The 1973 Game: The Year Of Going Too Far

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 11 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

There's a natural progression to a
generation's historical arc.

A crisis for which current thought has
no answer creates new stories from the old opposition, which
overthrows the old older and is then validated by a new political
coalition.

Until this point it's possible to see
the failures of the past as emanating from some extremist fringe,
some virus within the old order that, once eradicated, makes it
viable again. But then the old mainstream goes too far, the new
majority identifies the whole of that mainstream as anathema, and a
new generation's politics are made solid, the way starch exploding in
heated liquid creates a stable pudding.

I saw this a generation ago, in 1973.
Liberals, desperate to gain the last possible advantage they could
through court action (since courts are the branch of government that
most resists change) handed down decisions like Roe vs. Wade. Roe was
a great decision for women but, as even feminist lawyer (now justice)
Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted, it was a decision that held within it the
seeds of a profound backlash, since it went beyond what legislators
and voters were willing to do and enshrined abortion as a natural
right.

Fast forward to our time, and we see
the conservative movement doing the same thing. By eviscerating the
Voting Rights Act and the very concept of campaign finance reform,
the Scalia Court is creating a backlash. Add to that the actions by
governors who are destroying local governments to go after unions,
who are seeking to gerrymander the Presidency, or legislators trying
to enslave women, teach creationism or impose an obligation to own
killing firearms, and you have the same dynamic at work. The old
mainstream is the new crazy.

When people see that they're about to
lose power, not for a year or several but for the rest of their
lives, it leads to desperate measures. The mainstream of a political
movement goes crazy, and takes its own future down with it.

In my youth I watched it happen to
Democrats, although the view was obscured by Watergate, which created
the false dawn of the Carter years. Now, with no scandal with which
to fight back, I'm watching it happen to Republicans.

President Obama is, at his base, a
history professor, and intuits this transformation even as he leads
it. He understands that, in giving the other side ample supplies of
rope, they will hang themselves. All he has to be is who he is, a
liberal reformer, a Stevenson Democrat like his mother, an
internationalist whose own politics were forged in opposition to the
old mainstream.

Each of our crisis Presidents was like
this. Richard Nixon developed his politics in opposition to a liberal
consensus. Franklin Roosevelt emerged from Woodrow Wilson's populism.
William McKinley agreed with “Mugwumps” like Grover Cleveland,
endorsing progressive change against infrastructure monopolies, on
behalf of a new mass manufacturing era. And Abraham Lincoln famously
wore his suit in the style of Henry Clay, whose Whig Party sought
modernization in the face of Democratic intransigence aimed at
placating the Slave Power.

But this is the time that tries a new
politic's soul. Neither Lincoln nor McKinley survived this fifth year
of their Presidencies. Nixon by this time had carved his own
political obituary from insecurity that had become paranoia. Even
Roosevelt found himself losing popular support, although the struggle
of his time turned out to be for democracy itself, against the rise
of German and Japanese absolutism, and it would eventually claim his
life.

What's most vital to realize is that
the actions of the old mainstream create their own backlash, that a
Crisis President does his best work symbolizing rather than
implementing change, and that in our system the economy leads, the
people follow, and the politicians can only dance on the historical
tide. I think Obama knows this, which is why his best moves, hopping
onto a stage, or placing one foot behind the other as he stands, are
a dancer's moves.

What is happening, beneath the surface,
is a profound economic change, ingenuity overcoming our dependence on
scarce, expensive fossil fuels, devices slowly creating the new
abundance we'll need to fight the environmental battles ahead. That
economic change is leading to new social and political arrangements,
based on a new dominant medium, the Internet replacing television,
and a new dominant paradigm, which for lack of a better term we'll
call Obamaism.

What is happening on the surface, of
course, is something completely different. We're obsessed over the
budget, with Republicans united only in saying no. We're horrified by
the spectre of Republican governors fighting the very concept of
democracy, Republican legislators attempting to impose an obsolete
social structure on the rest of us, on Republican judges kowtowing to
the vast economic power of oil that funds it all.

My point today is that it's all a sort
of Gotterdamerung, the twilight of a generation's political gods. If
it seems that Republicans have become crazy it's because becoming a
minority party makes you crazy, makes you desperate to cling on to
what power you can, to institutionalize it if you can, to write it
into the Constitution. It's the last hiding of nuts by squirrels
before the long winter closes in.

But what is fall for some is spring
for others. For Obamaism this is indeed March. It seems that the cold
will never let up, that spring may never come. But, politically, it
will. That's when the real challenges of our time begin, when the new
generation takes over, and my generation, the generation that fought
the War against the War, that fought Nixon and Reagan and Bush, moves
off the stage and is replaced by our children.