1997 (qua 1887): The author with the old Red Sox fan and her millennials. Partying with my peeps while the New Deal was going to hell.
I’m a 57-year-old woman who spends her days surrounded by millennials. Right now, my world is full of “Bernie Babies.” Yeah, I’m all-in for Bernie too—sending all the money I can to Bernie and his down-ticket friends; phone banking; talking him up and pleading his case to family, acquaintances, and total strangers in the grocery store.
Yes, I am kind of obsessed, and frankly amazed that someone so aligned with my worldview is actually resonating with more than six people. I feel like one of the Whos down in Whoville, and finally someone can hear us shouting, “We are here!” “We are here!” (No offense, President O. I love you and admire you! But you are two miles to the right of my worldview.)
Now here’s the thing: I hope, hope, hope we can help Bernie pull off this nomination. But we might fall short. It might not happen. Speaking as a white-haired lady who has been wandering in the desert her whole adult life, I’m counting on you Young Ones to stick with me if that happens. Don’t curl up in a ball on me.
Because we’re playing a long game and the paradigm shift is coming. Recently economist Thomas Piketty made a good case for the coming sea change. www.theguardian.com/...
How can we interpret the incredible success of the “socialist” candidate Bernie Sanders in the US primaries? The Vermont senator is now ahead of Hillary Clinton among Democratic-leaning voters below the age of 50, and it’s only thanks to the older generation that Clinton has managed to stay ahead in the polls.
Because he is facing the Clinton machine, as well as the conservatism of mainstream media, Sanders might not win the race. But it has now been demonstrated that another Sanders – possibly younger and less white – could one day soon win the US presidential elections and change the face of the country. In many respects, we are witnessing the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the victory of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 elections.
This piece filled me with joy and it’s well worth reading the whole thing. Piketty goes on to discuss the political climate from the 1930s to the 1970s, and then the paradigm shift into the Reagan era. He concludes that today, “new forms of political mobilization and crowdfunding can prevail and push America into a new political cycle.”
After you read that article, go listen to a short interview on The Nation’s “Start Making Sense”, where Harvard Kennedy School’s Richard Parker argues that “Bernie Sanders is the leading edge of the historical forces that will bring the Reagan era to an end”. soundcloud.com/... (Click on 12:30 to hear this segment.)
Parker looks at political history rather than economic history, but his conclusions overlap with Piketty’s. According to Parker and Stephen Skowronek (a political philosopher Parker quotes), there have been just a few presidents who have ushered in new political eras that have then persisted for decades. These paradigm shifts happen in times of crisis, when conditions in the country are rough and people are hurting.
Per Parker, the Great Depression gave us FDR, and the “FDR era” lasted until 1980. During that time, there were only two Republican presidents, and they were each centrists, both in temperament and because they had to work with liberal congresses. Thus Eisenhower gave us the Warren Court and Nixon gave us the Clean Air Act.
In 1964, during the FDR era, the Republicans ran the hard-right Barry Goldwater, but he lost in a landslide. en.wikipedia.org/...
Then came the clusterf*** that was the late 1970s: “stagflation,” oil crisis, hostage crisis, recession. In 1980, Jimmy Carter was vulnerable, but the Republican establishment thought they had learned their lesson from the Goldwater disaster. According to the Christian Science Monitor in March of 1980:
The nation's Republicans are working against the clock to answer two key questions: Can conservative Ronald Reagan possibly attract enough independent and Democratic votes to win in November?...The consensus among political experts is that…Gerald Ford…still appears the stronger choice to beat Jimmy Carter in November.
As we know, the political experts were wrong. The brilliance of running Reagan: Carter was going down no matter what because the country was effed up everywhere you looked. Why not seize that moment to run a Goldwater protégé who would make a real and lasting change? Why tinker around the edges when you have The Mo?
