Just finished a re-read of Before The Storm, Rick Perlstein’s superlative account of the Goldwater campaign of 1964. The first in his trilogy tracing the development of contemporary conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s – or perhaps, tracing the decline and fall of traditional Republicanism – it informs a lot of the nonsense we see going on today.
Barry Goldwater was in no way orthogonal to the conservative movement in the 1950s and early 1960s – he was in sympathy with the people Perlstein opens the book by describing: the traditional Midwestern manufacturing firms, family-owned, who felt tremendously hard-done-by in the aftermath of depression and war by an emerging political consensus that was pro-union, pro-government and agreeable to Eastern money interests rather than Midwestern business. That belief system was neatly bundled with anti-Communist paranoia from Birchers and the like, and the whole thing dovetailed neatly into the Southern doctrine of massive resistance to desegregation and civil rights, and before you know it, Barry Goldwater – stalwart libertarian, NAACP sympathizer, generally mistrustful of big government, and a Senator who would crack wise late in life about being an “honorary homosexual” for defending the rights of gay soldiers to join and remain in the service – Barry Goldwater found himself riding a noisy racist tiger with no easy way to climb off.
The description of the movement – paranoid, anti-government, looking for Reds under every flat surface, convinced the United States was being led down the road to ruin – is functionally indistinguishable from the Tea Party GOP as it exists today. It found its perfect avatar in Sarah Palin and led eight years on to Donald Trump – no politician at all, no experience in government of any kind, just a notionally-self-funded barbaric yawp, the id of the worst of America made manifest. Unlike Senator Goldwater, he seems to be in this thing mostly for the greater glory of Trump, as one yahoo after another makes an ass of themselves proclaiming how great he is and how he’s gonna stick it to the Mooslims or the Messicans or whatever else.
This is the dilemma – yes, there are serious issues in American life right now as the economy crumbles underneath the feet of the have-nots. Silicon Valley is firmly committed to its goal of abstracting away the Morlocks to the Eloi can enjoy their best life, while it becomes rapidly apparently that nobody has a plan once every cashier is automated away by an app and that we can’t have a hundred million people driving delivery. Especially when the self-driving cars arrive. And God help you if all you have is a 401(k), because it’s starting to become apparent that basing your retirement on someone else’s stock speculation was a fool’s errand. If you feel like the whole world is turning on you and that the game is rigged and you’re getting the short end of the stick, guess what? It’s not paranoia if they’re genuinely out to get you.
But.
If you think Trump is the answer – if you think a reality-TV hairpiece driven by the comment section at AL.com and the kinds of things that aging white men think sound great on Twitter is the person who’s going to solve everything – then you are stupid. Full stop. You want political correctness run amuck, here it is: thirty percent of the country is stupid enough to vote for this idiot for President and we’re not allowed to call a spade a spade. Miss me with this shit about how it’s wrong and dangerous to mock these people. Some of their problems are real. Some of their concerns are very legitimate. We’ve spent years nursing this doctrine that everyone can be a tremendous success and that it’s all your fault if you aren’t, and it’s not unreasonable to expect people to be looking for someone to blame, but scapegoating grounded in racism and bigotry and the notion that somehow “Mr. Trump” is going to wind the clock back fifty years so that white people can stay immune to the consequences of their actions – that. is. fucking. stupid.
And the truly ironic thing is that all of this paranoia, all of this anti-government rage, all of this THANGS AIN’T JESUS LIKE THEY USTA BE, all this idea that the wealth creators and the well-to-do are the ones REALLY being done wrong in the modern economy and that the working class and poor are the lucky duckies – every bit of that is sitting right there in the late 1950s, in that golden era that people want to go back to now. Replace the Mexicans and the Muslims with the blacks and the Communists and piss and moan about the New Deal and Social Security instead of Obamacare and it’s exactly the same. Dubya didn’t invent I Got Mine Fuck You. Neither did Reagan. Neither did Goldwater, for crying out loud. This has been with us for three generations and probably beyond, and you can probably take it back to the “malefactors of great wealth” that another Republican railed against in his day if you want to dig. They’re selling the same old vintage-1959 liquid shit in shiny new bottles with two-day Prime delivery for free, and our political consensus is too battered by forty years of fuckery to tell them to shove that shit back where they got it from.
The GOP has been riding this tiger in some form or another for fifty years and change. Now they’ve fallen off in front of it. It’s important for us as a society to shoot that tiger dead before it can do any more harm…once it’s done with lunch.