Here are two end points for you, from an historian's point of the terminus a quo (beginning point) and terminus a quem (ending point, or, in our case, today):
The real beginning point is between 1948 - 1951, but that would make zero sense to you without a detour through 1968, because that's where most people's major historical misconception about American politics begins.
The 1960s are, of course, famous for the counter-culture, Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, urban riots, and LBJ's extension of the New Deal welfare state. We look back on that as an era of protest, rock music, long hair, and weed. It was, in fact, a year of worldwide social protest and calls for revolution.
It gave birth -- in the eyes of many social commentators -- to the transition from Cold War America to what is often called the "liberal consensus" about human rights (evolved from FDR's "Four freedoms"), the role of the State, and the necessity for even greater democracy. (If you are interested in learning more about the exact nature of the revised social contract that formed this liberal consensus, you cannot do better than the first chapter of Matthew J. Costello's Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America.)
But here's the ugly little secret: the liberal consensus and the social revolution in America was a mile wide and an inch deep. The reality is that the majority of American citizens -- especially white American citizens -- were always significantly more conservative than our popular political narratives suggest.
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| Most of what you think you know about the presidential election 1968 is wrong. |
This can be fully documented, but I am going to give you one overwhelming example to prove my point: the Presidential election of 1968, which pitted Republican former VP Richard Nixon against Democratic VP Hubert Humphrey and the insurgent independent campaign of Alabama Governor George Wallace.
Nixon narrowly defeated Humphrey in the popular vote (43.4% - 42.7%), but racked up 301 Electoral votes to Humphrey's 191 and Wallace's 46. Hmphrey's defeat, at the time, was largely attributed (as in the 2024 election with Harris replacing Biden as the candidate) to (A) LBJ quitting the race and (B) the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, who (like Bernie Sanders today) was seen by much of the Democratic Party as the "true" anti-war liberal in the race (ironically, he wasn't; Humphrey was far more liberal).
But the results were nowhere near as close as they seem. If we assume --as a thought experiment -- that Wallace dropped out of the race, let's see what would have happened. It is difficult to make any argument for presumptive Wallace voters casting ballots for Humphrey, and while some diehards might have stayed home, the reality is that the overwhelming majority of Wallace voters would have voted for Nixon.
What would this mean? Initially, we can safely transfer Wallace's 46 Electoral votes into Nixon's column, increasing his total to 347. In addition, looking at the Wallace votes in states that Humphrey won, we find that in a two-man race he would almost certainly have lost Connecticut (6), Maryland (10), Pennsylvanai (29), Texas (25), Washington (9), and West Virginia (7). This means that we subtract 86 Electoral votes from Humphrey (leaving him only 105, and move them into Nixon's column, raising him to 433.
Removing Wallace from the equation also would have placed New York's 43 electoral votes in play, as the combined Nixon-Wallace vote was behind Humphrey by only 12,000 votes in a state where 6.6 million people voted. Moreover, Nixon's share of the popular vote could have risen as high as 56%, which is considered landslide territory. (If you think this impossible, remember that Nixon nearly hit 61% of the vote in the Presidential election of 1972.)
Pretty clearly, American voters rejected the leftward motion of most of the world in 1968, in favor of a drif back right, but toward what? Well, again, Watergate, Vietnam, and Nixon's overtures to China obscure two major facts: (a) Nixon domestically governed as the last liberal president of the 20th Century; and (b) compared to today, the Republican Party of 1972 was more liberal than the Democratic Party of 2024.
Noam Chomsky makes a compelling case for Nixon governing as a liberal, to include the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (and the passage of 90% of the environmental laws still in place today), the use of wage and price controls to fight inflation, and taking the nation off the gold standard among other thing.
Likewise, if you look at the GOP Platform in 1972 and ignore abortion (not an issue for national platforms of the day because Roe v Wade had not been decided yet) and LGBTQ+ issues (which, honestly, a few years after Stonewall were not really a major national political issue yet, either), that platform is more pro-welfare-state-safety net, more pro-labor, more pro-environment, and more pro-civil rights than anything a Democrat has run on the past two decades.
