History is informative when it allows for comparisons but not predictive because it does not tell you how things will work out. It is therefore informative to point out that there are ways in which the era of the Fifties and Sixties is repeating itself in the Twenties by presenting an intensity of events in the public arena that are unsettling and foment change and are perfectly visible. That earlier era saw assassinations and riots and major landmark legislation and Supreme Court decisions, deeply flawed Presidents contending with real statesmen (though today including stateswomen) and simultaneous actions here and abroad: a war then as well as a major domestic upheaval over race, based on regional conflict, while today there is a still minor scale (for American) war alongside an upheaval over the rights of women and attendant other “minorities”, again based on regionalism (the west coast and the east versus the south and the mountain states). There was rioting in a number of cities after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a little bit of rioting after the death of George Floyd a few years ago. There was back then a President assassinated and one resigned and today there is a recent President who was twice impeached and leads an insurrection and a President, two incumbent’s before, who qualifies now as the second worst President ever for having gone into war on the basis of a lie, the real reason for it still unclear. History, for the duration of the periods, then and now, seems to be moving at quick speed, not having to absorb one moment before there is another one demanding its attention. What is happening that makes us attend to what will happen next, what will unfold in the news cycle, is the long slumbering answer or backlash against the Fifties and Sixties, an attempt to regain what had been supposedly lost as a result of those reforms some fifty or more years ago and reestablish the social order that existed before those changes. It has been a long time in coming, but it has come, and it is unclear which of the two major factions, those who prefer what existed before the Fifties and what came after it, will prevail.
The intermittent period, between the Eighties and the present decade, were not uneventful. After all, there was the War on Terror that had begun with the World Trade Center attack, but that was a singular event well managed by the national psyche: a military threat countered with an invasion and leaving little American carnage behind it, though at the moment there was an expectation of a great many similar attacks all over the nation, but the War on Terror had few after effects other than the safety precautions in airports.There were between those two ages of turmoil long term evolutionary developments such as the development of the computer, which changed work from manufacturing to data processing, but nobody is sorry that there aren’t many secretarial pools to provide work for women, and also what seems the meteoric rise of women into the professions and into politics, and such other sociological developments as boutique bakeries and the movie industry into decline, not what every family did during the weekend to experience the common point of view from Hollywood. But these were social changes and what I am after is what is self admittedly the combination of political crises that existed then and exists just now.
A good way to understand the deep conflict within the body politic during these two episodes is to recognize that the two opposing sides do not understand one another very well. The two sides cannot recognize any legitimacy on the other side. The slogan by Southerners against desegregation and integration was “Segregation Now and Forever”. All the Southern Senators signed onto that in their Southern Manifesto whether they believed it or not because other than to do so meant the end of their political careers, the populace using segregation as a single litmus test issue. William Fulbright had to sign even though it meant getting disqualified as Kennedy’s Secretary of State and that was fateful because he was against the Vietnam War when it started but all he could do was rail against the war as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And yet, despite the vociferousness, times were changing. Public opinion polls at the time showed that every five years or so the percentage of the population opposed to working or living next to Black people was going down, though there was still resistance to miscegenation. The society was changing and politics would help that and also recognize that.
It might therefore be expected that Roe v. Wade, the central issue in the abortion debate, would have also gone through a change in the minds and hearts of Americans opposed to abortion. The religious communities, Catholicism and the Evangelical community, might come to make their peace with abortion as something legitimate outside of their own precincts or find a way to expand the exceptions for abortion just as the Catholic Church made more broad the allowance of annulment while maintaining that it forbid divorce. But that is not what happened. Vetting potential Supreme Court nominees for their point of view helped Mitch MacConnell and Donald Trump decide who to appoint even if Trump, the New York Lothario, probably had no moral conviction about preventing abortion. The Right to Life party persisted that human life began at conception, which is a plausible argument but is a dicey one once you consider that there are so many fetuses that never make it through implantation into the womb and so that could be a cutting off point, or any number of other points during gestation on how to assign humanity with regard to the sui generis issue of when human life begins. But to complicate the issue is to abandon it as a readily decided moral issue.
