American democracy is in real trouble right now, there's no doubt. The evidence is everywhere.
From 2016 to 2020 the President was a boorish multimillionaire whose early history was that of a New York Democrat. Picking up on the anger in the country, he converted himself into a populist Republican and ran the nation in a semi unhinged manner restrained only by as set of advisors that reigned him in, or simply just didn't do what he wanted right up until when he tried to retain control through a coup. On the plus side, however, Mitch McConnell basically ran the judicial nomination system, and after decades of Democratic picks who regarded the Constitution as more of a loose set of guidelines than a law, and weak kneed Republican nominees who turned out to be disappointments, some real jurists were finally elected.
Now we've reached the point where in Arizona there's a serious chance the next Governor will be an election denier, in Pennsylvania a quack doctor may be their next Senator, and in Wyoming we're going to elect a Congressional candidate who stabbed her predecessor in the back and claims to believe, although I very much doubt she does, that the election was stolen. Indeed, if she doesn't believe it was stolen, that makes her all the worse for promoting lies. In the Secretary of State's office the current interim occupant is another election denier, and in January Chuck Gray, who based his campaign on nothing else, is going to be elected to an office he shouldn't be holding. The state's GOP, meanwhile, is led by an extreme right wing Trumpite.
Democracy, truly, is in peril.
How did this happen?
We've dealt with this before, but if we really look deeply at this election, what we're seeing is 1) a hardcore group of Americans who feel their culture is being attacked, and not without merit for that belief, and 2) a group of fellow travelers who would probably, quite frankly, join in any political movement as they either don't think their claimed beliefs through or they want to be on what seems to be the winning side.
Note that I didn't say that it was because people believe the election was stolen. Some do, but what is really the case for most of those people is that they want to believe the election was stolen.
And they want to believe that, as they want to believe their nation was stolen.
Was it?
The culture wars have been going on in the US for a lot longer than pundits would have it. Indeed, the United States has always had some sort of culture war going on, and It's always had more than one culture. But by and large, its culture as a whole has been a Western European Christian one.
And by and large, it still is.
Attacks on that go back quite some time as well. Indeed, one way it is sometimes dated is to go October 31, 1517, when Monk Martin Luther ostensibly nailed his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Cathedral door. In doing that Luther, who temperamentally should really never have been a cleric, unintentionally ushered in the age of individualism, which is always an attack on a culture as it ultimately must mean that an individual can define a culture himself, and sooner or later that leads to a sort of rampaging societal narcissism.
Which we have now.
Which means the 1517 date isn't a bad one from which to track the decay of Western European society, of which we are part.
Whether that's correct or not, we see larger, more radical attacks coming about in the late 18th Century. The celebrated French Revolution, a massive failure, was one such example. The following of Communism and Communist Revolutions, which were ideologically and historically children of the French Revolution, are more recent examples which did real damage.
But through it all, the basic tenants of society remained. Two genders. Conventional relationships. Marriage. A broad Christian concept of society, held even by non Christians. All of this was part of Western European, and more particularly, American, life.
That's been under attack since at least the 1920s, and very much under attack since the 1950s.
And that's what people are reacting to, albeit, much too late, and often on an instinctive level that ignores their own hypocrisy.
We just ran an item entitled Cis. That doesn't explain it all, but in the conversion of the GOP into a sort of Populist-Fascist Party, we see part of the reaction to that. When people say the 2020 election was stolen, what they really mean, on an instinctive level, is that they want their culture back as the cultural norm, and any result contrary to that is a species of theft, as it's illegitimate.
Put another way, they don't accept that homosexuality is normal. They aren't accepting the damage done to marriage. They don't want a multicultural society of any kind.
They also want Detroit of the 1950s back, and American industry back. They want Dayton Ohio back before it was modern Dayton. They want blue collar jobs that you work at all day long without a lot of thought, and when you knock off at 5, you go to the bar with your buddies, hit on the bar maid, and then go home to your wife.
They want to set the dial back.
But they don't want to set it all the way back, and that's what's so ironic. Only parts. They probably just want to set it back to maybe 1985. Not 1885, or 1485.