On the other hand, by any significant measure, the US was -- and has remained -- far more politically conservative than the rest of the industrialized world. While we can safely consider Nixon as an American "liberal" president, it's worth using the proxy of universal health care as a gauge of how much more liberal most other developed nations were. Here are the adoption dates of universal healthcare for key nations: Australia (1975), Austria (1966), Canada (1966), Denmark (1973), Finland (1972), France (1974), Ireland (1977), Italy (1978), the Netherlands (1966), Meanwhile, Norway (1912), Japan (1938), New Zealand (1938), Germany (1941 and then 1947), Belgium (1945), and the UK (1948) had already has this for decades.
Here's the reality, folks: the US has always been, at best, a center-right nation, and in any other political paradigm our "liberals" would have been considered --at best-- left-leaning centrists. That's why the Democratic Party effectively gave up on liberalism after 1984, fully embracing the neoliberalism of free markets, privatization, lower taxes for the affluent, and pruning back the social safety net in 1988 (nobody really noticed this till Bill Clinton won in 1992 because Mike Dukakis was such a shitty candidate his actual politics did not factor into his defeat).
Since then, except on certain (very specific and highly touted) social issues, the Democratic Party has been moving progressively (yes, the pun was intentional) to the right in search of an electoral majority.
And in so doing, Democrats have been completely bipartisan in handing over to the Executive Branch the very weapons that President Trump is now using to dismantle large sections of the American government and citizens' civil rights. I am just going to hit a few of the low points --
Bill Clinton not only started the process of gutting welfare, but in fast-tracking NAFTA he creating what Ross Perot correctly called the "sucking sound" of jobs leaving the United States, militarized the Mexican border for the first time, and created ICE. He also set the precedent for permitting the State Department to use Private Military Companies (PMCs -- mercenaries) as an integral part of US operations in the Balkans and elsewhere. Again, for example, the US subsidized the deployment of mercenaries (chiefly MPRI and AirScan) to the Cabinda province of Angola to create a garrison state to maintain control of Angola oil production.
While GW Bush was president it is important to note that the Patriot Act and every single NDAA that increased the domestic surveillance and police states, the creation of a network of "black" prisons around the globe, authorized torture and rendition on a mass scale, initiated unilateral (and illegal) drone warfare against noncombatant nations ... all of these passed with bipartisan approval -- and all of them were supported by Bush's 2004 Democratic opponent John Kerry.
Thereafter, Barack Obama refused to close down the black sites or Gitmo, authorized the expanded killing of civilians in countries we were not at war with (to include the executive-ordered murder of American citizens abroad), began the process of mass family separation at the border, increased the power of ICE, recognized an anti-Democratic coup in Colombia, increased the ability of US weapons manufacturers to sell arms abroad, increased the use of mercenaries ...
And the same continued throughout the Biden administration --- much worse when you look at our insanely inept foreign policy non-decisions during the Israel-Hamas war.
Nor can we omit the fact that, since the early 1990s one of the most bipartisan collaborations has been the gutting and corporatizing of universal public education. To be really honest, the only two things I will miss about USDOE is the administration of IDEA and having real Title IX enforcement.
Let's look at one more point: stealing a strategy (ironically) from Black America during Jim Crow, the right wing looked at its effective exclusion from what -- in the late 1980s/early 1990s -- was the mainstream media, and capitalized on the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine to begin developing an entire alternate, parallel news and information milieu to mobilize its partisans. From Rush Limbaugh to Sean Hannity to G. Gordon Liddy (who as, honestly, the most entertaining of them all) they started the push through AM Talk Radio because nobody else could make money doing it. They used the lessons learned there and by Fox News to be ready with websites as the worldwide web took over the internet in the early 2000s.
Meanwhile, what were the leading Democrats doing? Bill Clinton in 1992 went after Sister Soujah (she was collateral damage -- his real target was Jesse Jackson) to such an extent that a "Sister Souljah moment" has entered our political lexicon as emblematic of cynical positioning:
A Sister Souljah moment is a politician's calculated public repudiation of an extremist person, statement, group, or position that is perceived to have some association with the politician's own party.
