As the Eagles said, we haven’t had the spirit here since 1979, when the U.S. lurched from the liberalism of the New Deal and Kennedy eras, to Jimmy Carter, towards Ronald Reagan’s landslide election. Several storm flags are flying:
In synagogue tonight, my Rabbi, generally a woke liberal, was unbelievably firm on the issue of Hamas and Gaza. He said that saying “it’s complicated“ or “is relative“ is not OK;
The popularity of two right wing country songs: Don’t Try That in a Small Town, by Jason Aldean, and Rich Men North of Richmond by Oliver Anthony;
The recall of a San Fransisco DA, and of a Board of Education member
During the late 1970’s and recently there were similar parallel events:
Watergate, the 1973 War and fear of the power of Arab Oil fueled a lurch to the left, and did the 2020 murder of George Floyd;
Right-wing country music surged in popularity in 1979/80-81 with Urban Cowboy and the sudden success of WHN in the ultra-liberal NYC market;
Charlie Daniels' rightward shift with "In America is similar to the aforementioned Don't Try That in a Small Town and Rich Men North of Richmond is strikingly similar to the 1979-80 country music surge.
I believe that we are at a divide in a good way similar to what happened after November 1979 with the disgust at Carter’s weakness in handling the hostage crisis. Joe Biden is an even more addled version.
I suspect that the overall disgust with Biden, and the woke is penetrating. People don’t like our country apologizing for itself. They like living large, and not the forced shift to glorified golf carts. This could be big.
Sort of. Except the song proclaimed the year as 1969. More importantly, this isn’t a new thing. The change, from what I’ve noticed, started around 2015 (Trump was a result, not a cause, although he did accelerate the pace in the US), not yesterday or last week.
The country swung right because of the events in 1968. Richard Nixon saw the swing and laid out the Southern Strategy, bringing tens of millions of bigots, I mean right-wingers, into the Republican party. Carter became president just because of Nixon resigning and Ford being a temp. Nobody could have succeeded in the post-Name, post-oil crisis, inflation-riddled world.
Is the country swinging right today? No, the swing took place years ago. What we’re seeing now is the disintegration of the Republican party and the resurrection of a Democratic party actually fighting for itself and not taking voters for granted. People don’t like a lot of stuff, but their dislikes are abortion bans and book burning. Unions are also fighting back, a winning combination whenever that happened.
People also don’t like an end to democracy itself, and that’s inevitable if the right wing shift continues. That alone might cause People to think.
It seems to me that the world is shifting to the right. New Zealand just elected a Conservative/Libertarian government. Australia just shot down a referendum giving Aboriginals extra rights. The Netherlands forced their progressive leader to resign, as did New Zealand. Canada’s Conservatives now are projected to win more seats than all the other parties combined, by a wide margin. The latest elections in Europe have all brought right wing governments to power. In the U.S., Trump is polling ahead of Biden.
And all this was before Europe experienced the anti-semitic riots now going on.
Maybe I missed it, but has a left-wing government been elected anywhere in the world in the past two years?
As the world gets more dangerous, people abandon their lofty goals and start looking for safety. Climate Change doesn’t seem as relevant when there may be nuclear war on the horizon, y’know?
One surprising thing to me is that the anti-nuclear-war protestors have vanished. We are currently closer to a nuclear war than we have ever been in my lifetime. I’m shocked that it’s not a bigger issue.
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