Somewhere around 1977 or so, liberals and progressives who had privileged access to the pre-Internet public culture of the United States declared victory over racism, sexism and imperialism.
Of course, not really, but that was when a consciousness started to settle over one sector of American society, a sense that progress was irreversible, that certain arguments were settled and that anyone still defending racial segregation, limits on women’s rights, or conflicts like the Vietnam War was an anachronism.
That was the mainstream rhetoric applied to people like Jesse Helms or Arizona governor Evan Mecham when they fought against making Martin Luther King’s birthday an officially recognized holiday. They were the last gasp of a profoundly discredited past, the end of a horrible lineage of oppression. The liberal consensus busied itself with future challenges to the further extension of progress towards equality, fairness, pluralism and liberty, with crafting public policy that would finally close the gap between democratic aspiration and social reality—busing, the Equal Rights Amendment, affirmative action, and so on.
I think centrist liberals have never really awoken from that moment of ill-considered self-satisfaction, though people leftward of them got the picture pretty clearly in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. Every idea, every civic virtue, that the liberal consensus assumed was an obvious established moral truth in the late 1970s had won over almost nobody but those who were won over in the first place when those beliefs first catalyzed voters and activists in the 1960s. Almost as many people still believed the Vietnam War had been a righteous conflict as did during that war. The majority of Americans had a strongly unfavorable view of Martin Luther King Jr. during his lifetime, and by 1977, that sentiment had only moved modestly along. The ERA was close to passage until suddenly in 1978 it moved forever out of reach as conservative opposition—including from conservative women—came to the surface.
Polling in the early 21st Century showed that King was almost unanimously admired by Americans. But year after year on this holiday, folks end up having to point out that the King who is being admired is not in any sense King as an actual historical leader in terms of the positions, arguments and advocacy he expressed in his life. (Nor does this admiration include any reckoning with the moral contradictions of his personal life, but that’s another issue.) What King fought for is not unanimously admired. Stone by stone, brick by brick, it is being dismantled. Voter suppression is again being legally sanctioned. Affirmative action is likely months away from being overturned. Black men are still targeted by a judicial and carceral system profoundly biased against them.
As I look back, I’m not sure any longer that I can say that any kind of illiberal, unjust, discriminatory, unequal thought or consciousness has been so defeated by progress since the French Revolution that it is no longer with us.
There are ways of thinking and being in the world that I can in fact say as a historian are fundamentally pastward. There are professions that no one at all practices, or that they practice only as a curiosity and hobby rather than as an essential part of everyday life. There are identities rooted in systems of hierarchy and labor which don’t exist in the world any longer. There are institutions that shaped how people thought of themselves that are utterly gone. There are kingdoms and territories and empires which have disappeared more or less without a trace that once shaped the lives of their inhabitants in profound ways. There are religions that were once common and are now practiced in almost unrecognizable forms by tiny minorities.
Minds and hearts do change forever in history. Some thoughts become unavailable, some practices become forgotten. And maybe, just maybe, sometimes bad ideas lose rather than merely drift away into irrelevancy.
We do not live in such times. The bad ideas never lost, and more importantly, they reproduced themselves in younger generations. The symbols of American life that seem to promise a near-unanimous commitment to some distinctive form of progress are just a veneer over fundamental disagreements that were never brought to any real conclusion. In many ways, that moment of disdainful assumption of victory made it all worse—it let unfinished business fester, it tempted progressives to move far beyond the basic propositions they needed to keep well-tended and strongly defended on to much more speculative or ill-considered public policy.
MLK Jr. Day needs to a day that is less about celebrating what has been accomplished and more a day of reflecting on how hard it is to hold on to even small changes, and of how unconvinced a major segment of American society has remained about the basic ideals of equality, fairness and liberty for all.
Image credit: Photo by History in HD on Unsplash
I’m not sure “like” is what I want to do about his. Do you think, Tim, that it is possible that not everything is the fault of the “liberal consensus” you so like to talk about (and to chide)? Some of the opposition towards the ERA came from conservative women? Um, a lot of it did. Some of that was motivated by male and patriarchal gatekeepers, but a lot of it they totally figured out on their own. And for some of us on the left, the ERA was wishy- washy stuff—that I would dearly like to have back now.