The second great extinction of the liberal dream.

Posted by Pointman on March 30, 2018 · 18 Comments 

There was something which happened in the 1980s which was variously labeled the death of the liberal dream or the great extinction of the liberal dream. It was much discussed at the time, but you’ll rarely hear of it in any political discussion nowadays. In essence, it was a seismic and global shift away from the statist, left-wing ideas that had held sway in government circles through most of the 70s. The entire world seemed to be moving towards the right and any surviving liberal ideals became the exclusive province of raggedy assed hippies moving into middle-age or embittered politicians who were also products of the 60s, but were now severely out of touch with the modern Zeitgeist.

There are a number of reasons why you’ll probably not have heard about it. To name but a few; the level of political analysis these days is so immediate, tribal and short-term, nobody can be arsed to learn some political history to inform their opinions. Too many of those who know about it, know it was a massive defeat, and can remember the despair of the left that lasted nearly two decades, so they don’t want to talk about those times. Or just maybe in what is a very 21st century reflex when dealing with unpalatable facts, if it’s never mentioned in polite company, then it never happened. The liberal dominance of the mainstream media and academia amounts to propaganda, even in political history.

It was one of those mass shifts in popular sentiment that was reflected in the political landscape, and although the cause for such changes can sometimes be pinpointed to a single traumatic point such as the morning of Sunday December 7th 1941, more usually they are a combination of concerns that have all come to a head at the same time. What caused the great extinction of the 80s was surviving the previous decade.

The 70s were a decade of disillusionment and in so many ways like suffering a hangover from the party on hard euphoria of the previous decade when the world had been a lot different.

Most economies were in recession due to various factors but mainly as a result of the Arab world hiking oil prices through the roof to punish the West’s support for Israel, against whom they’d just got their arses handed to them yet again in another war. Jobs and money were scarce. Industrial strife was widespread, with strikes that could go on for months. The chill out man and just smoke another joint attitude of the previous decade had mutated into a Class A drugs nightmare. Great cities of the world like New York had become dangerous, crime-ridden war zones teetering on the edge of municipal bankruptcy.

The politics of the seventies were, if anything, even more polarised and venomous than they are now, with dutifully virtuous mobs turning out at west coast airports to spit on freshly arrived GIs who were only 48 hours earlier getting their ass shot off for their country in some shithole in Indochina. The politicians at the time were uniformly anodyne, incompetent, useless and not only uninspiring but also uninspired. They did a lot of there’s no need to panic type of speeches, but the accurate and perceived reality by the ordinary person was they simply didn’t have the first clue about how to fix any of it.

The mass media was in transit from the overwhelmingly right-wing stance of the previous years, towards a much more critical, if not cynical, viewpoint on many things that the ordinary person, caught between the warring factions, still believed in because that was their day-to-day world.

An abiding pride in your country was not some hidden fascist tendency that had to be rooted out by the newly appointed witchfinder generals of popular opinion. Being married with kids was still a thing to be desired in the circles you moved in, despite what the media was trumpeting as the demise of the family unit. Schools were there to teach your children some basics like reading, writing and arithmetic, not to churn out miniature class warriors who would despise their parents, who’d worked their ass off to put them there in the first damn place.

Universities had metastasised from centres of intellectual exploration to bastions of political intolerance that verged on the neo-fascist, with the added value of two thirds of the people who probably shouldn’t even have been there in the first place, failing to make it into the third year. Academia instead of being a factory for grinding out fresh ideas, became a charnel house where they came to die. It’s no coincidence that nearly all the innovators of the digital revolution of the 80s did the freshman year and after looking around at the prevailing chaos, decided they could do a lot better working in their parent’s garage with a soldering iron.

Why should you constantly have pressure on you to apologise for your steady belief in country, culture, your patriotism, your belief in family, in some sort of sane continuity in the face of the ongoing chaos all around you, which although viciously critical of the fundamental tenets of your life, offered no viable alternatives to that value system nor solutions to any of the self-declared but must-be-addressed emergencies that you were absolutely sure had no relevance to your life.

All you wanted was a return of prosperity, a job and the prospect of a better life for your family and the kids.

By the dawn of the 80s, the world was ready, if not desperate, for practical, effective politicians like Reagan and Thatcher, both of whom never sat well with their own political establishment, but would go on to do a job of societal re-engineering that brought back prosperity and culminated in the political grand slam of the Berlin wall coming down in 89, which marked the effective demise of the Soviet Union and a half century long ideological battle.

If any of that lot sounds familiar, then welcome to 2016 and the supposedly massive surprise of Trump being elected.

