The Forty-Year Itch

I've concluded that the years between 1980 and 2020 will be looked upon by future historians - assuming that climate change doesn't wipe out the human race first - as the period in which America lost its mind.  It will be remembered as the period in which social, political, and cultural standards fell through the floor, a time when abolishing taxes on the rich and abolishing abortion services for women were considered sound government policy, a time when when privatizing public services and making private lives public domain was considered normal, a time when speaking aggressively into microphone to a computerized beat was accepted as music, a time when movies with commuter-generated special effects were heralded as great cinema, a time when advances in communication  resulted in a loss of the art of communicating, and a time when being famous for existing counted more than being famous for doing.  As Kurt Andersen recently wrote, there's always been a degree of insanity binding These States together, but the most recent four decades have been crazier than the two centuries that came before.

Attentive readers will note that this period is framed by Ronald Reagan's election to the Presidency and Donald Trump's planned bid for re-election to that office.  That, of course, is assuming he isn't forced out of office first.  But the Ronald and the Donald make perfect bookends to the most recent four decades - two entertainers fronting the Republican right wing and getting elected President with some vague promise of restoring American greatness, only to preside over a further diminishing of this land we call home.  In between, we've had as President two guys named George Bush who sought to preserve the legacy of Ronald Reagan and two young, engaging moderate Democrats who got elected because their charisma reminded people of Reagan.  And Reagan's supply-side economics made Trump possible.  Both men symbolize 1980s greed, and even today it still feels like we're still living in the 1980s.

Now, there were times before when I thought that this era of foolishness and devolution were coming to an end.  I thought so when Bill Clinton was elected President, when 9/11 shook everyone out of complacency, when the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006 and paved the way for Barack Obama's election to the Presidency in 2008, and when Obama was elected in the aftermath of the worst economic downturn in eighty years.  Each time, I was wrong.  And then it hit me: This era was kicked off by an insubstantial, opportunistic incompetent showman becoming our leader.  For this era to end, we needed another an insubstantial, opportunistic incompetent showman to lead us.  But not just any old insubstantial, opportunistic incompetent showman - we needed someone who made Ronald Reagan look like George Washington, someone who disrespected the norms and ideas of what leadership should be, someone who went beyond misunderstanding the facts, as Reagan did, but who instead would offer lies in the guise of "alternative facts."  We needed someone who would wake Americans up more than any terrorist attack, stock market crash, or cynical war policy ever could.  We needed Trump to show us who we are . . . and, quite frankly, what we've become.  And his current push to declare a national emergency so he can build a border wall that the majority of Americans do not want may be the tipping point.  The antidote to the rattlesnake's venom is the venom itself.

But that does not mean we're going to automatically turn the page in 2020 and start a new, more civilized, more enlightened era.  Now that Trump has us aware, we need to turn that awareness into action.  The 2018 midterms may have been an excellent start, but they were just a start. We need to work hard and push harder to get Trump out of the White House.  But even if we elect a new President with intelligence, dignity, honesty, and integrity, that won't mean diddly-squat if we all go home and let that person run the country like we did in 2009.  Because even if we have a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress in 2021, we could still have a Democratic Party beholden to corporate interests and not the people.  If we want to end stupidity and barbarism and all that stuff, we gotta hold a Democratic Congress accountable and make them educate our children better, come up with sustainable energy and transportation systems, end gun violence, help local economies, and provide all of the other nice things that make a country worth living in.  And if hate has no home here, we gotta make sure that anyone who supports a hateful person like Donald John Trump has no home in the body politic. 

And if a Democrat is somehow elected President in 2020, then we gotta hold his or her feet to the fire.  Part of the reason Franklin Roosevelt did so much to save America from the aftereffects of a similarly foolish era in our history (the Roaring Twenties) is because Americans made him do it - he wanted to give us Social Security and public works, but he couldn't have done it without the people making him and Congress do it.  Either we do this with the 46th President and the 117th (and 118th) Congress or we end our decline not with a renaissance but with a fall, like what happened with Odoacer's conquest of Rome in A.D. 476, the Norman conquest of England at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, or the Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453.  

This is the fifth or sixth time I have believed that this era of decline was coming to an end.  This time, let's make sure it is.  It began with a smarmy showman, so let's make sure it end with the smarmy showman we have now.