Very often, you’ll hear historians say, we’ve seen this before and we’ve survived. But we saw it mostly in the 19th Century--which was an absolutely horrible time in U.S. history. And we only emerged from its horrors because of the Progressive Movement, which was at first more a Republican thing (TR) and then more of a Democrat thing (FDR). The Progressives of the early 20th century effected a genuine evolutionary step in American society, and yet huge swaths of America see Progressivism as anti-American. Because for them American identity is all about be self-reliant, to fend for yourself, to take pride in not needing anyone else's help, especially not the government's, which they see as the greatest threat to their freedom an independence.
And so contemporary Republican zealots, starting with Reagan, have begun an effective program to restore a frontier imagination of American identity. It was a primitive, cruel mentality then, but it was understandable given the daily realities that Americans faced on the frontier, in the Civil War, and later in the factories. These Republican zealots have for forty years now been striving to to dismantle Progressive institutions--even Social Security--and to regress us back into a time when there were no protections, when the powerful did as they pleased, and if you were poor it was your own fault for not being smart enough or ruthless enough to eat rather than be eaten.
Cruelty and viciousness we shall have always with us, but for the best part of the 20th Century American political establishment found a way to soften the hard edges. But the Right has done a remarkably effective job since 1980 of sharpening them again and making the U.S. a remarkably cruel place when compared to other economically developed societies. To celebrate 19th century America is a nostalgic delusion, and the non-zealots among us are quite right to be horrified. It was a cruel, viciously mean, dog-eat-dog era in which government mostly colluded with the meanest and the most vicious. In someone like Mitch McConnell you have a 19th Century through back to that meanness.
Regardless of SJW sneer that has recently become a trope, social justice is something to strive for--then and now. It improved the quality of life then in ways that we have come to take for granted now. And yet the people who are suffering the most from this meanness are the ones voting for and supporting the meanest. And they do it because there's meaning in meanness, it's what they're used to, and there's a dignity in suffering that they don't find in Liberal ideology, which they see as promoting a slothful dependency inimical to everything they believe is central to American identity and to their dignity as human beings.
But the choice that Americans face in the political sphere is not binary. On the right, Americans think it better to be ruled by the law of the jungle and governed by Libertarian zealots because they fear living in an Orwellian dystopia governed by Big Brother. They see managerial liberalism and the bureaucratic technocracy embraced by Democrats as the route to this dystopia. But this is where clear thinking about the complexity of governing a country that will soon have 400 million people has to prevail. A Libertarian ethos is insanely inadequate for the challenges we face. But that does not mean that Big Brother is our only other option.
Self-reliance will always be an important part of American identity, but we are living in a society that is far too complex to think that the kind of life that people lived in the 19th century provides any viable model for us now. A balance has to be found between self-reliance and understanding how each of us is enmeshed in a complex national and global social system. Wishing things were simpler doesn't make it so, but dealing with complexity isn't something that interests zealots, and zealots, those who are most aggressively and ignorantly wrongheaded, are playing a disproportionate role in preventing us from thinking about and developing solutions to very real problems we all face together.
The U.S. will survive in some form or another, but will it be a place that any decent human being would want to live in? That’s a very real question. And if Trump wins again, we take another step toward becoming meaner and more cruelly vicious. If you don't have a problem with that, shame on you.