It’s all so familiar, for those of us past a certain age. The rage, the sense of betrayal, the disbelief that this just could not happen. Their causes are so just! Their causes are so right! Their causes are so self-evident! If only the ignorant could just see…
Sit down kids and let me tell you about the 1970s. If the 60s were the decade of Left protests, the 70s were the decade when those protests became action. That evil man Nixon was deposed, the Vietnam War ended, Earth Day was founded, the sexual revolution due to the pill came in full force, second wave feminism started and there was going to be an equal rights amendment, really there were equal rights movements for every group under the sun, Sesame Street was telling the kids to be nice to each other, college was for everyone, Title IX was passed, inner city urban culture would be recognized and celebrated, the Cold War thawed, war (by America anyway) was abolished, churches were emptying, gun control efforts started, secular beliefs were rising, world hunger and poverty were being reduced. It was fantastic. The future was here. Disco was invented. And the Left was going to win.
That’s what the Left saw. What regular people saw was: vicious urban blight, a defeated military, weak foreign policy, outrageous gas prices, an energy crisis, burdensome environmental regulations, hedonism, narcissism, the rise of smug Left intellectual elites, the emptying of churches, gun control rising, a loss of patriotism, an embarrassing and weak America. Disco was invented. And America was failing.
I was a grade school kid at that time and looking back, it was strange. We were told about the Population Bomb, that we would all be starving because the population would not be able to feed itself. Great thing to tell a kid who was born only a few years earlier that they should expect to starve to death as adults. Us boys, in the name of fighting the great patriarchy, were pushed to the side for a “girl-forward” school structure. For many of us, our self-esteem never recovered. We were shown films depicting all the food we would eat in our lifetimes by volume to instill guilt at material needs (remember that population bomb?) and I recall an odd lesson about composting toilets, for some reason. But it was all great and necessary to make A Better World ™.
A great documentary that probably most of you has seen sums up this period in history perfectly: Monty Python’s Life of Brian. No, seriously. Watch the movie with commentary. The Pythons say that they based the People’s Front Of Judea (SPLITTERS!) on the British Labor Party of the 1970s. Instead of doing anything for the people the party had crawled up its own ass, sorry, arse, and spent all their time debating useless abstractions. In the U.S., Gerald Ford kept the seat warm and fell down stairs, then Jimmy Carter put solar panels of the roof of the White House and said we should put on sweaters instead of dealing with the energy crisis. The result was a decade of chaos and ineffectiveness.
By 1979 everyone had enough. In that year the Equal Rights Amendment failed to be passed and Margaret Thatcher was elected. In 1980 Ronald Reagan defeated Carter handily, and in 1984 he annihilated Walter Mondale, winning 49 states.
For the Left this was Armageddon. They figured they lost everything they had been building since the 1960s. The world had spun around to the Reagan Revolution and all the old powers of evil they had defeated came roaring back.
Did the Left reconsider? Did they regroup and say, yeah, maybe we went too far too fast. Maybe the people were right and some of our ideas were outlandish and unworkable, strange even.
No, they did not do that. They became bitter, viciously bitter. The Left politicians became New Democrats and started to plot how to out-Republican the Republicans. The activists went into academia and invented Wokeism.
The rage never faded, like a political PTSD. Every presidential election was life and death. Each Republican candidate was The Devil. Bush, Dole, W. Bush, McCain; they even demonized Mitt Romney, perhaps the most boring presidential candidate in living memory. Each lost election an echo of 1980, the Great Defeat. In the schools, the academics preached about the Great Defeat and warned that unless they took over, unless they treated each democratic election as existential, nay, until they defeated democracy itself, all would be lost into a morass of populism, religion, and individual freedom. The idea trickled down so that every single Republican win from school board to White House was a Great Defeat and Armageddon. The accumulated tears could have powered a hydroelectric dam.
But their faith was strong and the one who prophesy foretold appeared, the orange one, the outsider, the game show host, yea, Trump himself. The Adversary.
So they were primed for Trump Derangement Syndrome. Now that the two branches of the Left—the radical activists and the New Democrats—have reunited after their long fork in the road, the young are the shock troops of the old. And while the young ground troops are mired in TDS the old ones, the Boomer era Lefties like the Clintons and Pelosi and Schumer, they’re still fighting against Reagan. To them, it’s not about Trump. It’s about avoid another Great Defeat so that their agenda cannot fade away for decades. No more Reagan Revolutions. No more Thatchers. No more 1979, 1980.
And if they have to annihilate freedom and democracy itself then so be it. Because their causes are so just! Their causes are so right! Their causes are so self-evident! If only the ignorant could just see…
This is so completely out of touch. I doubt you could substantiate even a single of the extremely broad and shallow claims you’re making about “the Left.” Nice vibes-based polemic though I guess. It’s just a shame there’s no historical literacy on display.