The Dying Reagan Era

It's important to remember that we are entering a new political era. The Reagan era in America is now dying a very fast and painful death and has to be replaced by something else. Will it be the updated, 21st Century New Deal of Barack Obama, or will it be whatever John McCain does with it?

The heart and soul of the Reagan Era, the political coalition our last great president formed of neo-conservative anti-communists, free market fundamentalists and country club wealthy, and the religious right, has become decrepid and feeble. It is literally falling apart before our eyes.

In part this is because the Communist world collapsed around 1990 of its own dead weight, leaving us no real enemy to fight. The neo-cons have tried very hard ever since to replace Communism with Radical Islam, but that effort has been largely blown apart by the disastrous Iraqi War. Meanwhile we keep our vast military machine deployed around the world, spending trillions of dollars in the process, trying to keep the shrinking reserves of oil flowing to our vast national fleet of pickups and SUVs.

In part, it is because Reaganomics (and the neo-liberalism of Clinton, which was really a Democratic version of Reaganomics), while doing some economic things very well, has also left us up to our eyeballs in debt and dependent upon the rest of the world to fund that debt. Manufacturing has been largely replaced by go-go finance, aka Casino Capitalism, creating an illusion of prosperity but not the substance. Also, it has created the greatest disparity in the distribution of national income and wealth since the Gilded Age, which many people are beginning to understand and oppose. Finally, it is has left us very vulnerable to the increasing global shortages of oil by ignoring our growing dependence on foreign sources of energy.

And in part, it is because the founding celebrities of the Religious Right--its Falwells, Dobsons, Robertsons--are aging and losing influence (or already dead), while the younger generation are moving in a different, more nuanced political direction (e.g. Emerging Church).

And there are other reasons as well--the Internet, for example, or the rise of China and India as global competitors.

Where Obama will take us--toward a new New Deal (or as Time calls it, the Renew Deal)--is quite clear to me. He will try to reverse the worst consequences of the Reaganomics with new measures across the board, with an activist government intervention, while at the same time, working hard to restore America's good name around the world by working cooperatively with our friends and negotiating with our foes whenever possible, with use of force as a last resort.

But where McCain will take us is not clear to me. Perhaps he would just preside over the current economic ruins, until replaced by Hillary Clinton in 2012, or Sarah Palin even sooner. Or perhaps he would make it worse by attacking Iran or provoking the resurgent Russia.

Whatever he would do, McCain would be joined in it by what remains of the Reaganite intellectual resources at the American Enterprise Institute (where I almost went to work in 1988), anti-taxer Grover Norquist and his buddies, and the fundamentalists at the Family Resource Council, among others. (Oh, and I can't forget that ever grinning Joe Lieberman, who would obviously join McCain in the White House in order to perpetually stand just behind McCain's chair in the Oval Office and continue grinning, since he will be 'persona non grata' in the Senate after the election.)

Now where Sarah Palin would take us, that is an interesting question! And that is beyond the horizon of my current viewpoint, though I know that I desperately don't want to go there.