Joy Ann Reid Gives Us HOPE: "The Right Can't Fight the Future"

[kpete]

While Trump and his cabinet loot the palace, the GOP has reckoning coming its way.
JOY-ANN REID
03.03.18 8:15 AM ET

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In every way, Donald Trump is a president built for the past; a benighted, late 19th Century figure who spun his supporters a tale that he could restore a bygone era when coal fires burned, factories hummed, steel mills belched out soot and opportunity and a (white) man with a sturdy back, a high school diploma and a song in his heart could buy a little house, marry a little wife and have 3 cherry-cheeked kids he didn’t ever have to cook or clean for, plus if he can afford it, a hot mistress on the side. Trump is the slovenly but brash, gold-plated emblem of a time when in the imagination of his followers, black women hummed a tune while they cleaned your house or did the washing, black men tipped their hat on the street but didn’t dare look you in the eye, and neither would dream of moving in next door. A time when women asked their husbands for an allowance, not their boss for a promotion, men were “allowed to be men” complete with ribald jokes and a slap on the fanny for the pretty secretary at work, and there were no gays, no trans people, no birth control … they somehow just didn’t exist! The rural folks were the salt of the earth and we only let in “a certain kind of immigrant” whose only goal was to shake off his ethnicity and “assimilate.” Everyone went to (separate) church on Sundays and everyone “got along.” It’s a plasticine world that for many must feel like it truly existed, though of course it never did.

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But here’s the thing: the past really is past. Coal is still a dying industry and America will never again have an industrial revolution. It’s other countries’ turn to do that now. Black and brown people aren’t giving up our dignity, including the right to protest and to survive mundane encounters with police. Immigrants aren’t going away (and in fact we need them to keep the economy and the safety net flush). LGBT people aren’t going back into the closet. And women are staying in the workforce, with many aiming to become the CEO, while insisting on hanging onto our reproductive liberty. There is indeed a sizable minority of Americans who want to go back to the old times. But we aren’t going back.


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Meanwhile, there is another America, which is busy concerning itself with the future. It’s the America that produces two-thirds of this country’s economic output, though it represents just hundreds of counties versus Trump’s thousands. It’s the America that objects to Russian interference in our elections, that welcomes immigrants and their economic contributions, that recognizes that even ancient institutions like marriage can modernize, that views women’s full equality as a boon not a threat to civilization, that doesn’t want to be ruled from Biblical texts or by a savage gun lobby, and that wants America to be a part of the world, not it’s creaky, cranky, lonely adversary.

In particular, young Americans—Millennials and post-Millennials, have had enough of our tired wrangling. They’re sick of the Baby Boomers’ social agonies and the clenched grip of the World War II generation on American social and political life. They want an end to throwback rigidity on guns, gays, and religion. And they neither respect nor revere the current president of the United States.

Far from becoming more conservative with time, young Americans are staying right where they were when Barack Obama was first elected—on the left of center—if not growing more progressive. It’s why Republicans are so keen to suppress their votes. Where my generation, Generation X, polls at 51-41 percent blue over red, for Millennials the Democratic-over-Republican preference is a daunting 62-29, while Boomers are 48-46 D versus R and their parents, in the Silent Generation, tilt Republican 51 to 45 percent. The main reason for the increasing liberalism of the younger cohorts? These generations (including the youngest group, Generation Z) are chock full of young people of color. They are the most racially diverse generation in modern American history. And by next year, Millennials will be the single largest generational group in America, with their ranks swelled by immigrants (which explains the urgent right wing push for mass deportation.)


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With its broad and seemingly absolute power over the country, the Republican Party may not feel like it is dying, but it is dying nonetheless, at the hands of youth and multiracial population growth. The GOP can rush to install voter suppression traps and other restraints on change to try and keep the tide from coming in. But it will come anyway.

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The future is coming. It cannot live alongside the past. And in the end, it cannot be stopped.

the rest:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-right-cant-fight-the-future

[strangedaysindeed]

1. Unfortunately

That is also why they want to blow the place up.