In history there are often reactionary movements to progress of all kinds. For example, the American Revolution dealt with Loyalists, who were colonists loyal to Great Britain, rather than joining in with the American Revolution. In the Russian Revolution of 1917, there was a backlash of supporters of the Czar that led to the Russian Civil War. Sometimes (as in the case with the American Revolution or Russian Revolution) the progressive element wins, however sometimes the reactionary element wins (such as in the Spanish Civil war) and sometimes some sort of long struggle and stalemate emerges, such as for instance after the American Civil War, the racist reactionaries established segregation which lasted for a century or so following the American Civil War. In the civil rights movement, there was of course unfortunately a backlash to that, starting in a small circle of academics in elitist, “country club” circles in the 1950’s, and growing into what is now known as the “conservative movement” that culminated in a racist backlash against civil rights which resulted some years later in the election of Ronald Reagan, and reached its ultimate crescendo of its aims of achieving a racist fascist regime in America with the 2016 election of Donald Trump. So in about 60 years, the conservative movement went from a racist reaction against civil rights largely confined to academia and to small parts of the Republican Party to completely taking over the Republican Party and the Presidency. (A difference between the Reagan and Trump administrations is that while both Presidents Reagan and Trump were motivated by racism, Trump did not bother to hide it as much as Reagan had, because his whole movement and appeal to his base was largely predicated on Trump’s making his misguided followers feel emboldened to express their racial resentments out loud, in a way they had not felt able to before. Sadly, for the Trump Administration, open racism was a feature, not a bug, and not even a subliminal feature as it had been in previous Republican Administrations).
Essentially what happened, beginning in the 1950’s in the Republican Party was a racist, segregationist, reactionary rump led by people like National Review magazine founder, segregationist William Buckley, which was largely motivated by race resentment, allied themselves with libertarians such as Senator Barry Goldwater. (This was an uneasy alliance as often the two groups did not like each other - for example the racist, xenophobic, and sexist Buckley disliked libertarian writer Ayn Rand (as she was herself a Russian immigrant) who in turn did not like Buckley much either, as her motivations were economic, not racial and cultural, however arguably misguided many of her ideas were in hindsight.) Nevertheless, segregationists such as Buckley strategically allied themselves with the libertarian wing of the Republicans, in order to squeeze out the more moderate elements, represented by people like Nelson Rockefeller, and even Richard Nixon. (For all his Machiavellian faults, it is ironic that Nixon was disliked by movement conservatives such as Buckley because they felt that Nixon was insufficiently racist, essentially.) This moderate - extremist tension within the Republican Party came to a head first in 1976, when the moderate President Gerald Ford beat the extremist Ronald Reagan for the Republican Presidential nomination that year, and then again four years later, when the result was reversed and the (relatively) moderate George H.W. Bush was beaten by Reagan for the nomination and the rest is sadly, history. Today, with President Trump essentially treating the Republican Party like his own personal fiefdom, driving (relative) moderates like Congresswomen Cheney or Senator Romney into the political wilderness, the “deal with the devil” that the 1960’s Republican libertarians made, has come to its full manifestation - the remaining beleaguered moderates in the Republican Party are all but extinct, and the libertarian element (which overlaps to an extent with the moderate element) is also relatively small and confined mostly to think tanks and academia, but the racist reactionary element that was once a fringe group lead by extremists like Buckley, is now almost wholly dominant in today’s Republican Party. This change, as I will here discuss, has had horrific consequences for America’s future, and dooms the younger generations (Generation X, Millennial, and Z) to economic hardship and depredation not experienced by the Baby Boom and earlier generations, and, indeed, has brought about an end to the concept of America as being a land of opportunity, or even, increasingly, a particularly desirable place to live in the word as compared to its peer countries with similar economic output.
