Last week a friend of mine asked me to concisely list everything that has brought us to this present political moment. Another friend also offered his additions to my incomplete list.
This is the result:
Begin with an underlying distrust about government, a distrust that is 250 years old, and that has now metastasized into a profound cynicism. Add an underlying American race hatred that is 400 years old and that has found its most accomplished 21st Century salesman.
Of the 11 States of the Confederacy, 9 are solid Red and 2 are nominally Purple. That switch to Red began with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The moral and economic calamity of Vietnam remains with us – its ghosts still help fuel a self-destructive fury.
Nixon begins the War on Drugs which continues to this day. No knock warrants and both the valorization and the militarization of the police have resulted.
In 1972 Roe v Wade splits the country and eventually helps create the Moral Majority which evolves over time into Christian Nationalism.
Reagan is elected on a call to empower capital and further empower the myth of the morally debilitated poor. Neo-liberal, laissez faire capitalism becomes a matter of dogma.
The cult of the gun is inextricably tied into the cult of the individual answerable to no one. In the debased American imagination, guns are more important than children. The failure of the Sandy Hook massacre to motivate meaningful federal legislative action is prima facie evidence of a deep moral rot.
Bill and Hillary Clinton, but especially 49-year-old Bill in his affair with a 22-year-old intern, contributes to the destruction of moral guidelines for the Presidency that had been shaky since JFK and that poisonously blossomed in the Johnson and Nixon administrations.
Fox News and Newt Gingrich make Democrats and city dwellers actual enemies of all other Americans.
9/11 shocks us into a paranoia that produces the Patriot Act, a very first step toward a surveillance state. Bush takes us into Iraq — a 1 trillion $ blood-soaked moral disaster.
Beginning in 2004, Mark Burnett offers The Apprentice and makes a failing real estate developer into a Master of the Universe.
The nation elects Obama. Half of all white people lose their minds.
The internet supercharges stupidity, conspiracies, deranged “truth tellers”, an amoral point of view that turns human beings into commodities and an overall culture of dreck and addictive algorithms. Our collective need for constant stimulation and entertainment begins to grow exponentially. Now add in the assembly line election of morons and grifters by a polis that has itself become distracted and incapable of sustained thought.
The Crash of 2008 occurs, and yet the billionaires and banks remained untouched.
Nature continues to be degraded by our addiction to consumption. This has become an elemental force driving our collective apocalyptic imaginings.
The Supreme Court in 2010 in the case of Citizens United legitimizes the overwhelming power of big money in politics.
The Republican Party becomes a Trump cult with MAGA as its engine.
A mainstream news media, corporate and cozied up to power, is incapable of meeting the moment.
The Country seems exhausted, as if it’s suffering from hardening of the arteries, as if it’s shuffling toward an ending no one can imagine. The Democratic leadership are old and exhausted or utterly lacking in a clarity of purpose, a clarity of principals, in imagination and especially in passion and fight. They still believe in political rules — “if only we do x, if only we say y, we can turn this around.” They do not understand that Trump and MAGA have forever altered traditional political rules and roles. Whomever among the Democrats figures that out will have a chance.
I know that I have missed lots of other factors, and it will take a generation or 2 for historians to even begin to see clearly how all of these events entwine and how all the causes and effects have come together to have created this wreckage.
