Categorical Aperitif

Tomasky reads the tea leaves:

Well, no, I don't give up. But my darkest fear goes something like this. Historically speaking, the conservative movement started in the late 1950s. It took a long time but it seized real power in 1980. Results were mixed, it retreated for a bit (Clinton), then roared back to power in 2000.

Living these events in real time, the general view of them, I think, has been, well, those were their two best shots, and now they're bound to lose steam. You didn't have to think that the 2008 election signaled a liberal renaissance (and I did not) to think that a 50-year old movement that hadn't produced a truly new idea in a long time was running out of gas.

But now I think: taking the longer historical view, it may well be that the Reagan and Dubya years were just warm-up acts, and that the conservative movement has yet to behold its triumph. The amount of money corporate titans can now pump into politics, the level of activism, the utter inability of the media to call lies lies, the weakness of the Democrats...we may be in for a 40-year descent, until there is no Social Security and there are no environmental regulations and so on and so on, and it'll take a couple of generations for Americans to see the grim effects of that kind of country and decide that pension security and regulation weren't such horrible ideas after all, and America will have to spend 20 years, from about 2050 to 2070, rebuilding an apparatus of state that was built a century before but dismantled. Worst of all, of course, is that according to the actuarial tables, I will die during the descent.

A 40-year descent...and he doesn't even mention having to re-fight the Enlightenment. Yep: just how I wanted to spend my golden years.