Due to tax cuts for the wealthy which rewards asset ownership, not work, that is, a tax structure that relies heaviest on income taxes on working people and not on capital gains taxes on the wealthy, such that people like Warren Buffet pay less taxes as a percentage of their income than their secretaries do, over the past several decades, the gap between the wealthy and the middle class and working class has widened to being the biggest gap in the developed world. This not only means that the top 1% own most of the wealth of the country, it also means that social mobility is the lowest in the developed world. Back in the 1960’s, it was a well known fact that if one were born into a working class family in the UK, the chances of that person acquiring wealth throughout their lifetime and winding up in the upper classes was very low. By contrast, in America one had a better chance of social mobility back then. There were education subsidies for lower income people, interest rates for savings accounts were higher, and the costs of living such as housing were lower. Now however the situation is reversed, people in America have the lowest social mobility as compared to people in the UK and Europe. America is no longer the “land of opportunity”. During the pandemic, the top 0.01% of the population in terms of wealth actually doubled their wealth. On the other hand, the bottom 50% of people collectively have essentially 0 assets, once debt is factored in. This is a result of a combination of tax breaks for the wealthy as well as artificially low interest rates for many years, which penalizes savings (because inflation rises faster than interest earned by savings) but rewards stock market speculation, so the wealthy get to keep more of their wealth due to a tax system biased in their favor, and they get to gain more wealth by stock market speculation which is paid for in a sense by making it harder for average people to earn wealth by savings accounts. The system is “rigged” indeed but it is “rigged” in the favor of the white and the wealthy.
An unforeseen consequence of this whole thing has been a plummet of birth rates, such that birth rates are very far below replacement levels (hovering in the U.S., around 1.6 or 1.7 children on average per couple, with population break-even level being about 2.1). This is because in addition to peoples’ “real wealth” (adjusted for inflation) falling over the decades as a result of unfair monetary and tax policies, there has also been a related issue of increase of rent and housing prices. This is due in part to inflation which has been encouraged by right-wing policy makers in order to “grease the wheels” of the stock market, which has eroded the value of people’s savings and driven up rent costs at the same time, such that for example in cities like Boston today, a studio apartment might cost $1,600 a month. Another factor here is that extremist policy makers have allowed big corporations to buy up housing to their heart’s content, driving average buyers out of the market. So if people cannot afford rent and cannot afford to buy a house (as they could more easily in for instance in the 1960’s and 1970’s), they naturally will not have the children that they cannot afford to have. Economic growth is always tied to population growth, so, as the population declines due to declining birth rates, the economy will also contract. Right-wingers say that artificial intelligence and other types of technology can keep up the GDP even as the number of workers goes down, but just look at Japan - they have a similar population problem, and they have the world’s most advanced and widely used robotics, but this has not stopped Japan from being in an economic morass for over the past 30 years. Expecting technology to make up for a falling population is like pumps on a sinking ship, it can buy time, but it won’t stave off inevitable decline.
These unfair policies which have made it impossible for many working people to have children, and are contributing to the decline of standards of living and ultimately to population decline, have the protection of the courts. This again goes back to the devious machinations of the movement conservatives of the 20th century. They created the Federalist Society which is a racist organization whose primary purpose is to get extremist judges appointed, and reached its zenith of power not long ago when Federalist Society approved Justices Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett got on to the Supreme Court, giving the court an extreme reactionary tilt for probably a generation. Issues like fair housing will not get an equitable hearing in the courts due to their current makeup. There is a devious method to the madness here. Movement conservatives understood the fact that as the country diversified and grew, white majority rule was threatened, so they calculated that they could create white minority rule through the courts, which sadly has come to pass in many respects. The irony is that the extreme right is now being hoisted by their own petard: a shrinking economy hurts everyone, including the white elites whose interests movement conservatives have worked to promote for more than half a century. As the population declines as a direct result of right-wing policies, the economy declines, and this hurts the wealthy also, even if they are cushioned somewhat from the worst effects of economic decline.
