The Triumph and Vindication
of the Warren Court, Racial
Integration and Multiculturalism
As seen in the Election of ‘08

    Following the seminal election of Barack Obama as 44th – president of the US the Republican Party has been disoriented and confused.  They wonder where they lost the great drive of the party of Reagan begun in 1980 and which dominated American politics for the last 28 years.  
     Partly their confusion lies in a misunderstanding of themselves.  They like to remember Reagan’s reference to a “city on a hill” and paint themselves optimists and farsighted.  But honestly the power of Reagan’s movement was always more negative and reactionary than positive.  They were for tearing down and rolling back more than building up and it was always easier to tell what and who they were against than what they stood for.  Their movement in its social aspects might be called the Mayberry Syndrome as it was designed to hold fast against the irrepressible tide of progress moving ahead in our society and reverses it back to a reality that never really was. 

     One of the greatest sociological movements in recorded history occurred over the course of the last century.  This was the changing status of women in our society and in many other parts of the world.  To illustrate, imagine a woman born in 1900 vs. a woman born in 2000.  The differences in horizons of opportunity facing these two women are so immense as to leave their positions nearly unrecognizable to each other.  A modern woman not only has the traditional role in society of motherhood and homemaker available to her but also many if not all of the opportunities traditionally open to men.
     To achieve this change took the whole of last century, evolutionary mostly, revolutionary at times but, though glacial to us, in terms of anthropology this transformation has occurred with lightening speed.  And of course, if one half of the nation radically changes its perspective and point of view about the society in which it lives it means the other half of society, the men, must change as well, but often with considerably more reluctance to do so.  
    By now there is no question as to the ultimate rightness of the women’s movement and no one openly denies it.  Yet even though it has been propelled forward with a certain momentum of inevitability and as a direct response to unprecedented technological changes which allowed it, its comprehensive nature has meant that many difficult adjustments have had to be made along the way.  It has been particularly difficult on the institution of marriage. 
    Consider that the last half of the twentieth century, and with increasing speed its last quarter especially, has been dominated by issues concerning gender.  Debates over the proper status of women in society, pressures of balancing work and family, birth control, sex education, family planning, the nature of feminism, equal pay and equal rights in the work place, glass ceilings that bar advancement, stalking by possessive partners and custody battles after divorce have dominated our courts and our public and political life for decades.  The worst of these problems seem to have been largely worked through but many still remain.  
    Republicans, though not able to oppose these changes explicitly, nonetheless tried to capitalize politically on the generalized angst that has accompanied the liberation of women.  They gathered all these disruptions vaguely together under a single rubric, labeled it “family values”, blamed liberals for all the troubles brought on by it and implied, with no evidence whatsoever, that they had better family values than everyone else.
    The emotional spike of their opposition to all this progress has been reproductive rights and abortion.  This is the ultimate visceral point of control of men over women and women over men.  On this issue they proclaimed themselves “pro life” as if those who disagreed politically with their solutions were suicidal and preferred the alternative.
    This has been the mad genius of the modern Republican Party.  Instead of trying to solve mutual problems, it identifies an area of uncertainty which exists in the population, oversimplifies it, applies a general name to it in slogans easy to understand and in vaguely expressed theologies accuse the other party of having done it and proclaim themselves opposed.  This has had the desired effect of polarization in order to kill all honest debate and allow it to consistently oppose any liberalization of our laws and policies.  
    Some of these sources of concern had to do with the decisions of the Warren Court to bar religious activities in public schools (which by default they thought might grant equal rights to minority and religious beliefs), support racial integration and encourage across a broad spectrum equalities that they came to call “multiculturalism.”
     Through an entire series of carefully coded phrases and crudely calibrated positions the republicans gradually built up as their “base,” a far “religious” right, a curious mélange of latter day know-nothings who were radically opposed to all change, intellectualism, science, culture and progress in society.  So Reagan and his followers spoke of “welfare queens” guns, the ACLU, prayer in school, small government, activist courts and lawyers, and tort reform to make it harder for the weak to question the mighty.       
    They also disparaged the increasing rights of blacks and other minorities in our society and promised to undo advances made and roll back the legal decisions which led to them.  They doubled down Nixon’s Southern strategy and made the democrats, just as Lyndon Johnson had suggested would happen, pay politically for their support for dismantling segregation.  
     Each and every one of these things spoke to a rear guard revolt against a rapidly changing world and a reversion toward a homogeneous provincialism, an ethnocentric, Christian and predominately white state which would docilely praise big money, status and hierarchy in our society.  This was a backward looking notion of our country, like the Mayberry of their dreams, totally out of touch with the reality of the changing world; devoted to regaining a world, which if it ever had existed, was fast and faster receding from view.  
     Naturally there were always visible cracks and noticeable fissures in both their logic and their coalition and as certain issues fell away and lost their punch (like prayer in school) others had to take their place (stem cell research, gay marriage) to engender the mobilizing outrage necessary to win most elections.
    Even so, remarkably, they were able to keep this predominately white biased, obeisance to wealth, exclusively Christian paradigm in place for over a quarter of a century.  In part, they were able to do this by always knowing exactly what buttons to push to reliably arouse the nervous undercurrent of societal, racial and religious unrest which exists just under the surface of any society to new levels of fear and outrage.  This manufactured outrage was what they came to depend on to get their supporters to go to the mattresses every two to four years in support of their candidates.
     But finally this regressive, revisionist movement, as such things will, wound itself tighter and tighter back upon itself, until in the George W. Bush administration it overreached, perverted its own message and engineered its own demise.  
    By 2004, like a drug addict looking for a new vein, the Republican Party had so far run out of steam that they inexcusably manipulated national security issues through fear of terror and war mongering to question the patriotism of their opponents, in order to shoehorn George Bush into an entirely undeserved second term.  This has brought us the xenophobic, narrow minded, forever partisan, greedy, self-aggrandizing, Manichean, sadistic, broke, anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-democratic, rights trampling administration we see before us today.

