This was a dark time—a time when the hope and promise of the civil rights movement seemed to have been overly optimistic, even naïve. A bit like our own political moment, when each new headline seems to bring with it a new outrage, a new sense of injustice—an era when the bad guys often seem to be winning. “Of course, you could see it coming,” she says now. “But still, the way it happened. It didn’t really matter who killed him [MLK Jr.]—the CIA and all the conspiracy stuff around it. He knew he was gonna be killed. And he was killed. And it radicalized people.”
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The whole nation seemed to be disintegrating, coming apart under the centrifugal forces of war and racism, like a jet engine cracking up and spinning out of control. And all you could do was either brace for impact or try to grab the controls.
Two months after King’s death, SDS held a meeting to elect new leadership. And even though she had been a member of the group for less than a year, Bernardine was put forward as a candidate-part of the Revolutionary Youth Movement slate, promising to take SDS in a more militant, radical direction. …
“You have to take action,” she remembers telling herself. “You have to do something.”
On June 14, 1968, SDS met in plenary session to ask questions of the new candidates. Bernardine, the only woman on stage, faced vocal skepticism about her radical bona fides. “Do you consider yourself a socialist?” a man in the audience called out, drawing jeers and mocking laughter from the crowd.
Bernardine stared him down for a long moment of silence. “I consider myself,” she said finally, “a revolutionary Communist.”
She was elected in a landslide. Suddenly, at twenty-six, Bernardine was one of three co-equal national leaders of SDS, and one of the most prominent women in the New Left.
That same year, membership in the organization surged above 100,000, with 350 chapters nationwide. SDS was fast becoming the biggest, most visible, and most active student group in the country. And while some members still wanted to focus on building a big-tent mass movement, Bernardine and her Revolutionary Youth Movement comrades were determined to up the level of protest-to turn their peaceful student debate club into a militant fighting force.
“There’s no way to be committed to nonviolence,” Bernardine told a crowd of SDS members that month, “in the middle of the most violent society history has ever created!”
“Trump had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to delegitimize the opposition after 2024 through effective conservative governance and honorable comportment,” he wrote [Peter Laffin]. “But he couldn’t escape his impulsiveness, and he could very well go down as the figure who ushered in socialism in the U.S.”
Is that the answer?
As I noted last week, the president’s right-wing apologists love to credit his continued political viability to a popular backlash to progressivism. “This is how you got Trump,” they’ll snort, alluding to how the elite left’s condescension and cultural excesses alienate the working class. But that logic works, or should work, both ways: If socialists sweep into federal office this fall, presumably that too would be driven by some sort of backlash among the hoi polloi—to the right this time, not the left.
What will the nature of the backlash be, according to Republicans? When they ask themselves “What did we do wrong to make a creep like Graham Platner electable?” what conclusion will they reach?
We can start with a conclusion they won’t reach. They won’t embrace Laffin’s theory.
Admitting that Trump cocked things up so badly as to make socialism attractive by comparison would require right-wingers to admit they erred catastrophically in reelecting him. They’ll never do it. They spent 10 years being warned by “elites” that the president is an embarrassing civic blight on America who’s as incompetent as he is crooked. They’d sooner pay $12 per gallon for gas before they acknowledge that those elites were correct.
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Republican voters will find it hard to concede that Trump’s failure on affordability is how we got Graham Platner. For one thing, they won’t want to admit that the president’s blue-collar credentials are almost entirely cultural, not economic. But I think the right is also instinctively allergic to interpreting politics through the lens of class and redistribution. They associate such things with the Marxist left, and I think on some level they resist the idea that control of the government should depend on which side is delivering tangible improvements for voters.
To the modern right-wing tribalist, politics isn’t a contest to see who can deliver more. (Except with respect to deportations.) It’s an existential struggle to keep the left out of power so that they don’t destroy the country. Concede that socialists are benefiting from Trump’s failure to bring down the cost of living and you’re conceding that, in some circumstances, the public might reasonably prefer socialist leaders. Unthinkable.
[…]
…if you grew up, as I did, with “American exceptionalism” as the engine of your patriotic pride, the last 10 years have been a sustained exercise in having your face ground in a pile of s–t. (If you grew up during the Trump era, you never had that engine to begin with.) Americans might once have been an exception to the grubby manner in which most other populations on Earth governed their countries, but no more. If we’re exceptional now, it’s only insofar as we gave a second chance at leadership to a man any respectable people would have thrown in prison or exiled after his first term ended the way it did.
Patriotism will recover somewhat once Trump is gone, but I’ll be surprised if it ever rebounds completely. Having seen what other Americans are willing to elect and indulge, the disillusionment about exceptionalism can never be undone.
And that partly explains how you get Graham Platner. When you lose respect for your country, electing unfit, unrespectable people to office can only feel less objectionable. That’s basically what populists say when asked why they excuse Trump’s poor character, no? I came to hate the system, so I was willing to overlook a dishonorable candidate’s flaws to shake it up.
Well, a lot of people hate “the system” that Trump and MAGA have created. If there’s a guy out there willing to tear it down, who cares if he once had a Nazi tattoo? The branch of government he’s running for functionally doesn’t even exist anymore! Political squalor is like any other good: If you make it profitable, as the right did by twice electing the president, you’ll get more of it.
Needless to say, I don’t expect any soul-searching on this point from Republicans in November if Platner and the other socialists win. The market among the grassroots right for less squalor and more dignity is, shall we say, not robust.
If anything, I imagine many will seize on a swell of support for “godless communism” as an excuse to become more radically squalid in their politics. That’s another impediment to Trump’s “Stop the Steal” plans, in fact: Postliberals will want mainstream Republicans to believe that the socialist threat is real and rising, not an artifact of election chicanery. It can’t be defeated by banning mail-in ballots or tightening voting procedures. It can only be defeated by—you guessed it—the GOP becoming even more fascist.