The same inclination to de-complicate the issue also holds with those who are appalled at the Dobbs decision whereby Roe v. Wade was overturned this past week. The two slogans invoked by columnists and cable commentators against Dobbs are that this issue has to do with a woman’s control of her own body and that this is the first time that a right granted by the Supreme Court has been taken away are both begging the question as to what is the issue at stake. The question is whether a female body is really wholly its own when it has become dependent on a fetus who lives inside it and is rather a host that is necessary to sustain a separate life even if it creates burdens for the host and has potential social shortcomings when sustaining that life. Would it be incumbent upon you to have a transfusion for an hour if you allowed a person to remain alive? What if it were for nine months and with an internal and troublesome parasite? Difficult moral dilemma. Phillipa Foot, an English philosopher writing at the time of Roe v. Wade thought that the woman was not obligated to take up that burden, but I am not so sure. A woman breast feeds an old man in “Grapes of Wrath'' so he will not starve. Should anyone do less? And how much more of a burden can be required, and so is an obligation? And as for reversing a right, anti-abortionists would say that Dobbs is recognizing a new right, which is that of the unborn to remain alive, even if it places a burden on the mother, just as slave owners thought that they wereto be prevented from keeping the wealth of their slave property, which was a considerable hardship. Rights have consequences even if a right is legitimate.
Put the abortion issue in a wider social context. Women, by and large, have the role of being caretakers and have done so for millenia and still disproportionately. Women do the body work for their spouses and children. They clean and cook even if home appliances make this work less burdensome. They are forebearing and delicate in handling the egos of their spouses and children. Patience and forbearance seems their natural role. But what if, as a result of the exposure to work, they or large parts of their number are unwilling to continue to discipline themselves to forbearance? What if they want the assertiveness that comes with being a doctor or a lawyer or even an office manager? And, most dramatically, they may not want to engage in the consideration of the needs of others to provide a fetus with its host even if doing so creates a significant burden on the social well being much less the general inconvenience of the mother? When can she say enough is enough? After the third or fourth pregnancies or after ten or twelve, as happened with Queen Anne? The question is when does she have agency rather than a social role supposedly determined by the biological facts. So there is a principled and opposing difference between the abortionists and the anti-abortionists, the first group feeling that their lives are their own, never mind the dependency present inside their bodies, able to talk the fetuses away by treating them as no more than hangnails, and the anti-abortionists convinced that, all conditions aside, the fetus is as real a human being as if it was just about to emerge from the birth canal or has just done so. These are values at stake rather than food riots or wage increases and Neal Smelser, a sociologist of collective behavior, says these such grounds are the basis for revolution rather than mere legislation, though the genius of the American system is to find a way to channel such conflict into the institutional mechanisms of the Supreme Court, legislation and voting.
Why are these intermittent periods of political unrest? It is very difficult to say. Some fads, like the hula hoop, just die out because they do not sustain interest, as the drama does,or an interest in ancient artifacts, but that is merely to note that it has passed on. There have been no attempts to assassinate the President since Ronald Reagan, but maybe that is because the Secret Service has become more skillful and such an activity would return if the Secret Service let up. Male youths engaged in mass killings were in hiatus during Covid but have reappeared and so it is not just copycat killings. Something goes on that lets people do such things, whether the social condition whereby somee people have so much hatred that they want to lash out o becauseassault rifles are availble and a likely weapon of choice, but there were spates of murder in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the late Nineteenth Century that could be attributed to the wild frontier rather than the nature of firearms. Fads remain one of the deepest phenomena of sociology.