It has been described as "a key moment when the candidate takes what at least appears to be a bold stand against certain extremes within their party" and as "a calculated denunciation of an extremist position or special interest group." This act is intended to be a signal to centrist voters that the politician is not beholden to those positions or interest groups. However, such a repudiation runs the risk of alienating some of the politician's allies and the party's base voters. The term is named after the hip hop artist Sister Souljah.
And not too long thereafter, Al and Tipper Gore lead the charge for warning labels on rap music products.
In other words, while conservatives were building an extremely effective Republican noise machine, the Democratic elites were attacking the emerging voices in youth and Black culture to propitiate the "centrists" who were really the moderate Republicans that they were courting.
I don't even think that I have to talk about how Democratic Party elites, during the same period, were usurping complete control of the party's nomination process, and -- with the initial exception of Barack Obama -- putting up one conservative neoliberal after another as the party's latest hope: John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden. I say "initial exception" with regard to Obama because it did not take long at all for his insurrectionist campaign to be quickly co-opted by the elite Democratic and corporate leadership. In the end -- groundbreaking as it was in social terms -- Obama's presidency, when considered completely on the merits of his accomplishments, remained another corporate neoliberal disappointment.
Now let's bring ourselves back to Donald Trump for a moment.
First, let's note that with intellectual resources of the Heritage Foundation and its fellow travelers, they have sniffed out every possible existing power and authority that can be re-purposed, twisted, or extended to achieve their conservative agenda. As we have seen above, Democratic Party leaders were equally complicit in creating such powers and leaving them lying about on the ridiculous premise that there was some sort of "gentlemen's agreement" not to use them in very radical ways.
Second, let's also note that President Trump's viewpoint toward both the domestic front and the rest of the world is more of an extension of what has gone before than a radical divergence. Hmm, you say, channeling the movie "True Grit," "I call that bold talk from a one-eyed fat man."
But the reality is that too many people miss the point of MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, thinking that it refers to a particular set of SOCIAL conditions (Black people in their place, LGBTQ+ in the closet, etc.) when it is really focused on ECONOMIC and POLITICAL conditions on a world stage.
They are not trying to bring back Jim Crow as primary objective. Bringing back Jim Crow is a consequence of their main objective, which is to BRING BACK COLD WAR AMERICA circa 1948 - 1965.
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| The document that created modern America: NSC 68 |
The two best, succinct explanations of this are found in Noam Chomsky's Consequences of Capitalism (with Marv Waterstone) and How the World Works, but there's been a long trend of (mostly ignored) leftist criticism of the US garrison state during the Cold War period, beginning with William Appleton Williams' Empire as a Way of Life.
As Chomsky argues, quoting extensively from recently declassified National Security Council memos from the period 1948-1951, elite government planners were well aware from the get-go that the Soviet Union was actually a political problem, not a military one. But they saw the confrontation with the Soviets that would eventually morph into the Cold War not as saving the world from Communism, but rather ensuring that the United States would retain global hegemony over the majority of the world's resources.
CHOMSKY: I want to turn now to National Security Council (NSC) Memorandum 68. This was sort of the defining blueprint for how to deal with the world geopolitics following World War II. ...
The memo that circulated and, in fact, was taken up as the guiding policy document of this period, had almost immediate effects. Military spending increased by 458 percent between 1951 and 1952. This is rather enormous. In virtually all other previous wars, we demobilized after the war was over. In this case, this set in motion the idea of a constantly evolving military budget. Military personnel increased from 2.2 to over 5 million, so the memo was extremely effective.
In the name of anti-communism and the spread of freedom (usually meaning free markets and the rights of private property), following the Nitze Doctrine, the US bolstered friendly regimes through military aid, trade arrangements, credit, and so forth and opposed or toppled regimes through military confrontation, covert actions, interference in internal politics, regime change, assassination, trade and financial sanctions, and so on. Often using either UN or other military alliances, for example, NATO, as “coalitions of the willing” to cover otherwise unilateral actions. I need not enumerate all of these, but I’ll have a few more words about them in just a minute.
At home in the US, this paranoid style of politics meant virulent anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-trade union, anti-leftist repression. This is how this translated to the domestic scene. McCarthyism, which was overt repression, FBI infiltration, subversion, and assassinations, though often covert, was legitimated as necessary for national security in the face of the Soviet and international communist threat.
