Thread by @LarryGlickman

The language of “five minutes to midnight,” the prediction that liberalism represented an imminent threat to freedom, has shaped modern conservative rhetoric. In a 1940 article, Wendell L. Willkie projected descent into a totalitarian pit” if the New Deal wasn’t defeated./1

In 1961, warning about Medicare, Ronald Reagan worried that if it passed, he and his generation would have to tell their offspring "what it once was like in American when men were free."/2
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Lewis F. Powell Jr., closed his 1971 Confidential Memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, titled "Attack on American Free Enterprise System," with the ominous warning that "business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble and the hours is late."/3

In 1978, condemning Democrats as the party of "big government and big spenders," Ronald Reagan, beginning his (successful) run for the presidency, used the "5 minutes" expression that Willkie had employed in 1940 & warned of the "road to collectivism." /4
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The fact that all of these predications proved to be spectacularly wrong, has not made them less persistent or less central. It's always "five minutes to midnight" and existential danger of even moderate reformism always beckons./5

Remember that the "Flight 93 Election" argument was directed not against the incompetent, narcissistic racist, Donald Trump (about whom it might have been plausible) but Hillary Clinton, an establishment Democrat, who, whatever her faults, was hardly a totalitarian threat./6

Maybe 2020 will be the year we finally take James Marlow's sensible but largely unheeded advice from 1948: don't "be kidded into getting excited every time you hear someone scream that free enterprise is in danger of being destroyed." /7
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If you'd like to read more, my @yalepress book, "Free Enterprise: An American History," offers many more examples of this history. /8
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030023…