Giving up would be a historical mistake

My friend and colleague, Marc Rosen, commented on one of my earlier posts that finding optimism is difficult, amid today’s depressing displays of political appeals to public stupidity.  This is true.

Marc suggests the negative case for not giving up.  One way to bolster optimism is to ask people to consider the alternative – doing nothing?  Moving to Canada?  Giving up, in this view, is impractical, in spite of how much allure it has for me on my worst days.

I would, however, like to state the positive case for optimism.  Giving up would be a historical mistake.  Here is what I mean.

What abolitionism started

If you go back to the middle of the 19th Century in America, you find a relatively small group of people fighting against extraordinary odds to battle against slavery, America’s “original sin.”  To the abolitionists, it must have seemed a daunting task.  All of the big money was on keeping slavery, the only pressing question being where it would be allowed to be practiced.  Yet, as the archetype social movement, abolitionism fought for decades and, ultimately, succeeded, albeit at the cost of a civil war. 

This began an unprecedented century of American political progressivism, where one social movement after another battled the rich and the powerful and numeric majorities, in order to establish policies that promoted justice.  Here is a partial list of those movements:

The antitrust laws in the latter part of the 19th Century were a direct affront to the power of the richest class to control the economy as they saw fit. 

In the early part of the 20th Century, Progressives past the pure food and drugs laws that have been the basis of the last 100 years of food and pharmaceutical safety.  As with many of these social movements, that work is not over, but we shouldn’t forget the fight that began that effort.

It is well to remember that it was the leaders of the Republican party that championed conservationism at the turn of the last century.  Our system of national parks and forests, and our wildlife refuges on land and in the sea, are the magnificent evidence of the wisdom of that movement.

We passed child labor laws when the richest and most powerful fought to preserve the profits from the work of tiny fingers. 

We recognized the rights of women to vote at a time when all of the country’s wealth and power was concentrated in the hands of men.

After decades of fighting, politically and literally, with the deaths of many protesters, the labor movement in the early part of the 20th Century led to passage of national labor law reform.  While there is much still to be done, and while recent anti-union efforts have been scornfully successful, the basic legal statement that workers have rights to bargain collectively is the outstanding result of that progressive fight eighty years ago.

The New Deal brought us Social Security and the minimum wage.  That both of these successes are under attack doesn’t take away the accomplishment of the movements that achieved them, but calls to us to continue that fight anew.

In the middle of the 20th Century, a small minority of citizens started to make the case that the laws of the country did not provide equal treatment to all Americans.  Where did the Freedom Riders in 1961 get their optimism as they faced down Bull Connors’ dogs?  I imagine that, sitting in that jail in Birmingham in 1963, finding optimism might have been difficult for Dr. King.  Yet, the civil rights movement resulted in Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Law of 1968. 

In spite of Ronald Reagan’s 1961 phonograph oratory against socialized medicine and the potential end of freedom as we know it, healthcare for the elderly and the poor was guaranteed in the passage of Medicare and Medicaid.  The social movement that continues to strive for true universal healthcare, based upon an acknowledgment of the right of all people to treatment when they are sick, is not done, the Affordable Care Act notwithstanding. 

In the 1960's and into the 1970's, social movements for women’s rights and environmentalism and occupational safety and health saw significant victories.

An end or a hiatus?

But this all came to a stop in 1980, as the right wing backlash, started in the 50's and 60's, finally out-organized us, and, I am afraid, out-thought us, and came to power.

From 1865 to 1980, this century of progressive public policy was the result of social movements that were numerical and political minorities fighting daunting odds and, yet, succeeding.  This era came, not to an end, but to a temporary hiatus in 1980 (see my earlier blogs on Decades, parts 1 and 2).

That is the real key – did this period “end” or are we waiting through a backlash?  Do we see the end of the ability of concerned and organized people to make a difference, or do we need to find the way to make such concerted efforts successful again?  That is the crux of the question posed to us by our current dismay over the ridiculousness of our current public policy making.  Are we seeing the final end of that progressive era?  Or might this, too, pass?

Frankly, I see no contemporary or historic argument that says that that century of Good works, from 1865 to 1980, was an anomaly.  If social movements can do something as unlikely as electing a black man to the Presidency, the approach must still hold some validity. 

Social movements need seven things.  They need intensity, focus, cohesion, structure, a bit of luck, a supportive reaction from the media and leadership.  Want to see what that looks like?  Check out any presentation by Bernie Sanders.

But he can’t really win, right?  Back to the basic question – are you a pessimist or an optimist?  I think pessimism, while absolutely delicious in its appeal, is a historic mistake. As it always has been, it is still time to get to work!