Where Are We Now?

We are in limbo. That’s the short answer. I’ve spent the weeks since the election in shock—but not surprise, wondering why I was not surprised and trying to think of anything to say that would express my wordlessness. And failing. This is where polarization has taken us, and part of me feels my entire adulthood has been shaped by its unstoppable progress.

Born in the Depression and raised during World War II, I came of age at the birth of the Cold War when Communism was the Ogre, and Americans first started calling their political opponents “enemies.” Senator Joseph McCarthy rose to claim that the nation was riddled with cells of spies and Commie-sympathizers—largely on college campuses—and that college faculty should take loyalty oaths. The University of Chicago, where I was a student, refused his order and we were investigated. I was a graduate student wife at Berkeley when students protesting McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee were hosed down the steps of the San Francisco City Hall. Fear on the Right fueled this confrontation.

I was a young mother and faculty wife at the University of Michigan when Vietnam protests joined civil rights marchers, and the revolution of the Sixties spread across the nation’s campuses. What began as protests against the war and racism became a condemnation of the entire culture. My husband was a councilman and became a target. He and one other councilman lost reelection, costing the Democratic Party its first majority in years. Extreme anti-authoritarianism was the mark of the Left. At the alternative high-school my elder daughter attended, a pair of drama teachers took her class home for an introduction to alcohol and drugs. An elementary school teacher took my younger daughter and another student out to lunch to encourage them to defy their authoritarian parents. The city became a Mecca for runaway teens, and my elder daughter became one of them when I refused to let her return to that school. For me, true terror has come from the extremism of the Left. Most of the identity-centered politics that now make up the Democratic Party came out of these years, replacing the traditional economic-centered base and becoming more and more autocratic as it went.

I was a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara when Reagan led what I’ve always called the counter-revolution. Hyper-individualism, unregulated capitalism and small government were its hallmarks. “Privatize everything” was the battle-cry. As the causes on the Left sought to remake the culture, the Right sought to return the nation to the unrestrained capitalism of the Nineteenth Century, thus opening the chasm even further. As the Democratic Party deserted economic for social issues, Reaganomics did its work consolidating wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Democratic leaders paid little attention as unions crumbled, factories left the country, and retirement funds vanished. And the hostility of the stranded working class grew.

This brings me to the Twenty-First Century, which I’ve spent in retirement. Clearly, I’ve lived most of my life in academic communities; the central role of universities in the break-up of the nation is the topic in this month’s Atlantic Monthly and worth a blog or so on its own. The Tech Revolution has also played a major role, for the college-educated liberals joined the social-justice based products of the Sixties, splitting the Democrats from the working class economically as well as ideologically. That is food for another blog—or more. For now, I’ll just stress the increasing animosity of Left and Right and the role of fear in its progression.

The generation the Cold War had been shaped by the Depression and World War II. Peace was a new and fragile thing, fear of another catastrophe a raw presence. The rising and spreading attacks on the culture in the Sixties reached its height in 1968 with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and it really felt as though the nation was coming apart. During the Reagan years, economic and cultural issues ran on separate antagonistic tracks, each out to destroy the other. Democracy, which depends on debate and negotiation, became deadlocked. I remember silently begging Hillary Clinton to mention the economic conditions of the working class as she campaigned. She didn’t. Each side was equally oblivious of the issues of the other.

Because the California-based tech industry voted Democratic in the early years of the century, they joined the social justice bloc to become a powerful force, electing two Presidents. But as the Democratic Party remained focused on identity, promoting an ever increasing role of government in equalizing opportunity, the Republican Party continued to strive for larger and larger mega-corporations under less and less government restraint. The chasm between them widened and widened, and as compromise between them became more and more impossible, public trust eroded on both sides.

And Trump arose to fan the flames. All he had to do was call the national situation what it was—a mess. Biden was the first to stress strengthening unions and paying attention to working class issues, and Harris downplayed identity as a mixed race woman in her campaign, but it was too little too late. Biden was too old and Harris’s campaign played almost exclusively on her minority identity. They didn’t get it. Polarization brings that kind of blindness. Each faction lived in its own bubble without interest or contact with any other. I’ve heard two Washington US House of Representatives demand that Democrats need to pay attention to working class issues, but they seem to receive little attention.

So where are we? Trump will come to power and Republicans will control both houses of Congress. Elon Musk has apparently replaced Bannon as his chief advisor, giving big money yet another boost. They will attack the institutions that get in their way, and turn them into weapons against his enemies. It will be up to members of Congress and the Court to stop them, and They are unlikely to act unless they hear from us. Our sense of order depends on those institutions. The greatest danger is Trump’s promise to revenge dissenters, for that will silence us. My hope is that by midterm elections, both sides wake up to the cost of fear and desert the leaders of Trump’s rampage.