Looking to 1953

There's a really interesting, and scary, article on Salon right now which consists of an interview of Joe Walsh.

For those who don't recall him, Walsh was a Republican who ran against Trump.  He'd been a Tea Party Republican who was an early defector in opposition to Trump and, apparently, has remained there.  Indeed, he was associated with Trump allies before he bolted to sound a warning against Trump, which he's still trying to sound.

The reason I note this is that the article, while it definitely has its flaws, is insightful and, for anyone reading this blog, probably a little familiar.  A lot of what he's warning about has been addressed here.

Walsh's main point, and its a good one, is that Trump populists have an existential view of the world that's fundamentally such that it's become unapologetically anti-democratic. Therefore, those who have the view that once Trumpites learn what really occurred in regard to the November 2020 election, i.e., it wasn't stolen, or what really occurred on January 6, i.e. it was an insurrection, that they will change their mind and oppose Trump are simply wrong.  The reason for that is that their Weltanschauung is such that Trumpites view their opponents as existentially illegitimate.

That's a really scary point, but its correct in large measure.  And he's correct on how we got there. . . in part, and also, not in part.

Walsh takes the view that going back to the Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan, without every mentioning Reagan, the GOP adopted, or rather co-opted, this view, for its own purposes.  That's' partially correct.  And he's definitely correct when he notes that the Trumpites know that they were completely ignored in their concerns by generations of American politicians, left and right.  And like we've said, by voting for Trump in 2016 they were voting to throw in the match and burn the system down.  Like we also said at that time and since, if Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic candidate in 2016 (and frankly, maybe 2020)  he would be President now.  Sanders appealed to the exact same base.  

And as we've also noted, by choosing Uber Establishment Hilary Clinton, the Democrats blew it.

What we've noted, but what the article doesn't, is that the roots of this go back further than the 1976 election.  They go back at least to the 1960s when fundamental long established aspects of western culture came under surfaced attacks from the left.  Animosity in some part of the left to western culture had existed for almost all of the 20th Century, but they had not been able to emerge into mainstream political and cultural discourse until after World War Two.  Part of that attack came in other ways right after the war, and we've been dealing with another in our series on an attack on the culture that came from another quarter.  As we have noted before, the war did something that set things up in some fashion for what occurred in the 60s.  But it was the massive introduction of new wealth, combined with an expansion of the economy, combined with the Vietnam War that really exploded into a left wing eruption in the culture by the fateful year of 1968.  The article misses that.

The hard hat reaction to 1968 existed in that very year.  But the elite drift to the left, which had been going on since the 1950s, really accelerated at that time and the left, using the courts, started gaining ground in the 1970s to force cultural changes up on the country through litigation, not through the ballot box, where the ballot box would not suffice, or seem to suffice.  As also noted here before, such decisions really do not tend to really fix an issue in the public's mind immediately, and sometimes not at all.  Combined with that, in the 1970s, the American economy began to fundamentally change with nothing done to stop it. Both Democrats and Republicans winked at manufacturing jobs, particularly low tech manufacturing jobs, going overseas, confident in the view that what this would undoubtedly mean is the arrival of high paying replacement jobs that everyone wanted.

Walsh puts this in terms of "1953", more or less arguing that populist Republicans seek to return the country to its status, economically certainly, but culturally also, that it had in 1953.  His analysis is sophisticated in some sense, and not in others.  In one way he gets it correct that contrary to what the press asserts, outward racism isn't part of it, but at the same time the sense that the "perfect" world of 1953 was a white one.

More accurately, of course, the United States of 1953 had a white protestant culture.  The Catholic Ghetto was still very much a thing in 1953 and Catholics were attending university for the first time.  And the big advancements in civil rights for African Americans were very much part of the story of the 1950s, although that may be part of it too, as almost all Americans look back on that as a success.  1953 was during the era in which American industry dominated the world without question, although 53 is an odd choice as the Korean War, which was not actually a popular one, was ongoing.  Having said that, the Vietnam War was yet to occur.

1953 was the year in which Playboy magazine premiered and the assault on the traditional family really, therefore, began in earnest.  It was also, however, during an era in which most men, including men with no college degree, could support a family without anyone else in it making an outside income.  That era has very much passed.

Of course, the irony of an idealized pass is both that it never actually matches the reality of  the past or the current lives of those who advocate for it.  Many in the populist camp look back on this prior era strongly romantically, however, and Walsh is correct. The desire is to return the culture to something like that era.

A desire to return to past standard, or even some of them, is not in and of itself anti-democratic or illegitimate.  Globally, strongly conservative, and not just populist, movements often have varying elements of that as a goal. Certainly the American conservative movement, at least weakly, had that as a goal to some extent for some time.  The problem becomes when the mindset of some with such goals reduces them both to myth, and strongly endorses a conspiratorial view of their opponents.  Liberals, in taking to the courts, were not engaging in conspiracies, although there were always some extreme left wingers who acted somewhat hidden goals that they were advancing incrementally.  The problem that the left, and the larger society right and left, now has is that its overarchingly difficult for those outside of the populist right to grasp that many in that section of the electorate have convinced themselves that what was done was completely illegitimate and that those who took those positions are illegitimate as well.

With that view, the Trumpites, and they vary enormously in loyalty and world view, go from being somewhat predisposed to believe that the left would resort to stealing an election all the way to believing that views outside of their own are so fundamentally flawed as to be irrelevant.  The big problem is the question of to what degree do the latter makeup the GOP today.  Seemingly, in some quarters at least, they're driving the party.

Given that, as noted in the article, the hope that the sun will come out, people will look around, and return to their democratic senses, as seems to be the hope in the left and center, may well be a forlorn hope for at least the time being.  What's the way out of a danger for democracy if this is the point we've reached?

Ironically, the answer may be in part the same way we got here.  In spite of the whining and crying about them, the current Supreme Court seems intent on dismantling "progress" by judicial decree, and leaving that, whatever that is, up to the state legislatures and Congress.  If distrusts of the parties and the government started with the courts, which it did to some extent, maybe this will start to restore it.  The problem still is, however, that it took us around fifty years to get to this point.  Getting back. . . well there may not be fifty years to do it.

And even if there is, are there enough on the right and left from whom democracy is the first principal, to get there?