Thread by @LarryGlickman

This is an iteration of a backlash impulse that dates to the Reconstruction era. /1

https://twitter.com/MJGerson/status/1395691322401505280

The idea that time is running out--that it was always, as I showed in my book, FREE ENTERPRISE: AN AMERICAN HISTORY, "five minutes to midnight"--is central to the existential framing of all backlashes. /2
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030023…

So too was the idea that the rule of law was provisional, that certain people were not bound by its strictures. As one critic of the "recent revolutionary acts of Congress" said in 1868, they would "provoke on the part of those immediately affected by them violent resistance."/3

The claim that the natural order (or, the "traditional American way of life") is being inverted is central to the claim of crisis and and frames what I call "elite victimization."/4

As a critic of Reconstruction forthrightly said in 1866: “Then we had the influence of the General Government in our favor—now its whole power [is] wielded...with a fierceness and cruelty that can find no parallel in any previous period of our history...directed against us.”/5

The claims of "monstrous inversion" (as one critic of Reconstruction put it), the psychology of humiliation, the politics of existential emergency, and the threat of extralegal violence have long gone hand in hand in constituting backlash politics./6.

Enumerating the train of humiliations is another key element of backlash framing. For white Southerners in 1875 to complain about the "lacerations of untold tortures" suggests that projection is central as well./ 7

Via this projection, backlashers coopt the language of the oppressed. As one observer of the 1964 GOP convention noted, "the theme song of the whole convention seemed to be—we’re sick and tired—sick and tired of this, sick and tired of that, sick and tired of the other." /8

Fannie Lou Hamer famously said, she was "sick and tired or being sick and tired." /9