A brief history of our time

Here’s my amateur quasi-non-ideological Frankenstein myth about the American left since the New Deal: 

Post Roosevelt History is divided into pre-End of History and post-End of History.  Pre End of History,  the left was to a great extent labor unions who due to material conditions and power were partners in American prosperity (and in anti-communism) until about the 70’s when the right, in response to Civil Rights, Voting Rights and other Human Rights, and to the peace movement and environmentalism, got its shit together and began aggressively destroying the left—motivated not just by profit but by a desire to put the genie of civil rights and feminism back into the bottle.  This was achievable in part because global shortages and high inflation weakened the leverage of labor in negotiations forcing an extended period of concessions.  With the advent of Reagan using the excuse of an escalating cold war to bloat the US military budget, labor was in retreat, social programs were cut, and public services began to be privatized extending the scope of wealth at the top while stagnating or shrinking the wealth at the bottom.  

Meanwhile on the other side of the world, the experiment of actually existing socialism was imploding in Russia and China.  Thus Unions and actually existing socialism died at the same time in the early 90s resulting in the conquest of history by neoliberalism.  

In the end of history era, politics died.  Flames were kept kindled by extremely isolated, utterly marginal and effectively discredited pockets of angry alienated folks (and some faith keepers—e.g., Noam Chomsky, Adolph Reed, yourself).  Neoliberalism hardened the arteries of history with an intractable plaque that is with us today.  However, the flaws baked into capitalism in this time of extreme social isolation, alienation (even amongst the managerial and owner classes at the top) herniated in the 2000’s inspiring a resurgence of leftist activism (the flames of which were fanned by not just the financial meltdown and its exposure of runaway disparities in wealth and freedom, but also by such neoliberal contributions to human civilization as free trade, forever wars, anti-democracy, technocracy), a resurgence which reached its apotheosis in the 2016 and 2020 presidential primary challenges of Bernie Sanders*, an effort which brought the disparate tendrils of the disaffected left together in collective hopes of achieving something like legitimate power with which to jumpstart history again and to get to hacking apart the soulless hegemony of neoliberal capitalism.  

The defeat of Bernie Sanders by a concerted conspiracy of Democrats in 2020 was a setback that we’re still trying to recover from.  

There’s a shit ton I’ve left out of course-- the war on drugs leading to grand scale incarceration, the pretext of a war on terror for draconian erosion of personal privacy and autonomy, the onset of the observable destructive effects of human caused planetary warming and Trump (who is in fact more neoliberal than he wants his base to think—the negative twin of Obama—both having similarly deludedly satisfied bases.)  

I wanted to bring this back to the abortion thing.  Hard to see how this isn’t going to have repercussions that I’m really looking forward to seeing.  The contradictions are going to be obvious to everyone I thnk.  If something exciting doesn’t come out of this, we’re even more doomed than I thought we were last week.

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* If you see Bernie Sanders as right wing, it might be a good idea to ask yourself if you're willing to set aside your purity to make revolution happen for other people who probably need it more than you.