People Forget

Or probably were never taught.

My parents became Democrats in the 1950s, as the party swung from being a racist, southern, KKK-adjacent organization to a party that stood for civil rights, feminism, human rights. (One could argue they are all the same thing, and one would not be wrong.)

My family name is Nixon. My father used to constantly say, “We’re not related” – I didn’t realize, until I was older and could put seven and five together, that we were not related because we were never really Nixons. My great-grandmother was pregnant with my grandfather when she got married (or shortly thereafter), and that son was not her husband’s son.

But the husband gave the family our name. Or cursed us with it.

So my political awakening came early, during the Nixon administration, when my parents were being prank-called at 3 in the morning, and I was 8 and 9 years old. Playgrounds were vicious even then, let me tell you – kids come at you with everything they ever heard from their parents, whether it makes sense to them or no. Kids are about power or no power, and whatever they can use for leverage, they will.

I was made, for better or worse, aware of Watergate, even though I was a child. And as a young adult, made tremendously aware of Lee Atwater. I remember when he died, and some friends were basically dancing on his grave, and I didn’t agree with that because “do not speak ill of the dead” generosity that I was imbued with – I can say now that I was wrong, and I should have been dancing with them.

But Atwater was only exploiting what was already there.

Carter became president as a backlash to the corruption of the Republican Party. But he was drummed out very quickly – the media made up stories about his incompetence, and Reagan screwed him over during the election year.

Now, I think we all know what a good man Carter is. He should never have been subjected to the media treatment he was. We can say that about so many people in retrospect.

Due to colluding between the Reagan campaign and the media, Reagan succeeded Carter as the President. And he was re-elected in 1984. While he was President, he deregulated everything he possibly could. This was the beginning of the erosion of the American safety net. Reagan and Thatcher referred to it as the Nanny State – it was anything but. That was a lie predicated on on another lie.

It worked. Who benefited?

When Reagan deregulated institutions, private industry saw an opportunity. Prisons? CCA was there to step in. Mental institutions? Not a bad idea, but that left parents and families to provide support when they were not trained or funded to do so, and homelessness increased. The rug was ripped out from under the diverse middle class, just as it had begun to take root. When Black people and single women became a part of the American Dream, there were going to be repercussions.

That was when the abortion debate resurged. When I graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1987, I didn’t realize I was on the doorstep of a lot of violence.

Bush I didn’t have a lot to offer – I’m not even sure why he was elected, except that he managed to make Dukakis look foolish for justifiably wearing a helmet. Between that and the Willie Horton panic – again, patriarchy/macho-ism and racism – Bush managed to win.

Black people and single women and gay people and trans people could NEVER, under this regime, succeed. There were pockets of acceptance – it’s why I moved to New York after college – but even pockets of acceptance aren’t necessarily a refuge.

We thought we had a respite when Clinton was elected, but there were problems there too. Clinton (and Tony Blair) were leading a political movement that came to be called Third Way – what it amounted to was a further tack to the right. Clinton ran (and was re-elected) as a Democrat – what he was was a palatable Democrat to the right-leaning apparatus that had been on the ascendancy since Nixon. It was the only way Democrats were going to win.

The Bush/Gore election was quite close. I have my own opinions about that, and people can probably guess what they are. Nonetheless, Bush II became president, and September 11 happened almost immediately. And that altered everything, whether we agreed with it or not. It became an opening for tyranny. I was working in the library space, for a vendor, and I distinctly remember clients telling me that they would put up a sign: “The FBI has not been here today.” They weren’t allowed to tell patrons that the FBI HAD been there, so they would just take the sign down if it happened.

Obama was elected in 2008, and it was a huge relief – but there was a tremendous racist backlash. The Tea Party, death panels – as Obama was trying to put forward his healthcare plan, there were people in town halls saying that they would much rather die than pay for their neighbor’s healthcare. (I wish I had a citation for this, but I remember it very clearly from a CNN report.) What they meant was that they would rather die than accept a benefit from a Black president, because that meant that a Black president had something to give them. That they were on the receiving end. That they were supplicants.

This was the beginning of a specific kind of racist insanity. But it didn’t end there. When Hillary Clinton was running against Trump in 2016, I think a lot of us remember the misogyny and the weirdness around things like, “I don’t like her voice,” or “she laughs wrong” (I have had this specific thing leveled against me), or “I’m not against a woman, but not this woman.”

Biden was able to grab hold of the parts of Obama’s legacy that worked for white people – gay marriage, healthcare (despite people holding their noses at it, they adopted it) – and provide stability during an eruption of (justifiable) anger at police brutality across the country. To say nothing of being a settled influence as we recovered (and we haven’t fully recovered) from COVID.

But he was sabotaged as a candidate in 2024. Rightfully or wrongly, the Democratic establishment was against him, and they put up Kamala instead. She would have been a strong candidate! But she wasn’t given enough runway or support. This is where I begin to ask some questions:

• Did the media want Trump to win because he sells clicks?

• What’s the DNC strategy right now, because it seems like they don’t have one?

• Why is voting now a hairsplitting betting game rather than an earnest support of who should actually have power and lead this country?

The Republicans have been at this game for a really long time, since before the Southern Strategy. They’ve shed their reputation as the party of respectability – that’s been left in the dust. The question now is, why are they still in control? They’re the minority. Gerrymandering gets you part of the way – pandering gets you the rest of the way.

But what do either of those things get you outside of personal power?

Yeah. It’s about personal power. The US presidency is about crowning a king. And that is NOT what the Declaration of Independence is going for.