And they don't want to impose the societal rules that apply to themselves personally. That is, other people should not be openly acting on self identified sexual concepts, but the disgruntled voters, assuming their inclinations are conventional, doesn't really want to return to a day when Playboy was still capable of being banned in some places, divorce required fault, and living in sin was heavily frowned upon. Going back, in other words, is fine for me, where I like it, but shouldn't have to bind me otherwise.
And, in setting things back, you have to really honestly ask what you are setting them back to.
This isn't going on just in the United States. It's going on elsewhere in the Western World. Hungary and Poland provide two such examples, and they're not alone. Just the other day, Sweden elevated to power a party that has its roots as a recent Neo Nazi movement.
So do they really believe the election was stolen?
I don't think they care. And if they do mean that, they probably really mean that the election was stolen when Teddy Kennedy's immigration reforms became law in the early 1970s, and when the results of the Stonehill Riot didn't come out as expected.
Getting here was a long road. Part of it was an American inability to really restrain the negative implications of technology that started to come in during the early 20th Century. Film, in particular, brought a leveling impact on society nationwide, but it also brought in a depressing one. Prior to the initial introduction of movies, a person might be able to indulge in their prurient interests, but it wasn't a very safe thing to do, and it'd become widely known, or risk becoming widely known, and condemned. After movies came in, it was at first easy to indulge in that just by going to them. There were no laws that precluded anything from being shown on film, and some early silent movies were outright pornographic. That brought in the Hayes Production Code, but the influence of money meant that was only able to hold back the tide.
Even while the production code was in effect, the improvements in film of all kinds, and in medial production, meant that leaps and bounds were taken in regard to the portrayal of women in society, and not in a good way, by the 40s and 50s. Playboy broke the door down, and the Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s did what all wars do, destroy.
The Great Depression of the 30s played its role by bringing in the Federal Government in ways it had never operated before, and by effectively destroying the American System of economics, which had always blending government assistance with private, and often localized, economics. Even by the mid 30s some were complaining about the impact of The New Deal on localized economies and cultures, such as "The Southern Agrarians" in I'll Take My Stand. It was a losing battle, however, due to the great crisis, which was followed by a second great crisis; World War Two, and a third great crisis; The Cold War. A nation that had to engage in that sort of struggle, or rather ongoing struggles, for a period of sixty years was one that was going to be geared towards economic magnitude and emphasize it above all else.
It had to.
This was also the glory years, truly, for American industry and therefore for American blue collar workers. European industry had been destroyed by the Second World War. The British and French Empires collapsed. The Soviet Union was our only contender in the world, but it wasn't that much of an economic contender.
So no harm in relaxing the standards a bit, eh?
Legal standards certainly relaxed. A Supreme Court which had taken the Lochner view prior to Franklin Roosevelt's threat to pack it relented and then, during the long Democratic period in power, followed by Republicans who were economic conservatives but were in the middle of the road, became effectively a third branch of government in the way it never had been before. And again, at first this was necessary, as the Supreme Court smashed through the vestiges of legal color barriers and forced the country to live up to its founding documents of the Revolutionary and Civil War period for the first time since the 1870s.
All that was necessary, but like most things, if the first helping is good, a second or third is warranted. The large size of the government did not abate at any point. The Court, having addressed concerns that it really needed to, went on to things which it neither had a need to nor really had any legal ability to address. The ever expansion outward of the economy was never reigned in, and Americans were converted from people into consumers. And, finally, a Democratic Party that had struggled between liberalism and reaction, freed itself of its reactionary wing but launched into first its New Deal wing, and then following Watergate, it's very liberal wing. While the latter occurred, the Republican Party largely stood by the wayside until the mid 1970s, when the reaction started.
The party reaction started then, but there had been reactions all along, and they spread and changed during the 1960s. It was also during the 1960s that the Baby Boomer generation, all over the Western World, enjoying economic largess on an unprecedented scale, began to adopt in a large way the more radicalized, in every sense, features of the 1950s. This eroded social institutions from below while the Courts eroded them, in the US, from above. Governments in the West attempted to address this, but largely post 1968 by accommodations. Social institutions of all types began to try to react during the 1960s as well, with many that had traditionally been very conservative in their outlook moving towards the left.
