My father was an enthusiastic Reagan supporter, and contributor to many of the right wing organs of the day, one of which was Young Americans for Freedom, or YAF. As one can imagine, its idea of freedom was freedom from government regulation, freedom to found businesses, freedom to rise as high as one's talents allow. Freedom to use one's money to go to private schools, freedom to hire workers on any basis they are willing to work, freedom to discriminate, to contaminate the environment, among much else. Reagan led a long campaign in the wilderness of the Republican right, on these ideas which became and remain the foundation of the right, of FOX, and of our current government. The Reagan revolution was far more influential than observers at the time (and from the left) anticipated, viewing the aging actor and his gouche entourage with distain. Reagan repaid that distain in spades, doddering through the Iran-Contra scandal, and finally leaving office with imminent senility. But he also was on occasion remarkably articulate- in marked contrast to our current virtually illiterate executive- and even inspiring, and was decisive at key moments. The ideology that Reagan brought into the mainstream, which now seems so stale and self-serving, was at the time taken as a significant and intellectually advanced critique of a system that had over the preceding decades so carefully balanced the public and private interests.
YAF was a melding of libertarians and conservatives, hardly hip even in its own day, but with an intellectual case to make. Today, things have changed substantially, as we are living in the world that the YAF-ers grew up and built, notably as part of the Gingrich revolution, the Tea party revolution, and the advanced propaganda organs that have succeeded the paltry efforts of YAF and its ilk. It is a new gilded age, where Mitt Romney can run for president as a "job creator", where Trump can win on the backs of the dispossessed, then turn around and give the lion's share of the spoils to the rich, where billionaires clog our political system, where employees are routinely underpaid and abused, climate heating is denied and ignored, and homelessness and despair are rampant.
The youth of today look at this world, and find a significant lack of freedom. Freedom is not a simple concept, and changes dramatically with one's situation and with the times. Is being homeless the epitome of freedom? In our world, money buys freedom, and poverty is a sentence of servitude and shame. With enough money, one can become president if one wishes, while without money, one can not even eat. This is the world that the Reagan revolution has sharpened, if not created- one of staggering and shameless inequality, where our communal humanity is being drowned in desperate competition and fealty to corporate overlords, and where we are presumed to be worshipful towards the blizzard of vanity foundations they sponsor in lieu of nuns and priests to chant their prayers.
The great task of society is to impose order and discipline, but also to inspire shared values and commitment, so that all members work towards the greater good, according to their respective abilities. There is a place for capitalism and hierarchy here, to supply the former. But the latter has been sorely lacking of late, systematically denigrated by the political right, in favor of an ideology of division, greed, and, frankly, hate. It is clear that the happiest societies strike a more compassionate balance, recognizing (and funding, with various public services) a baseline of common humanity and dignity (and freedom), while leaving plenty of room for ambitious achievement in the hierarchical, capitalist mode as well.
It is high time for the pendulum in the US to swing the other way, but how is that going to happen? I have been struck by the symmetries between Bernie Sanders and Reagan. Bernie is far from a lock on the nomination, but his accession would be a fitting bookend to the Reagan revolution. Both are outside politicians, who took over their party with a grassroots / insurgent campaign and pushed it away from the center, after decades of lonely ideological battle on the political fringe. Both have strong support among the youth of their parties, indeed a curiously militant sort of support, despite themselves being, by virtue of their long-march campaign, quite old.
But Reagan never had to face the kind of propaganda organs that the right marshals today. He benefitted from a much more decent, and unified, world. Today our fellow citizens are living in a starkly separate reality, which has bled strongly into the mainstream media. It is hard to fathom how Bernie's movement is going to make serious inroads other than over the dead bodies of FOX and its copycats. And the irony is that these outlets thrive even more in opposition than when their own party is in power, making it doubly difficult to imagine how our cultural conversation is going to change, no matter how momentous the Bernie movement is. Yet, all that said, hope springs eternal, and here we have to hope in Hegelian fashion that the forces of history, or of a timely leader, are able to break the witch's spell on the right, and bring our country back to a semblance of decency and rationality. And that that someone might just be the next Democratic nominee for president.
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