If you are reading carefully, this begins to read a lot like UR-versions of President Trump's foreign policy, especially when you realize that NSC 68 specifically in terms of suppressing domestic dissent:
CHOMSKY: [NSC 68 crtiqued] “the excesses of a permanently open mind [and] the excess of tolerance.” Another flaw is “dissent among us” when there should be conformity. We will have to learn to “distinguish between the necessity for tolerance and the necessity for just suppression,” which is a crucial feature of “the democratic way.” It is particularly important to insulate our “labor unions, civic enterprises, schools, churches, and all media for influencing opinion” from the “evil work” of the Kremlin, which seeks to subvert them and “make them sources of confusion in our economy, our culture and our body politic” (excerpts from NSC 68, 1950).
NSC 68 also contained language about suppressing Democratic movements abroad under the guise of anti-Communism:
CHOMSKY (citing George Kennan on dealing with other nations in our coalition): “The final answer might be an unpleasant one,” Kennan concluded: “police repression by the local government.” We should not hesitate to support “harsh government measures of repression” as long as “the results are on balance favorable to our purposes.” In general, “it is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists."
Worth noting as well is that NSC 68 not only called for suppressing dissent at home and abroad, but requiring sacrifices in social investments:
CHOMSKY: "There are other flaws of our society beyond open-mindedness and failure to understand the necessity of just suppression. Aspirations are too high. Increased taxes are necessary, along with reduction of Federal expenditures for purposes other than defense and foreign assistance, if necessary by the deferment of certain desirable programs.” These military Keynesian policies, it is suggested, are likely to stimulate the domestic economy as well and they may prevent “a decline in economic activity of serious proportions.” In general, “a large measure of sacrifice and discipline will be demanded of the American people,” and they also must “give up some of the benefits” they enjoy as we dedicate ourselves to saving humanity from the implacable campaign of the slave state to destroy freedom everywhere (excerpts from NSC 68, 1950).
It is way beyond my scope here, but it is very easy to draw a long direct line from NSC 68 and the boot-strapping of the Cold War with all of its imperialist actions, enforced conformity at home, and stripping funding away from social programs to the current Presidential administration. Without too much difficulty one can find senior government policymakers throughout both Democratic and Republican administrations advocating for such policies.
Only during the brief period between the first Gulf War (and the fall of the Soviet Union) did the Cold War advocates lose their footing and influence -- but 9/11 turned out to be exactly the tonic they needed to initiative the "War on Terror." That "war" having pretty much ended with our withdrawal from Afghanistan, new pretexts were needed. They found them in re-galvanized support for Israel at all costs in the Middle East and resisting the south-north global migration that has been building for the past thirty years.
Taken together these provided sufficient justification for what one might call "Cold War III."
Here is the worst irony of all: one of the elements that made the Cold War so effective at controlling the American people was that it changed "war" from an "event" into a "condition." It used to be (Civil War, WW1, WW2) that wars had a defined beginning and ending. We got attacked or declared war, we mobilized, everybody made sacrifices, and when the war was over things were supposed to go back to normal (they never really did, but that's another story).
The Cold War -- and its successors, the War on Terror and President Trump's Global Trade War -- ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO END. At least not any time in the near future. So our society is organized around the prospect of constant sacrifice of resources and civil liberties necessary to WIN THE WAR that can, of course, NEVER BE WON, because it is intended to be PERMANENT. This is EXACTLY what George Orwell was describing in 1984 -- the garrison state, or the perpetual war state.
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| When I went to school we didn't LEARN about the Cold War, we LIVED OUT nuclear attacks to make us compliant. |
But here's the worst hurt of all: as much as we decry radical right wingers pulling history books off the shelves in our public schools or at the US Naval Academy, the dirty little truth is that in all of K-12 Education (and most of higher education) we have never presented an accurate history of the Cold War and how it warped our society.
We literally don't fucking talk about it.
Which is why even highly educated Americans think what President Trump, his advisors, and his billionaire supporters is something new and cancerous, when it is in fact something old -- nearly 70 years old -- and cancerous that we have never attempted to cure because we are not allowed to talk about it.
My premise is that you cannot possibly defeat a threat if you do not understand the nature of that threat.
And now you know.
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