Reversion To Mean

The fantastic Will Bunch had a great, but depressing, piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer the other day that described the anger and sadness that so many who lived through the 1960s, myself included, feel in seeing everything they fought for, everything they believed in, being wiped away. It is especially galling when the figurehead of the multi-pronged, multi-decade effort to erase the progress that was made is so patently fraudulent, so clownishly corrupt, and so insipidly stupid as Trump. Evil we expected, but not in such an empty blue suit.

In the success of our youth, we believed in the dream that the arc of the universe bends toward freedom and justice. After all, we appeared to be bending it. In time, however, with our own lived experience suffering under Reaganomics and the 1980s, the admonitions of our elders who fought to simply to lay the groundwork for the 1960s rang true and we convinced ourselves that the arc of history was more like a pendulum which constantly required frequent action to restrain the inevitable reaction.

Now, in the last third of our lives, we realize in retrospect that the center of that pendulum swing is far to the right of the center of our moral universe. We were the exception, not the rule, and we are, in fact, the fortunate sons and daughters. We lived in the most economically and military powerful nation on earth at the height of its influence. While the Pax Americana was deadly for many hundreds of thousands around the world, it cost us a tiny fraction of that in American blood and the barest minimum of sacrifice from the rest of us. Incredible scientific breakthroughs protected us from pathogens that ravaged our forbearers and allowed us to live longer, healthier, more fulfilled lives. We enjoyed the fruits of fossil fuel capitalism without enduring the worst of the global environmental and climatic disasters it creates.

With courageous and fearless leaders, backed by a mass movement, combined with real threats of violence, we managed to expand the rights for more of our citizens than at any time since the country’s founding. Blacks finally had a chance to become full participants in our democracy. Women could live full lives, economically and sexually, without having to rely on a man. Gays and lesbians could come out of the closet and gain the same rights as married couples. The promise of the First Amendment’s commitment to free speech and free expression was greatly expanded. Trans people could more fully express themselves. We provided quality healthcare to millions who had little to nothing before. We exported the ideal of intrinsic human rights to places that never knew it. We were abetted by the fact that our only ideological and geopolitical foe, the Soviet Union, had a rhetorical commitment, even if not actually practiced, to social and economic rights and equality that was equal if not greater than our own which made it difficult for our leaders to ignore the country’s failings and our demands. We ended a useless war based on a bogus theory of anti-communism that cost thousands of American lives.

The American Century is over and the more equitable world we helped create is seemingly gone now. Forever. Like Reconstruction, the forces that opposed such progress began to roll it back almost from the moment it began. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” was just the beginning. The reality is that, other than the 14 years of Reconstruction and the 50 or so years from the Civil and Voting Rights Acts to Trump, we have always been in various stages of what could be described as a fascist state. For most of our history, we have endured racial fascism – slavery from our founding to the Civil War; Jim Crow for the near century from the end of Reconstruction to the 1960s; the massacres of Native Americans, with the theft of their land and the criminalization their culture; the Chinese Exclusion Act from the 1880s; the Asiatic Barred Zone Act and the Immigration Act of 1924; the deportation of Mexicans in the 1930s; the Nazi sympathizers and the America First Committe of the late 1930s; the internment of Japanese during World War II; and the carceral state created in the 1990s.

From our founding, we have also engaged in religious fascism, largely enabled by the most politically powerful denominations of the time. In some states, only white Christian males could vote. In the early 1800s, Catholics, Jews, Baptists, and Presbyterians were restricted from holding office and certain religious practices were limited. Anti-Catholic sentiment was rampant in the mid-1800s, as was discrimination against Mormons. Of course, Native Americans were forcibly assimilated into Christianity and had most of their religious practices criminalized. Today, the nexus of evangelical Protestants and extremist Catholics drive both religious persecution and Christian fascism. Trump’s Muslim ban was merely an extension of the racial and religious fascism that has existed in our country since its founding.

Similarly, with the exception of New Jersey, the original state constitutions at our founding installed a patriarchal fascism. Only men with property were given the franchise and New Jersey amended its constitution to conform with that practice in 1807. It took until 1893 for the first state, Colorado, to allow women to vote and it wasn’t until 1919 that the US Constitution was amended so that all women could exercise their franchise. But the extension of voting rights hardly ended patriarchy. Incredibly, as recently as 1974, women in the US could not open a bank account or obtain a credit card, mortgage, or business loan without a male co-signer. Still today, seventeen states have never had a woman Senator and eighteen states never had a female governor. And data is clear that misogyny played a role in the defeats of both Harris and Hillary.

What we are experiencing with Trump and his oligarchs is simply a reversion to the mean, in both senses of the word. It is a return to the illiberal country we have always been where the cruelty was always the point, both as a means of establishing dominance and enforcing the established hierarchy. We are just returning to what we always were. This version of American fascism may be worse than prior ones. But if history is any guide to where we are going from here, there is no better example than seeing how the last prior large expansion of rights, Reconstruction, ended. Blacks were marginalized, lynched, and massacred, and endured a racial fascism for nearly the next century.

In the dark days ahead, those of us who helped build that more equitable America should look back with pride on what we accomplished. We helped create a golden age. God knows we weren’t perfect and perhaps not even good enough, but we tried to make the world a better place. Yes, it did not last. But nothing does. And now we have to watch as what we built gets destroyed and our country reverts to the mean it always was. But we leave a legacy of what could be that is etched in history and cannot be erased by the incoming fascists, no matter how hard they try, and they are trying very hard. It will be a monument to those around the world and here at home who struggle to be free. We may want more, but we should be satisfied with that.