I'm old enough to remember this; and to remember when Barry Goldwater went from extreme right-wing crank to elder statesman and almost not crazy (turned out he wasn't quite as crazy as Curtis LeMay). The extremism of Goldwater paved the way for the liberal social policies of LBJ (but not a desire to stand down from Vietnam. LBJ was doomed to one term no matter what he did in Vietnam: had he de-escalated, he'd have been emasculated as too weak to be the C-in-C. He escalated, and got us so stuck in the tar baby even the briar patch couldn't get us loose.).The GOP is surrendering to QAnon #MarjorieTaylorGreene and other extremists today even more than it did to the John Birch Society in the 1960s, the closest earlier equivalent. My take. https://t.co/1QXkferkyn
— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) February 4, 2021
History may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes. Biden is not going to be LBJ (I don't think; who really knows?), but he's using the extremism of Trump to take the country to the other extreme. He's not going to fulfill Sanders' wish list, but he's likely to come as close as LBJ did to fulfilling the "dream" of MLK (and a few other dreams as well, on a number of fronts). After Korea and McCarthyism and with a rising Boomer generation demanding government do what only government could do, LBJ had something of a mandate for his sweeping actions. After the pandemic and Trump's complete inability to even figure out where the light switches were, Biden was a sweeping and implicit mandate to do whatever Trump would not. Much as LBJ had authority to be whatever Goldwater wouldn't have been.
May you live in interesting times.
No comments:
Post a Comment