History is informative when it allows for comparisons but not predictive because it does not tell you how things will work out. It is therefore informative to point out that there are ways in which the era of the Fifties and Sixties is repeating itself in the Twenties by presenting an intensity of events in the public arena that are unsettling and foment change and are perfectly visible. That earlier era saw assassinations and riots and major landmark legislation and Supreme Court decisions, deeply flawed Presidents contending with real statesmen (though today including stateswomen) and simultaneous actions here and abroad: a war then as well as a major domestic upheaval over race, based on regional conflict, while today there is a still minor scale (for American) war alongside an upheaval over the rights of women and attendant other “minorities”, again based on regionalism (the west coast and the east versus the south and the mountain states). There was rioting in a number of cities after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a little bit of rioting after the death of George Floyd a few years ago. There was back then a President assassinated and one resigned and today there is a recent President who was twice impeached and leads an insurrection and a President, two incumbent’s before, who qualifies now as the second worst President ever for having gone into war on the basis of a lie, the real reason for it still unclear. History, for the duration of the periods, then and now, seems to be moving at quick speed, not having to absorb one moment before there is another one demanding its attention. What is happening that makes us attend to what will happen next, what will unfold in the news cycle, is the long slumbering answer or backlash against the Fifties and Sixties, an attempt to regain what had been supposedly lost as a result of those reforms some fifty or more years ago and reestablish the social order that existed before those changes. It has been a long time in coming, but it has come, and it is unclear which of the two major factions, those who prefer what existed before the Fifties and what came after it, will prevail.
Read MoreAnti-Abortion Rubbish
There is only one major policy or political decision about which I have changed my mind in the course of my life, and that is abortion. Moving from a Liberal, from Robert Kennedy, to a centrist, like Obama and Biden, doesn’t count because it was just recalibrating the spectrum and remaining rooted in the New Deal philosophy that big government and entitlements were a good thing. (Biden seems radical because his legislative agenda is so ambitious but its principles of expanding entitlements is part of the long time Liberal agenda.) And I am still a believer of the principles of the Civil Rights Movement even if the generations since then have altered the way to proceed to a more equal union. And i did move from supporting Head Start to opposing it, always having always been skeptical, but mainly in response to the scientific reports showed that it didn’t work as the way to improve education, though I like Biden’s initiative to fund all children below five year olds because it means allowing women to go to work and let kids get away from baleful home circumstances. Abortion was the great change because I shifted from seeing a zygote as a human being to responding to social circumstances because my daughter went off to college and I assured her that I would give money and support and arrangements if she got into trouble despite my outspoken beliefs about abortion despite the opposing views in my Liberal circles because I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. If abortion would have been gppd enough for my daughter, then it should be available to any woman. The philosophical argument was replaced by the social argument that women alone took the burden of childbearing while men only provided insemination and so women had to decide now that medical science made abortion safe, because someone had to decide when to terminate pregnancies, however dubious I thought of the claim that women were always wise about making that decision. My position became and remains what Bill Clinton said, that abortion should be legal, safe and rare, and I still think so in that abortion is a bad thing, like an execution, but a necessary thing in some circumstances.
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