As it happens, I’m old enough to know a little bit about these political sea changes. As a little girl, I never tired of hearing one particular story told by my grandfather (Paul was his name). It was 1932 and he came home from the factory to tell my grandmother that, “Foreman says it’s pretty important to vote for Hoover.” Now my Grammy could not read (having passed up first grade to make her professional debut as a scullery maid), but she had been listening to the candidates’ speeches on the neighbors’ radio. As my Grampy told the story, he was shocked because my Grammy absolutely never had disagreed with his interpretation of the world at large. “And your grandmother looked at me and said, ‘No, Pauly, you’re gonna vote for F.D.R’. And so, children, that is why our family are Democrats.” Paradigm shift by radio.
I came of age during the death throes of the FDR era. The 2013 film, “American Hustle,” captures the zeitgeist pretty well. From time to time when my children were younger, I would get on a kick of trying to show them favorite films from my youth. “Poseidon Adventure” did not go over well. This disaster movie was typical of the time, and to us it seemed hopeful: Shit happens, and you come through. (“There’s Got to Be a Morning After.”) My kids found it really depressing. (But that was then.)
I graduated from college in 1981, as the Reagan era was taking hold and the world took a harsh right turn. (Yeah, trust me, Nancy Reagan did NOT start a conversation about AIDS.) Supposedly the Class of 1981 faced the worst job market since the Great Depression. But now you millennial lot have surely outdone us. We may have had our disaster movies, but your world is full of zombies and dystopian hellscapes of all sorts.
And here’s the thing: I feel bad about that. I feel like I let you all down. Because in the 1980s I stuffed a million envelopes and walked off my shoes for Jesse’s Rainbow Coalition, but then I gave up and went home and got busy with raising my own babies. I really lowered my guard when Democrat Bill Clinton was at the helm. Now I realize the Reagan era was still in full force. I wish I had been paying more attention when the “Omnibus Crime Bill of 1994” went down. I wish I had been writing letters when Glass-Steagall was being dissolved. And I wish I had been out in the streets protesting in 1998 when we let them make student loans non-dischargeable. (And, by the way, when the hell did we privatize all those prisons, anyway?)
So, yes, Babies, we white-haired people effed up. In my job I have to run credit checks on many young people, and I see the mountains of debt we have crippled you with; indentured servitude for a whole generation. In my roles as high-school PTA president and urban-renewal-board member, I have seen the tragedy of the thriving school-to-prison pipeline. And just as an ordinary citizen I watch the climate train wreck unfold.
But there are signs that a new paradigm shift is coming. Remember when Candidate Obama appeared to praise Reagan back in 2008?
I do think that, for example, the 1980 election was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. … I think he tapped into what people were already feeling.
Obama was not praising Reagan’s policies, but rather Reagan’s success as a “change agent”. But, sadly, in the case of the Obama election, the time had not yet come for a real sea change. (Obama did okay with what he had to work with, and I will forever sing his praises for Sotomayor and Kagan.)
But now may be the time. It’s like this: My dad was a Red Sox fan, the quintessential infracaninophile. They had last won the World Series when my Grammy was a teenager, back in 1918. Every year for decades my dad and I would root like crazy for the Sox and they would often come out of the box strong, surging ahead until the All-Star break or beyond. Then they would inevitably, sometimes spectacularly, crash and burn. Once they were out of the running, my dad would say, “That’s okay. This is not their year. Next year may be their year.” My dad passed away in 2001. When the Sox won the series in 2004 I burst into tears because my dad had not lived to see it.
He did not see it, but it happened. And you all will see the progressive paradigm shift. If our guy Bernie doesn’t make it this time, let’s send him back to the Senate where he and Elizabeth Warren can kick some major ass. Let’s send some more socialistic democrats to the House to swell the Progressive Caucus. Let’s fight for that minimum wage and prison reform and all the rest of it. And let’s all millions of us make such a noise that Hillary can’t pull any pro-fracking or pro-banking or pro-regime-change crap on us.
My Grammy had a radio, but you all have twitter and the rest of the social media universe. I am in awe of you and I promise to stay awake if you do. Together we are Invincible A. F.
A song for you::
