A political tide turned against liberalism in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the New Right.
Funded by ultra-rich ideologues, the New Right made a sharp turn away from moderate conservatism – which for a decade or more had supported reasonable advances like abortion rights and environmental protection – and embraced issues it could use to divide the coalition of middle and working class voters that built modern America.
While dismantling the laws and institutions that fostered the world’s largest middle class, the New Right embraced a three-point mantra which it cloaked as a return to “traditional values” with the grandfatherly Reagan leading us back to the “good old days.”
Marketed with gobbledygook such as “trickle down” and “fiscal austerity,” the mantra amounted to this: 1) The rules are off, 2) It’s every man for himself, and 3) Only the strong survive.
More than 40 years of this nonsense gutted the middle class, the bridge that once helped the poor to cross into income security. It reversed progress on the rights of workers, minorities and women. And it turned Americans against each other.
A person need only glance at a few social statistics – soaring rates of white suicide, obesity and incarceration – to appreciate how profoundly the mantra of the New Right, as embraced by the Republican Party, has damaged our nation.
Here in small-town Alaska, we have so bankrupted our public school system that our teaching jobs are attractive primarily to workers from poor nations. To gain any advantage, citizens have turned their homes into motels and have started selling food out of vans and trailers.
More and more, America resembles Mexico, a struggling, third-world nation hobbled by corruption and vast disparities of wealth.
Republican Party leaders like Donald Trump offer no real solutions to problems that plague our nation because they can’t. The party adopted the mantra of the New Right as its religion decades ago and any deviance from religious orthodoxy is sacrilege to its true believers.
Trumpism is Reaganism taken to its logical extreme. Reagan promised to take government off our backs. Donald Trump promises to put government in the trash can and replace it with just him.
If socialism is the end-game of liberal thinking, fascism is the logical extreme of conservatism. Forty years of rhetoric pitched against representative democracy has worn away support for norms that have held us together. In the hot-house of politics practiced without moderation, citizens lose patience with discussion and compromise.
They want simplicity, the flashy lure offered by strongmen.
For the third time in eight years, our nations is flirting with fascism, with half the country apparently ready to ditch representative democracy altogether and trade it in for a guy with a fat mouth and a thin resume.
Against the backdrop of the history, that’s not surprising. Democracies have always been rare, fragile and short-lived. Germany was the most culturally and scientifically advanced nation on earth when Hitler rose to power.
It’s foolhardy to assume that the United States of America is immune to the same madness.