     Though John McCain, the loser in the last election of the Reagan revolution, tried to say he was of a different breed, separate from these degenerative tendencies of his party, he never really succeeded.  As his losing campaign wore on it soon began to play to the lowest common denominators of society and became more brutally crude and ignorant as it went. 
It spoke of Obama as “different” and foreign.  It impugned his American values and his Christian faith.  It said he was an intellectual and elitist.  It and its republican outriders called him a socialist, a Marxist or finally – amazingly – inferred he was actually a dangerous terrorist more in sympathy with our enemies than with us.  They said his supporters (the majority of the country as it turned out) weren’t even “real” or “good” Americans.  They culled and coded every racial, xenophobic, us-against-them, cultural warrior message they could from the dregs of the their arsenal of division, fear and hate to try to destroy him and arouse the cultural wars anew.
     Unfortunately for them the country has grown fully tired of their calcified vision of the world and outgrown all the artificial barriers they have erected between Americans and our own finer instincts.  The lesson of the recently concluded election could not be more certain.  Could there have been a greater repudiation of the Reagan Revolution than the election of Barack Obama?  
    Obama is multiculturalism personified, to the bone.  He is the race card and the Southern strategy reversed (Johnson’s eggs have at last come home to hatch).  He absolutely represents the finest regenerative traditions of sound immigration policy.  Before their very eyes with this last election, the republicans’ narrow, carefully crafted, constrained, bigoted, backward looking and single vantaged world has escaped the dams they had so conscientiously built up around it.  It can never be put back again.
     While it’s true that women didn’t break through the topmost glass ceiling, they did everything but.  The entirely manufactured cultural war is ended.  The ones who invented it have lost and been discredited.  The motive force of Reaganism, its raison d’etre, its dark power, the engine which provided it with the torque that turned its gears, has failed.  
     With this election, the long, belligerent dissonance of the Reagan Revolution has ended on an harmonious chord of equal parts resolution and repudiation.  Its cultural war has brought nothing noticeably good with it, no domestic achievements, no memorable legislation, no great goals established and few ideals upheld.  At base it was a movement that was divisive, defeatist, backward looking, obstructionistic and ridden with economic injustice.  Even the things it said it wanted to achieve, like smaller government, ethical reforms, and a better focused use of tax dollars, it has dramatically failed to bring about.
     The reason for the republican failure is twofold.  On the one side they indulged in pretended angst even into actual ignorance.  They put their party and one part of the country ahead of all the nation’s long term interests and sought blindly and even irrationally to kill any program, even good and necessary ones, which didn’t service them politically or financially.  
    On the other side the real movers and shakers of the party were actively trying to erect a new plutocracy atop our old egalitarian democracy.  Now the first of these has lost its force and the second has eventuated in a financial collapse not seen since the Great Depression.  Meanwhile, not one of the long term problems the nation will face as it heads into this century has been effectively addressed and most have been allowed to grow much worse over the period of this republican domination.  Quite a record on which to hang their hats.
    
    But this is not meant to be an essay about specific policies or whether Obama, who has not even assumed office, will be a successful president.  It is about the deeper movements of our society and the subtler ebbs and flows which motivate nations.  It is about the irrepressible drive of our country for greater openness and fairness and a more perfect union.  It is about our uncanny gift of reinvention.  These things may be delayed for a time with great and costly effort but never ultimately denied.
    This is why the republicans seem a little lost now, a touch fatigued and beleaguered.  Provincialism, prejudice and ignorance are indulgences we can no longer afford.  Any who want to try to return to Reaganism will discover it a shell of itself and will not be able to figure out where it went and what the furor and passion was all about when it was in its prime.  Reaganism is dead.  It’s a limp rag.  All that it has most vehemently denounced has come to pass.  The religious right was wrong.  Nothing that they sought to achieve has occurred and separation of church and state is still the cornerstone of our democracy.
    As a last gasp some diehards now sniff and claim smugly that the nation is still a center-right country.  Of course this is an entirely meaningless canard because the center is not static.  Elections set the compass points that mark the new, true center and a new administration must ratify it by means of their success in putting forward their policies and in consolidating their hold on power.  Naturally, there is a partisan right of center and a partisan left of center but the center itself in the election of ’08 has clearly moved five or ten degrees to the left.  It would be wise if republican leaders could acknowledge this, even if only to each other. 
    The recent election has proved racial integration a wonderful success. In our increasingly complex and genealogically mixed, single parented society which Obama perfectly represents, the future is here and alive.  Bans against prejudicial, or state sponsored or mandatory religious practices have been consistently upheld by our courts.  Roe v. Wade is still law.  The women’s movement is irreversible in its strength and potent as ever.  Multiculturalism is alive and well and it is the law of the land.  
     Regretfully perhaps but Mayberry too, is dead.  They built an information superhighway through the middle of it.  Sheriff Andy and Opie, I see on the internet, (and Fonzie, too) all voted for Obama.