The reaction didn't begin to develop until the mid 1970s, but by that point so much had changed that finding a point on the compass was difficult. In the United States, Reagan came in and moved the needle back towards the right. In the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher did the same. But even as that occurred, most of the progress, if viewed that way, was fairly limited in real terms to economic matters on a large scale, with very little on the small scale. Social conservatism rose in the late 70s and early 80s, but not enough to really disrupt the overall direction of things, and the Court moved only from left to left center.
Given this, real systemic and social problems that set in soon after the end of the Vietnam War never ended up being addressed. Industry began to flood overseas without any effort to arrest it. Social changes brought about by the courts continued on. Social change at the local level was adopted wholesale by certain "elites" and the entertainment industry, to some degree in ways that would be regarded as shocking today. Damage to social structure was ongoing. Immigration reform brought in by Ted Kennedy and his fellow Democrats that reflected a concept of global social justice and 1950s style unabated economic opportunity set in so much that it's never been capable of being addressed.
While this occurred, the hard hat class lost their jobs. Men who had provided incomes for their families no longer could. Man and women had to go to work to support their families. The concept of simply abandoning women and children to the support of the government fixed in. Institutions long held sacrosanct were attacked.
So, in essence, Baby Boomers who grew up in their parent's 1950s and early 1960s (with the early 1960s really being part, culturally, of the 1950s) and then attacked it, looked back to that past and hoped to live in it, finding they could not. But not just that, the "Greatest Generation" that fought World War Two, looked back at the glory of the 40s and 50s, and the social support of the 1930s, and couldn't figure out how this had happened.
The World War Two Generation, once condemned by the Boomers and now universally praised by them, has largely passed away. But the Boomers, elderly though they now are, has not, and many of them are irate. And their children, who grew up in the broken world the Boomers created struggle as well, kept down in various real ways by the Boomers, but also looking for a raft in the flood.
And then entered Donald Trump.
Like Adolph Hitler of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Trump has a message to deliver to his followers and it is that you can go back, and that this is not your fault. Hitler told the Germans that losing World War One was not their fault, even though it certainly was, and that they'd been betrayed by the Jews. He would take them back, and not back to Imperial Germany, but to a Germany far beyond that which existed only in myth, when the Germans were rising out of the forest to conquer the world by right.
Trump promises to take Americans back, to Make America Great Again, and to take it back as well. Back to an era when we were the only power on the globe, the only one making things, and when all was right in the neighborhood. And, implicitly, just as Hitler promised to restore German greatness to the exclusion of all others whom the Volk had to deal with, Trump implicitly does the same. Trump's America is a white, male, Protestant one.
This narrow view of the United States doesn't reflect a country that actually ever existed, but it does completely buy off on two foundational myths of the country, one being the country was founded in much the same way betrayed in The Patriot, and the other being the less Puritan one of the 1950s. As odd as it may seem, Trumpist Americans see the country as a combination of strongly endowed with Puritan heritage while enjoying the pinups on the wall at a working class bar.
You cannot, of course, have both, which is the further irony. Every Trumpite who wants to "make America great again" and sees the country, as many strongly do, as a result of Manifest Destiny, would need to first consider that those early forebearors would be horrified by much personal conduct exhibited by average Americans today. Trump himself is basically a serial polygamist, something that up until recently was regarded as beyond the Pale for public figures outside of the entertainment industry. Divorced and remarried Americans who are populist standard-bearers are bearing a standard which, at its core, would not sanction that. We could go on.
Much of this is, we'd note, a failure of Conservatism. This all should have been something that Conservatives addressed, but they failed to effectively do so. Perhaps at least through Reagan they simply lacked the power to do so. They do lack the power to do so now, which explains the abandonment of democracy by a surprising number. But make no mistake, Conservatism and populist, let alone espousing Illiberal Democracy or fascism, are not at all the same thing. Conservatives are failing right now, as they have not taken on the illiberalism of the Trump forces that have stolen their banner.
We should hope they recover the courage to do so. Otherwise, large sections of the American public are falling into delusion, and the fate of the country rides on them being awakened from it.
Conservatives have good and valid points about the antidemocratic nature of the left that got us here. Only recently, it seems, have American progressives woken up to the need to support democracy. Before that, rule by a legal aristocracy was fine with them. But resorting to exclusion and denial of the vote, and the will of the voters, will not be the long term answer to anything. Rather, it sews the seeds of ultimate destruction, first to the true Conservative cause, and secondly to democracy itself.
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