February 1, 2018
We are through the looking glass. Those of us in the reality based community watch aghast as attacks on the independence of the FBI metastasize from infecting a handful of Trump toadies to The Speaker of the House. Earlier this week, Paul Ryan openly called for a need to “cleanse” the FBI (Source: “Paul Ryan calls for a ‘cleanse’ of the FBI and wants Trump to release the secret GOP memo,” by Brennan Weiss, Businessinsider.com 1/30/18). These are the actions of autocracies that bury the truth to protect the rulers at all costs, heedless of the impact of their actions on the Rule of Law, the integrity of the government or the will of the people.
America, it would seem, is no longer a democracy. Although it seems as if our decline has been precipitous and swift, if we are honest, we know it only seems that way. Since Barry Goldwater’s ignominious defeat at the hands of LBJ in 1964, arch conservatives who worship white supremacy, men and money, have been painstakingly plotting their comeback. They began by pioneering the “Southern Strategy” with Richard Nixon to entice Southern states into the arms of the Republican Party. They perfected it with Ronald Reagan, whose sunny and avuncular demeanor masked a hard right agenda that was hostile to Civil Rights for Black people, equal rights for women and basic humanity for the LGBT community. We should not forget that Reagan’s campaign was marked by a speech on “states’ rights” in Neshoba County, Mississippi, 7 miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were brutally murdered in 1964 for registering Black people to vote. For those too young to remember, “states’ rights” was the rallying cry of Southerners trying to use the 10th Amendment to deny Black people the protections of the 14th.
Reagan persists in the national imagination as an affable leader who presided over our return to prosperity, but the truth is that he was the first president to successfully wield a coalition of hard right ideologues from militant supply siders, to patriarchal fundamentalist Christians to resentful working class whites to dramatically recast Americans’ view of the social contract.
Reagan successfully moved the center rightward, such that it became an article of faith that government was bad and that therefore, taxing people to support it was unjust. Reagan’s famous quip that “government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem,” represented a sharp break from the previously predominant view that the role of government was to serve the common good. He replaced it with a nearly religious belief that massive tax cuts benefiting the wealthy would trickle down and benefit the rest of us. The reality is that those tax cuts tripled the deficit and were paid for by starving the safety net.
During his tenure, Reagan reduced the federal education budget by half and justified those cuts by successfully demonizing public education. He convened a “blue ribbon” commission to study the state of public education. That commission issued a “critical and far-reaching denunciation of public education, entitled, ‘A Nation at Risk,’” that has colored the view of public education ever since (Source: “The Educational Legacy of Ronald Reagan,” by Gary K. Clabaugh, Educational Horizons, www.files.eric.gov).
The one-two punch of aggressive defunding and masterful use of the bully pulpit of the Presidency to turn Americans against public education laid the foundation for the ensuing real decline in the quality of public education, where fiscally strapped districts eliminated “frills” like music, art and physical education and re-shaped curricula to produce model employees, rather than model citizens.
That is how we got here- with a nation of people who don’t know what our Constitution says or how the separation of powers is supposed to work. Our nation of Philistines who disdain intellectual rigor, innovation and expertise was built by design. Such a populace is easy to manipulate by appeal to hatred or to mollify with modern day bread and circuses like flat screen TVs and Super Bowls.
Although Trump is like the photographic negative of Ronald Reagan, peevish and resentful where Reagan was positive and cheerful, both men share precisely the same policy approach of abandoning any pretense that public funds are for the public good, so that they may enrich the already wealthy. They share the same approach to maintaining power – blunting opposition by appealing to the naked racism, misogyny and homophobia that is never far from the surface in American life. Now, more than ever, it is critical to understand how the conditions for our current moment were built over decades, because you know what they say about those who are ignorant of history….