It Has Happened Here

There’s a dialogue in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980) when Allen’s character, Sandy Bates, a filmmaker, begins a discussion with a group of aliens in a pastoral setting. The scene is very funny because the lines the alien speaks have to do with the quality of love, the value of Sandy’s older movies, and how Sandy can use his talents to make a better world. The conclusion of the scene is the alien’s admonition to tell better jokes and not to go off to save the world through an activity such as missionary work. “You not the missionary type,” is the alien’s observation about how Bates might live his life.

A close relative made the observation during the early years of the Reagan presidency that “All of the questions have been moved to the right.” What were the questions in 1981? There were questions about war and peace, questions about taxation, questions about nuclear proliferation and disarmament, questions about the environment, and for those on the political left, questions about where we would go and what we would do in the face of the right-wing juggernaut that was Reaganism. The Red Scare, McCarthyism, and racism in the person of Barry Goldwater were all lurking in the right-wing history of the US. The Iranian hostage crisis was the coup in the electorate’s perception of a troubled Carter presidency. It struck me as I began a draft registration information program at the Catholic Center on the campus of the University of Rhode Island that the knowledge of how religious fundamentalism grew in Iran was almost completely unknown in the US and in any case almost no one cared. It may be of interest to readers that all of these decades later Iran is seen as an enemy of the US. With a Trump presidency, fueled by resentments and anger, there must be serious handwringing among leaders in Iran and among its people.

The photographer Ansel Adams was granted an interview with Ronald Reagan in which he discussed the environment, something with which Adams was intimately connected since he was a landscape photographer. Adams spoke sometime following the interview with Reagan expressing disbelief that Reagan seemed disinterested and out of touch with the issues relating to the environment that Adams put forward during the meeting. Indeed, Adams sounded like a shellshocked soldier following his discussion with Reagan. Recall Reagan’s outrageous pronouncement that “Trees pollute.” Now Trump is intent on burning up the environment with fossil fuels.

Reagan, from the historic perspective of the far right, was the lead actor in the right’s attempt to dismantle the federal apparatus that put into place the New Deal and the Great Society. Trump, with control of all three branches of the federal government, will likely dismantle what remains of the functions of government that help people such as the Department of Education and the Social Security Administration. If Trump and his sycophants don’t dismantle these agencies, they will bring them down to their knees. Placing Robert Kennedy, Jr. in a position of leadership with health issues is reminiscent of Reagan’s right-wing juggernaut. “It’s morning again in America,” was Reagan’s campaign slogan. Now the electorate that did vote has bought this disaster lock, stock, and barrel.

Returning to Stardust Memories, the fictional aliens in it, and how the tragic interaction between the artist Adams and Reagan played out. What can we do better on the left besides missionary work in the face of the debacle of the 2024 election? The Democrats clearly missed their opportunity to connect with a base of working people who make moderate wages and face outlandish expenses of food, housing, health care, and other basic necessities. The Democratic Party long ago jettisoned the working class and no one is in a better position to capture those votes than the Republicans and Trump who laser focus anger with the economy. Joe Biden turned his back on railroad workers when they organized to strike, almost as if they didn’t matter. The slide of unions has been going on since industries moved out of the US in the decade of the 1970s, and it was Reagan, the Great Communicator, who symbolically cut the heads off striking air traffic controllers.

The Democrats sought to raise the level of identity politics as never before in 2024, a tactic that completely backfired. The mass media and the newspaper of record loved the latter and wrote both news as editorials and editorials themselves as if masses of potential voters gave a damn about what the elite had to say.

The degree to which US wars and military outlays affect ordinary people is problematic. People of Palestinian heritage in Michigan were justifiably angry at Biden and his heir, Harris. In interview after interview Harris refused to make a demonstrable statement on the carnage in the Middle East. While many in the working class may also feel angry at the outlays for war here, how that entered into a choice of candidates is unknown. War is not a bread and butter issue, but the consensus in the US is that war means little to most ordinary people and direct US interests are not at stake. Proxy wars, at least in the present, suit US military and political outcomes.

I think that the time to reform the government in the US has long passed. The election debacle is only somewhat reminiscent of George McGovern’s loss to Nixon in 1972, with the critical footnote being that there are no more echoes of the New Deal on this bleak political horizon. There may be great danger ahead for those on the left. Sinclair Lewis’ dystopian political and social drama It Can’t Happen Here (1935) about a US in the grip of a far-right government is now more than prescient. We are there!

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