Another aspect to all this is of course the environment. Extremist right-wing policies have led to climate change and a depletion of natural resources in general. It is estimated that, beyond the human cost, later in this century America may suffer up to 10 Trillion dollars worth of damage related to climate change (as areas of places like Miami and San Diego sink into the sea). I am putting this in dollar terms not to downplay the human cost of all this but to make the point that the movement conservatives who care about money, almost as much as they care about promoting white supremacy, have if you like shot themselves in the foot with their rolling back of environmental protections and wanton use of fossil fuels. The Trump Administration’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement was in a sense the final mistake, final in the sense that it was the major, pivotal mistake that has consequences that cannot now be avoided and will create disaster for everyone, including for those on the right who have been in denial about climate change, or think selfishly that they can avoid the consequences of the environmental catastrophe they have created.
In summary, in a couple decades or less, America will be in very steep economic decline, suffering the ravages of climate change and of population loss due to entirely self-inflicted extreme right-wing policies that came out of a small group of racists like William Buckley, who set out to remake the country in their image, starting back in the 1950’s.
I would make the following suggestions as to how to respond from a progressive standpoint to this tragic state of affairs.
1) While big change on a federal level is not realistic due to the structural disadvantages presented by the U.S. Senate (which was originally constituted incidentally in order to protect the interests of slave states, and so disproportionately favors smaller, whiter states), it is still important to “play defense” at least at the federal level. This means not only is it important to try to win Presidential elections but (sometimes overlooked by progressives) it is Also important to put all efforts into winnable Senate contests because it is the Senate that determines the makeup of the judiciary. Winning the U.S. House of Representatives is “nice to have '' but the Senate is more important, due to its role in the judiciary, a fact the right-wing picked up on a long time ago, so progressives need to understand this also.
2) If change at a federal level in a major, systemic way is right now unrealistic, progressives can still have victories at a state level, so more attention needs to be paid by the progressive grass roots to state and local elections, in order to make progress on important issues such as affordable housing and climate change. Again, this is a lesson long ago understood by the right wing, that piling up state-level victories can be a precursor to nationwide change, so this is another lesson that progressives need to learn as well.
3) The movement conservatives as I mentioned above made temporary alliances with libertarians whom they did not much care for, in order to further their agendas long term. Similarly, progressives may at times need to make alliances with other factions within the Democratic Party that may be more hawkish in foreign policy than some progressives want, or who may indeed be more oriented towards globalist capitalism than some progressives want, in order to defend against the worst excesses of the newly resurgent fascism America is now dealing with. Indeed it may at times be necessary to work with some moderate Republicans in order to save our democracy. The movement conservatives came to dominance in part by a willingness to make temporary quarter with elements of the Republican Party they did not much care for, and also worked with some of the racist segregationist “Dixiecrats” of the civil rights era to further their agenda of taking over the Republican Party and ultimately the country, so by the same token progressives need to take heed of this and be willing to bite the bullet and compromise at times to prevent the current slide towards fascism. While generating voter enthusiasm and turnout in the base is always important, especially in the very polarized era we now live in, a willingness to work with people of different ideological orientations is often necessary, so this fact needs to be communicated effectively to the base activists.
4) Finally, the racist movement conservatives of the 1950’s and 1960’s played the long game. They did not truly achieve national power until Ronald Regan in the 1980’s and they did not in fact achieve total dominance at the federal level in terms of the Presidential, legislative, and judicial branches of power, until Trump took office in 2017. That was more than a half century-long arc of the rough beast of racist reactionaries, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born, to channel poet William Yeats. The movement conservatives succeeded in their devious machinations in part because they were patient, and were playing the game over multiple generations. Progressives must have the same mentality. If it took around 60 years for the movement conservatives to achieve their goals, it may take 60 years from now for progressives to roll them back. So there must be a willingness to pile up small victories here and there, slowly but surely, including at the state and local levels, and build up bigger achievements over time.
To end on an optimistic note, or at least a less pessimistic one, the movement conservatives broke the country and they did it while never operating from a majority support position. Hitler never had a majority support either even at the height of his power in mid-1930’s Germany. The anti-fascists Do have the advantage of numbers. So the key lesson here is that anti-fascists have to be as strategic, and as patient, as are the enemies of democracy. The hour is late indeed, but perhaps the bell has not yet tolled for the American experiment.