It is very difficult to even say that there is a backlash except that people say it is so, as happened when Justice Alitto said that Roe v. Wade was incorrectly decided from the beginning but did not say that a whole hassle of Supreme Court pronouncements are also dubious including the Brown v. Board of Education decision requiring the desegregation of schools. Even Conservatives think that decision is hallowed because most people now think that Black people are fully citizens even if gay people and women are not and so there are restrictions on their abilities to marry or access abortion, something men don’t need. Alitto claims that the Dobbs decision only has to do with abortion because that is a matter of life and death, and indicates just how important that issue is, but any categorical decision can have major consequences in people’s lives. Saying miscegenation is again illegal would impact people profoundly and so there might be a passel of ways to turn back the clock even if Conservatives want to pooh-pooh those wider reverberations.The decision to separate abortion from other issues does not lend to the idea that there are any number of vectors-- a war, a plague, the importance of social media and changes in the status of women-- a whole pot pourri whereby there is a reaction to the past rather than just a selective rejection of the past. Moreover, that rejectionist mode can be shortly after it happens. The South rose again within a few years of the end of slavery or maybe never really suirrendered its own social structure. Mccarthyism was a backlash against the New Deal but Eisenhower, when he became President, assimilated rather than rejecting the New Deal heritage. People despise social media, as they did comic books in the forties, as vehicles of a deadened mind and spirit, just as they did the wasteland of television, without ever dispensing of these devices of cultural entertainment and enlightenment. So what is there about a backlash except a pronouncement of a past or current social practice that people say they don’t really like.
The best description of the great divide between two factions of a population that do not understand one another, though not an explanation of why that phenomenon happens, does. however, invoke global feelings rather than particular issues. It ties together the elements of a syndrome or a conflation that makes it a memorable time not as a sequence or a backlash or a pendulum but just two points of view so antithetical that they go past one another. That is Karl Mannheim’s insufficiently appreciated “Ideology and Utopia”, published in 1929, which claimed that there is no compromise between those who look at and want to restore the past, when men were men and women were women, and people of various classes knew their places, and those who look at the future as full of the promise of more freedom, whether of losing female shackles or achieving an extended life span or becoming ever more diverse. When was the starting point of the present and how far back before it is when it is to be restored? You could say radio was the start of in-home news of the world around you, and that's the 1920/s or it is indoor plumbing, which was widespread a decade before. Or maybe young people think that ordinary life began with smartphones or, if, of a romantic bent, when women lost the double standard. And how far back? To 1950, when men and women werre in their place and gay and Negroes were deviant and non-human? Maybe 1850, when slavery flourished and only the telegraph had been invented so that messages could be sent without transporting things, such as letters. Or 1755, when Dr Johnson was putting together his dictionary and Britain had not yet conquered French Canada, much less been caught up in a war with its colonies. Maybe back to that awful century, the Fourteenth, that contained both “The Canterbury Tales” and “The Divine Comedy'' and also the Black Plague. That was a century perhaps as awful as the Twentieth and so we should antecede it, treat it as point Zero. The thing is, though, that a stable pastoral society never really existed; it was just imagined by more complicated times and so there is no beginning for a stable society, only an imagined one when, among other things, people were not ambivalent about whether or not to abort a fetus.
The same idea of a stop time holds with the future when there is a stable time, whether in Plato’s Republic or in an accomplished socialist system, when there is no need to do anything new, perhaps other than going to the moon or getting in other inconsequential diversions. People will be comfortable and that is all that matters or needs to matter. The bad things will be eliminated. On the other hand, Liberals imagine a sequence or line of endless development where bad things are eliminated and there are no end of them like, as I say, having a very long life span or colonizing other stars, once past the requirements of giving everybody what they want and what they need, which means a middle range set of continuing improvements whereby every population gets more and more entitlements so that it can do whatever it wants or do nothing whatever, any and all desired goals, including having children only when people want them and bringing them forth without pain, none of these unreasonable goals on the not too immediate future even if the Bible says that women will have pain in childbirth and men will work through the sweat of their brows, both those goals not now so far away.
The key point is that the two political sides do not just disagree. They do not understand one another, crackpots all to the other side. It is a mistake to think that there is a compromise in the sense that there is a meeting of minds whereby the two sides can form a compromise as they supposedly did in the recent agreement on gun control. It was that the Democrats accepted whatever the Republicans would offer, clenching their fists so as to get the boyfriend loophole abolished because the Republicans think that the gun issue is now off the table and the Democrats think they might as well get something before they lose the Congress in November. Self interest rather than community is the order of the day and has been so since conservatives and liberals set up their opposition in the Seventeenth Century. Each side cultivates its own flocks rather than win over members of the opposing flock. See that happen in the fall.