All those very same factors were at work. He was smart enough to see that level of silent, pissed-off dissatisfaction, because that was the offshore storm that had been brewing in him for the last thirty years. He was terminally fed up of watching his country being pissed up against the wall by a bunch of incompetents whose only priority seemed to be pleasing an increasingly demanding media, rather than the people who dug drainage ditches along the side of the road, flipped burgers, waitressed those burgers to people, tutored a kid from a background you couldn’t interfere with through an exam they should never have got and a shot at a better life, ran towards the whole shit coming down event when anyone sensible was legging it the other way, were impelled to be silent when they wanted to scream and just hung on in there when there was no better reason than a sense of decency, rather than a profit margin.

Just bringing home a wage packet, week after week and then those weeks turning into months and then years, from a job that would never quite match up with your foolish youthful dreams, but was more than made up for by the leaps of the kids at Daddie half way through the front door and still struggling with one arm in his coat getting knocked flat on his ass by the enthusiasm of their greeting. It’s quiet personal stuff, but it really matters. Deeply.

The people, who held on to the scorned sense of duty, whether large or small, and through thick and thin, because they knew that without enough people like them, the whole bloody ball of wool would unravel. There was a feeling that the borders of sanity that really mattered were seriously in danger of being breached, which is why they took a chance and voted for Trump.

Sure, he knows his enemies, and if you watch is slowly working his way through them one by one, but he also knows who his friends are. You can look at as many popularity polls about him as you want, but remembering those very same polling organisations were giving him a 2% chance of beating Clinton on the eve of election day, my feeling is that his position with the electorate is even stronger than is indicated by those still hopelessly biased polls. Why anyone pays any attention to them nowadays is beyond me.

Like Reagan and Thatcher, his support was originally manifest in the secrecy of the polling booth, but after a few years, and the christianising of a news/media complex that’s learning that opposing him hits the bottom line, because by doing so you’re opposing a ground swell of popular sentiment, no matter how distasteful you might find it to your political sensitivities.

It’s commonly thought that he’s what’s called a money president, one who knows how to get an economy on track to bring back prosperity, and without a doubt, the last year has proven that as he’s rolled back the industrial decay of previous decades that supposedly nothing could be done about. His second priority, which he alluded to constantly in the election, was to restore America’s standing in a world that had got used to despising its weakness, and given his successes in foreign policy, foreign powers have now learned to tread very carefully around an America with an alpha male like Trump in charge of it.

In the first year of what looks to be an eight year presidency, he has made remarkable progress towards achieving both those goals. For anyone who watched his speeches in full, rather than the debased accounts of them in the media, neither of those objectives which he openly spoke about, or his determination to achieve them, should come as a surprise, but there was always a third and unspoken one.

It’s too easy an analysis to say he picked out CNN to destroy as an example to the rest of the fake news machine, too easy to say he gave Hollywood the worst year it’s had in the last twenty-five because it allowed itself to become a liberal propaganda mouth piece and even that he’s nearly destroyed the formerly money-spinning franchises that composed the NFL because the owners allowed their dumbo players to disrespect the national anthem, but let’s face it, not even Trump is that powerful.

The people who actually did all that financial damage to those formerly highly lucrative industries was the people, and it will continue for as long as those industries cling to a sense of entitlement and elitist political viewpoints that their newly militant consumers now actively dislike. They’ve seen what effect flexing their financial muscles can have on supposedly impervious people intent on ramming objectionable content down their throat, and they like the feel of it.

There’s even a certain pride, if not zest, in knocking them off their high horse.

The financial bloodbath will continue until the lesson is learned, and it will be, but the growing problem with each passing day will become how to lure the punters back when they’ve already moved on to alternative suppliers of products more to their taste. As all investors in retail know, recovering lost ground is a lot harder than taking it for the first time. The commonality those businesses share is that they all come under the heading of discretionary spending, since it doesn’t hurt people not to buy their product. Their only path to survival is to change the flavour of the product to more accurately reflect the shift in public sentiment.

Sure, Trump made a few slight but deft adjustments to the rudder of public opinion, but he’s not creating sentiments that weren’t already there, he’s just been trusted by those selfsame people to not only speak for them, but to be their champion in the swamp of Washington, if only to get it off their backs. Like his political forebears of Reagan and Thatcher, he is working on the same re-engineering of society that was slowly undone by decades of dross like Clinton, the Bushes and most recently Obama.

It’s a return to respecting traditional values which actually never went away, because without them, any civilisation would implode. Country, family, responsibility and common decency. There’s an old saying – comes the day, comes the man, and America in it’s relatively short history, has been inordinately fortunate in that respect. In its hour of need, it seems to cough up just the right man. Trump is smart, tough and always up for a scrap. I’ve no doubt he has his flaws, but his visceral support for those values and his intention to move them back into the centre of American life is the basis of his appeal to his electorate.

That was always the unspoken third objective, not because it was furtive, but because it was always the understood common ground, a consensual agreement, the contract between him and the people who voted for him. It’ll take a few more years, but I think the second great extinction of the liberal dream is well underway.

A storm is coming.

©Pointman

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