Cracks in Our Political Ice Age?

A few months ago I was lamenting about how static the politics of American in my lifetime have been. The same debates about abortion and guns I first heard as a child are still raging and have not been resolved. In the Reagan years I first picked up on the critique of how American society was increasingly divided and unequal, and that problem has only gotten worse. The second Gilded Age did not lead to a second Progressive Era. Instead, the divisions in American society obvious since the 1960s have remained and we have just been fighting over them for the last 50 years with no clear outcomes or change. Kruse and Zelizer's recent history Fault Lines does an excellent job of illustrating this.

The wave of protests over the last two weeks are a sign that America's political ice age is maybe finally coming to an end. One of the central tenets of this ice age has been the role of the police. "Small government" conservatives are really more interested in reorganizing the state than eliminating it, and their onslaught led to social services being starved and the prison-industrial complex being fed. For decades liberals, afraid of the wrath of the masses who wanted them to get "tough on crime," just went along with it. In this time of "fault lines" support for the police was one of the few political consensus points.

That has been undermined in a dramatic way. People who once may have felt uncomfortable criticizing law enforcement are openly doing so. Joe Biden's proposal to support community policing while still giving additional grants to police departments fell like a lead balloon. That kind of "reform" simply doesn't cut it anymore.

The sense that the underlying system has failed and needs to be drastically changed has been around my entire life, but the voices for that opinion have been on the margins. Now they are at center stage.  That's because plenty of people in the middle are taking the failures to heart. Politicians like Bernie Sanders who voice this critique have also articulated the need for major change to a larger audience than ever. Events of the past few years make any other interpretation impossible to sustain. Most of what passes for arguments the other way is just nostalgia or a pig-headed refusal to admit being wrong.

Donald Trump's election and presidency represent a total failure of our political system. It matters that he LOST the popular vote by a significant margin. It matters that Republicans have used voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the nature of the Senate to defy the public will. For a lot of people that was pretty abstract up until this year, but the tens of thousands of unnecessary virus deaths have illustrated the stakes of having a nakedly unrepresentative political system. The ways that Republicans at the state level have tried to use the virus to suppress voting have also been noticed in ways that prior attempts at voter suppression were not.

This all happened because Republicans know that the only way to sustain the 45 year ice age that allowed them to ward off change is to rig the system. A clear majority is against them, whether it be from generational replacement or from enough people deciding that the system does not work for them anymore. (That's also why they have won the popular vote in only one presidential election this century, and why the GOP had to turn to Trump. Their own brand is too tarnished.)

But I do wonder how much change will be generated by this unique moment. Last week we were talking about changing policing, this week it's monuments. While I cheer the monuments being taken down, I wonder if conservatives will end up shifting the discourse to turn this into another one of the culture wars that have been emblematic of the ice age. We can't let that happen.

I was inspired in the first place to use the "ice age" metaphor by an account I once read of the zeks in Siberian labor camps hearing of the death of Stalin. They gave a hopeful cheer, and one of the witnesses said it was like in Siberian spring when you could hear the massive sheets of ice cracking. That's how I feel now. The situation is beyond terrible, but there is a sign of hope. This American Spring needs to blossom into a full summer if we are to have a future. See you on the barricades.