Thread by @Noahpinion

1/Anyway, I've been reading @rickperlstein books, and I've naturally been thinking about the parallels between 1965-1976 and 2014-present...

2/It seems like the outpouring of leftist energy has proceeded roughly analogously to that time, with Obama as JFK/LBJ. The GOP backlash, with Trump as Nixon, also seems somewhat analogous...

3/But one big piece of the analogy is missing: the conservative movement.

By 1972 the conservative movement was already gathering strength. It had already captured the GOP nomination once, with Goldwater. Eventually it would triumph in 1980...

4/The conservative movement was a cultural movement organized around a Christian revival (at a time when many had predicted that Christianity was on the way out). It was also an anti-tax revolt, a localist revolt, etc.

5/Obviously the conservative energy was eventually co-opted by libertarian plutocrats, but it didn't start that way; it was a true grassroots uprising, organized around issues like abortion that plutocrats didn't really care about.

6/What really strikes me is that *there is nothing like that now*. There's no wave of grassroots conservative energy. There's no Goldwater, no Reagan. Nothing even on the horizon.

7/Trumpism is not a new grassroots movement. Neither is the alt-right. It's a screamier version of Nixon-era law-n-order-ism and racist reaction. It can't do what the Goldwater/Reagan/Billy Graham movement did in the 70s.

8/Conservatives in the 70s had an idea of the society they wanted to create - sort of a society of autonomous Christian villages living out traditional ways of life.

Trumpists have no such vision, beyond the mad racial purity fantasies of a few internet trolls.

9/It's very possible that the left wave of the late 60s and early 70s, while it transformed American culture, failed to seize political power because an equally powerful conservative wave crashed into it and derailed it.

Seems like that won't happen this time.

(end)