It’s happening so quickly that many Americans have not realized the ground moving beneath our feet. It is a fact that the changes implemented by Presidents take 2 to 3 years to be realized, sometimes longer. The first two to three years of Trump’s tumultuous term were the residue of the Obama presidency. Yet, the more profound the changes are, the longer it takes to feel their effect. Consider how long it took to actually feel the effect of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare).

It was four years before that legislation started making a real improvement in people’s lives, and not a moment too soon. Obama’s 2012 contest only barely started to reflect the success of the ACA, though it was enough to secure him a second term. By the time the GOP had regained control of both houses of Congress (2014), the positive effects of the ACA had seeped into the zeitgeist of the American public and there was no longer enough wind in the sails of Republicans to overturn the legislation.

Now, consider the disturbing effects of the Trump years. Though it was limited to one term and very little legislation actually passed, there was a huge cultural shift. The base of the Republican party completely changed from the old small government and low tax conservative to the firebrand anti-civil rights, anti-science, extra-legal, white-supremacy cohort that controls the party today. The shift has been so sudden that the average American does not even realize it has happened. The legacy of the Trump years only started to be felt in 2020 and is just now coming into full bloom, right in the middle of Joe Biden’s term.

As is so often the case, the GOP now takes the negative effects of their own misdeeds and blames their cause on the current President, Biden. But, that is not how change works. The many challenges we are facing today are a direct result of the policies and rhetoric of Trump. Plus, because his ideology was so far away from the center of gravity for American culture, the effects of these changes will take longer to feel and will last longer. The only encouraging aspect of what difficulties we will suffer due to Trump’s effect on our society is that it was limited to four years. Had he been given a second term, it’s likely we may never have recovered. Now, at least we have a chance.

Perhaps the best way to encapsulate all of the negative and painful policies and ideology of the new Trump Republican Part is to say that it is a reaction to and therefore the opposite of Progressivism. By the late 1990s, the shine had worn off of the New Deal. The GOP had completely reversed the Kensian tax model after Reagan was elected, creating a growing upper-class that would flourish for decades to come.

Civil discourse had lost the Fairness Doctrine thanks to the triangulation of Clinton as he dealt with Gingrinch’s revolution that wiped away 40 years of Democratic dominance in the US House, leaving us with Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the right-wing media. Finally, money got a foothold in our political discourse that it hadn’t seen since the Gilded Age, thanks to a Supreme Court that had been moving to the right with decisions like Citizen’s United. And, climate change became a scientific and cultural reality, giving life to a new generation of “science deniers”, led by the deep pockets of the oil and gas industry that saw the writing on the wall of the end of their dynasty with the reality of human-caused climate change being the death knell of their industry.

The confluence of all of these events (and more) was what gave birth (or re-birth) to Progressivism. If “liberal” had become a bad word associated with the hefty taxes and government largesse of the New Deal, “progressive” would take its place in the lexicon of the political left as an ideology based on sound science and proactive governance that addresses the pressing needs of the modern age by rapidly altering course and focusing on the needs of the many, rather than the desires of the wealthy few. Progressives would re-embrace Unions, further the cause of civil rights to include LGBT issues, address the sickness of our Healthcare Industry and the insurance and pharmaceutical companies that lobbied hard for the status quo, and embrace multi-culturalism in a way that would directly address the oppression of America’s original sin – racism and slavery.

If I may be so bold as to attempt to coin a phrase, I like to refer to modern conservatives as Regressives. This new brand of conservative ushered into the mainstream by the haughty ego of Trump (who is himself a life-long Democrat, though made in the image of the old Dixiecrats that disappeared for a half-century) has come with an almost singular purpose – to reverse all the advances made by Progressives.

These Regressives are anti-civil rights, anti-voting rights, anti-diversity, anti-science, anti-tolerant, and most of all, anti-progressive. They seem to exist for the sole purpose of undermining any cause championed by the Progressives. They have no ideology, no cause to support, no raison d’etre, other than to undo whatever successes the Democrats have achieved. Their message is all over the place because it has no positive central theme. Yet, their own successes are being realized in statehouses across the country.

In New Mexico, a simple bill advancing voting rights, based on the knowledge we gained from having to hold elections during the pandemic, would have been an easy and bipartisan bill in the past. Yet, it was scuttled by the hubris of a single Republican while the rest of us were left scratching our heads. Why would any American want to deny their constituents a robust bill to secure voting rights? The answer is simple, Regressivism.

This new direction for the GOP has now become the biggest challenge for Democrats and it would be wise to focus our efforts on combating this new breed of conservative firebrand before it undermines everything that generations have fought so hard to achieve. Regressive Republicans are the new reality and the nemesis of Progressive Democrats. We should face this new foe head-on, calling out the lies and conspiracies that underpin every cause that the Regressive Right pushes.

The ideology of regressive thinking is based completely on falsehoods, but that alone will not keep it from trampling on our civil liberties. We must show the world the weakness and mendacity of the regressive house of cards and knock it down ourselves before it is too late. 

Red States are remaking the civil liberties landscape.

Analysis by Ronald Brownstein (CNN)

States where the GOP controls both the governorship and state legislature are moving in unprecedented numbers to restrict abortion, limit access to voting, ban books, retrench transgender rights and constrain teachers’ ability to discuss race, gender, and sexual orientation at public K-12 schools and increasingly at public colleges and universities.

Many of the same states are simultaneously rescinding restrictions on gun ownership, stiffening penalties for people engaged in unruly public protests, and, in a new twist, empowering private citizens to bring lawsuits to enforce many of these initiatives, as Texas Republicans did on their recent law banning abortion after about six weeks.

Rapidly spreading from state to state, these Republican-driven initiatives reflect the GOP coalition’s shifting center of gravity away from the small-government, low-tax agenda that long topped its priorities toward the roiling cultural anxieties and resentments that have become central to its messaging, especially in the Donald Trump era.

More fundamentally, these red-state moves are remaking the American civil liberties landscape at breathtaking speed — and with little national attention to their cumulative effect. Taken together, these moves amount to a stark reversal of what many legal scholars call the “rights revolution” beginning in the 1960s, in which Congress and especially the Supreme Court expanded the number of rights available to all Americans nationwide and struck down state laws that constricted those rights on issues from racial segregation to abortion and same-sex marriage.

In many ways, the red states are attempting to tilt the nation back toward a pre-1960s model, when the basic civil rights and civil liberties available to Americans diverged far more depending on where they lived.

Link to article. (Most of the short article is reprinted here.)

Opinions expressed in the ValDem Blog are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the DPVC or the membership as a whole.