, to say the least.  A Democratic Oval office and Democratic Senate would join an already Democratic House and the state would be living with a lot of changes that its not mentally prepared to accept.  Part of the adjusting of that probably needs to start now.

My prediction is that some of the social policy fights that we've been having but which we've been relying on the high court to mediate will come roaring back.  Those fighting over gun control are going to find that the Supreme Court will hold that the 2nd Amendment is a real personal right restricting legislatures, but that won't mean that those same bodies, including the national one, can't actually impose some restrictions, and those restrictions are coming, and coming extremely rapidly.

Those on the left who have been depending upon the court to hold back the development of societal attitudes disfavoring abortion, but not completely eliminating it, are going to see some states go as far as they can, legally, soon to do just that. Some states will go the other way. There won't be one national law.

Those on the right who were hoping for the definition of marriage to return to the states, where it was before the court ruled otherwise recently, are going to be disappointed. That ship has sailed and the argument is now a cultural one not a legal one.  On the other hand, those who are hoping for the expansion of all sorts of self definition based on ones private parts and inclinations are going to be disappointed as well as the law is going to stop at its current position and the mass of the populace is going to move on to "don't care."

General government involvement in all things, economic and otherwise, is going to increase and markedly and in a leftwards direction.  Part of that will be in the area of environmental policy.  Arguments about climate are about to end, and policies are about to arrive.

None of this means that you have to like any of it, and that gets back to what I posted above. The local Republican party, the only real party in the state, has been enduring an alt -right insurgency. That insurgency is about to be put on the political margins in the entire United States.  And not only indefinitely, but maybe forever.  The right wing from this point, nationally, is the middle right.  Think of the Canadian right, or the British right.  If their right wing seems left wing to you, well we're about to join them.

And again, a person doesn't have to like it. Indeed, they can decry it.  But the drill has hit a hard spot and its' going to divert.

Of course, as noted, we never really know the course of history, or its outcome.  Things do go back, or touch back, or come to be regarded as a place to aim for, in terms of standards and conditions.  Some rapidly, some slowly, and some not at all.