“IS THE REAGAN REVOLUTION NEARING COMPLETION?”
I’m a little late coming to Imani Perry’s fine book “South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation,’ but in reading of her travels South and her reflections on it, I am reminded of how the deep the resistance is to the justice movements of the 1960’s: movements on race, gender, sexual orientation, class, capitalism, and environmental justice. And, as Dr. Perry’s book demonstrates, the resistance to these justice movements is not just located in the South – it is a deep part of our national history. She was born in Alabama, so she knows our language and our approaches to life, but in them, she also sees the depth of white, male supremacy that continues to plague us all as a nation.
As SCOTUS continues to strike down basic civil rights protection, I am taken back to the part of my life where I began to change on these issues: in the decade of the 1960’s. One of my friends scoffs at the 60’s, calling it a time of self-indulgence, the rise of the individual, and the breaking of community in America. While some of that is true, it was also a time when old ways of oppression and death began to be mitigated, including the thundering resistance to the Vietnam War, and when new communities - more centered on justice - began to form. Whatever one thinks of the 60’s, however, the movements for justice in that decade were strong enough to call forth a powerful counter-revolution, a revolution that got its sea legs under Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Nixon began it in the 1968 presidential election with his “Southern Strategy,” teaching white males how to re-institute racism without ever mentioning race. It is a strategy that they have followed ever since.
Nixon’s own personal shortcomings short-circuited this counter-revolution, and this movement would wait on a TV star/actor from California to lead it. Reagan came into office in 1980, beginning his campaign for the presidency at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the kidnaping and murdering of three civil rights workers in 1964: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. He never mentioned any of that, but his unspoken message was that he would be the candidate to restore white, male supremacy. His approach would be that government is the problem, not the solution. To those white people in the South and beyond who railed at the federal interventions on education, civil rights, and women’s rights, this approach was music to their ears. In this way, Reagan began a counter-revolution that continues – don’t tell those of us classified as “white” how to live our lives, don’t mess with us.
This revolution has continued to move forward – from the defeat of the Equal Rights Movement to Lee Atwater’s use of Willie Horton to propel George H.W. Bush to the presidency to the ascendance of a right-wing Supreme Court to the invasions of Iraq by the Bush dynasty, to the cuts in public assistance and the growth of prisons under the Clinton administration to the disasters of the W Bush administration to the blasphemy that is the Trump administration. We should be clear here – the presidency of Donald Trump is not an aberration. It is rather the culmination of a counter-revolution that began almost 50 years ago, a movement that began in response to the push for justice and equity in the 1960’s.
There are, of course, movements for justice and equity that continue. The election of Barack Obama as the first African-American President of the United States was a stunning achievement, but it scared many white folks to death, and it led us to Donald Trump as president. Black Lives Matter, the renewed fight for the ERA, Gay Pride, the fight for preservation of the earth – all these speak of the continuing powerful and deep energy for the idea of liberty and justice for all. I’ll continue this conversation next week, but for now, I want us to be mindful that Trump is not an aberration. In many ways, he is the culmination of the Reagan counter-revolution. And, yes, it will be wonderful if the Democrats can regain control of Congress in November but let us be clear-eyed on this: the Reagan Revolution will continue.
