I’ve been listening to Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast lately. I even read his book “The Storm Before The Storm” about the fall of the Roman Republic. This comes on the heels of reading a book about the 1850s that I can’t remember but will update as soon as I lead the beach. I’ve still got “The Road to Disunion”‘s two volumes on the stack. The thing that has hit me hardest in this spree is everything changes during the revolution. No matter how it comes out, everything changes.
Name a single national political figure from 1858 who was still a national political figure 
in 1968? Sumner? Stevens? I’d argue they weren’t really powerful figures before the war. Visionaries, the antebellum Howard Beales pehaps, but not really players. Robspierre, my man Danton, Marat, none of the were anything before the French Revolution and none of them survived it. Even the restored monarchy was vastly different than la ancien régime. Like the French Revolution, the English Revolution ended with a restoration, but it was a very different world.
We’re undergoing a counterrevolution right now in this country. It’s my fervent belief/hope that we’re seeing white supremacy’s dying convulsions as the president*(tm Charles P. Pierce) uncorks two generations of white backlash. I believe/hope that Tucker Carlson and Patrick Crusius are the dry heaves of white resentment of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s my belief/hope that trump will get rolled in the next election and those who gleefully jumped on the hate train will get rolled with him. It’s my belief/hope that the evangelicals will separate from the prosperity gospelers who have hitched a ride in their backwards wagon and the former will fade back into the world Flannery O’Connor knew so well and later will actually find Jesus (perhaps Matthew 25:35 would be a good place to look).
But we’re not going back to 2008. As William Strauss and Neil Howe noted in their epochal Generations, America goes through a crisis every 80 years or so and emerges much different, even though the good guys have won all the battles so far. But the country that emerged from the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War II was a very different nation than the one that entered each of those. President Warren/Biden/Buttigieg/Whoever will wield power in a very different way than presidents have since Roosevelt. The broken norms are Humpty-Dumpty. We aren’t going back. (If trump remains president*, it might be the last election of my lifetime).
Joaquin Castro outed trump donors in San Antonio. That was wrong. Not because we shouldn’t know who’s funding our leaders. We should. We all have civic duty to go to Open Secrets and look it up. Every newspaper should run the lists, not just of the president, but of donors to congresspeople, state reps, county commissioners and school board members. I did a story on money in a Brazoria County sheriff’s race. It was not only instructive from a horse race perspective (votes followed the money, even switching sides during the runnoff) it was a look into how people use money in a democracy.
But a politician outing donors of his opponent is somehow different. Especially since his focus isn’t on illuminating who the politician owes, but on illuminating who supports the politician, and thus, his policies. It’s not dangerous, but it’s distasteful. It’s a little creepy. But it’s not going to be the last time. And I understand why he did it. The San Antonio Express-News hasn’t done it. If you’re going to support evil, people should know. I’m sure there are people who voted for Hitler because of economic anxiety. They’re still Nazis. The Miami Dolphins owner has a foundation dedicated to ending racism in sports. But he gives money to trump and raises a lot more for him. That’s something we should know.
If the Ds win in 2020, if they take back the Senate and the White House, they will toss the rulebook. As a Burkean conservative, that bothers me. I really think change should happen within existing institutions and respect the rule of law. I hope one of the changes we’re going to see is greater respect for the rule of law. But you can bet the Ds will pack the Supreme Court and the federal benches. If they have the numbers, they’ll start impeaching judges. Speech codes are a distinct possibility. Ideally, every state will adopt the Wisconsin Model for education (did you know the libraries at UW are open to all state residents?) and we’ll finally see infrastructure week and a tax code that rewards labor as much as investment and encourages saving as much as spending.
But there’s going to be a dark side to this too. Some things will go too far (did I mention speech codes?). The people who got us into this mess, Biden, Clinton, McConnell, the Bushes, will be gone — swept away by the Ocasio-Cortezes, Omars, Hegars and O’Rourkes and whatever more radical things come next. That will be the thing to look for. When those we consider radical are suddenly denounced by Gen Z as reactionary, we’re too far down the road to turn back. For better or worse, this will be a very different country and a very different world in just 10 years.
I’ve come to believe we can only purge the sins of the last generations by burning them out. The sooner we deal with income inequality, the better and if those who have hoarded wealth the last 40 years don’t want to come along willingly, we’ll have to drag them for their own good. If those who benefitted from 400 years of institutionalized racism won’t acknowledge it, they’ll have to deal with the consequences. It’s time to burn the racism that is America’s original sin out and move on to what the next bad thing is. Because if we don’t those coming behind us will just take it. Right now we’re seeing the violence from the reactionaries trying to hold on to what they’ve had. But if they keep denying everyone else a chance, everyone else will eventually rise and take it. And they won’t stop at income. I believe/hope trump and his ilk are Sulla, the Roman counsel who overwhelmed the opposition and established what he thought was the traditional balance of power. But it wasn’t the norm, it was a 100-year blip he was trying to re-establish. His reforms didn’t last a single generation before Caesar came along.
America’s greatness is an ideal for which we’ve strived. Our exceptionalism is in the striving, not the achievement. Slavery, imperialism, Darwinistic capitalism are all roadblocks to achieving the ideal. But the history of the country has been a history of striving down that path. Taking three steps forward and two back. And every time we’re rocked back, the path ahead of us changes a little bit, or a lot. We’re rocked back now. What’s the path going to look like going forward?
Oran Today 