Things Aren’t Great Right Now, Liberals. But Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Despair.
Even before factoring in the catastrophic effects of covid-19, the years since the election of Donald Trump as president have felt like a giant setback to many of us in the United States and around the world, especially in comparison to the heady promise millions of Americans felt upon the start of the Barack Obama era back in 2008. The first black president yielded the White House to a shameless bigot endorsed by a leading figure in the Ku Klux Klan. From the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell, which legalized same-sex marriages throughout the United States, we now have a judicial majority that has signaled an unwillingness to regard loving gay unions with the same sanctity as straight ones. In 2016, the United States joined virtually every other country in signing on to the Paris Agreement, a pact committing the signatories to combating climate change caused by burning fossil fuels. Trump not only pulled us out of the accord, but almost out of a seemingly perverse sense of spite struck down numerous other environmental regulations too. And so on.
But before succumbing to despair, I invite the progressively oriented reader to step back and consider the broader sweep of history, the overarching, long-term trends, as opposed to the path suggested by extrapolating from just the immediate past alone. From this perspective, one can be reasonably optimistic about the prospect of a hopeful future.
Take attitudes towards interracial marriage. Just 30 years ago, according to surveys by the Pew Research Center, a jaw-dropping 63 percent of nonblack people said they would object to a relative marrying a black person. As of 2017, that figure had plummeted to just 13 percent, and presumably a large share of that small minority were older people whose attitudes simply hadn’t budged over the last few decades, and not a new, younger crop of racists.
Or let’s return to married gay couples . There is indeed a genuine risk that those in same-sex marriages will suffer an erosion of their liberties at the hands of the current Supreme Court, which appears to privilege the right of some religious people to discriminate over the right of gays to enjoy equality with heterosexuals. The high court last month heard arguments in a case in which they’ve been asked to rule on whether the city of Philadelphia can ban a Catholic social services agency that refuses to work with gay couples seeking to adopt, for instance. Remember that the Supreme Court itself decides which cases it takes up and that had it taken a pass on this case, the ban against the Catholic agency would have stayed in effect.
But less than 20 years ago, there were laws on the books in more than a dozen states making it a crime for two people of the same sex to engage in intercourse — even in private homes. Without trivializing the real, deleterious impact the court can have on gays today, it’s important to point out that a return to the days when physical acts of love between two women or two men could at least theoretically result in a prison sentence is all but impossible now. Even gay marriage — a concept once considered laughably radical well within living memory of a large majority of Americans — today seems effectively invulnerable to legal challenge.
If one were to depict what seems to be going on here in chart form, it would look like a jagged, saw-toothed line that is nonetheless heading upwards over time. Take a look at the image above, which shows the average mean temperature across the globe for the last 100 years. Yes, there are dips corresponding with drops in temperature, but as you move from left to right along the bottom, X-axis — from the past to the future — the lows get less and less low, while the highs get even higher. In mathematical terms, one would say the “slope” of such a graph is positive, meaning that a straight line drawn from one endpoint of the graph to the other rises as you move rightwards along the bottom axis.
Now replace “global mean temperature” with “cultural acceptance of gays,” and the chart would still look roughly the same — dips along the way, sure, but overall, gay people are markedly “higher” than they were 50 or 100 years ago.
Indeed, even those skeptical of or even hostile to other kinds of love than the “traditional” variety — like Sam Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, the core of the Supreme Court’s hard-right faction — must be aware that they are fighting a losing battle, that they are no longer defenders at the parapet of a sturdy castle but instead are desperately trying to push back on the tides. Barring an utter remaking of American society, one featuring such profound disruption it’s likely democracy and the very rule of law themselves would not survive it, gays will not be forced back into the closet.
There are many other examples: sexually charged online harassment of women and girls is sadly all too common, and even worse (albeit far rarer, thankfully), women remain the targets of murderous violence by so-called “incels,” men and boys who feel they are entitled to sex with the partners of their choice and are compelled to lash out when they’re denied. Progress towards equality between the sexes seems to have taken a step backward ever since such disturbed, violent men began finding each other in dark corners of the Internet over the last five or ten years.
Still, long gone are the days when rape was treated as a smutty joke by the police and even in the popular culture, and even on a television show that embodied the politically correct ethos of its time. MASH, which first aired in the 1970s, was set at a field hospital during the Korean War, but was really a scathing critique of militarism at a time when America was mired in the Vietnam War. And yet this wildly popular show, with its decidedly liberal slant, not only made light of attempted sexual assault, but also depicted the woman who was frequently the target of such attacks as an uptight scold and authority figure who deserved to be brought down a peg by her fun, freewheeling and (of course) male tormentors. Since the show ended in the early 80s, about two generations have reached adulthood in a culture where it is no longer acceptable to claim that a rape victim was “asking for it.”
None of this is to say that we’ve enjoyed genuine progress on all fronts. Wages for many blue-collar workers, for example, have remained stagnant for decades. The rich have generally always been able to accumulate more much more easily than everybody else, but in the last 40 years the power of wealth to grow itself has increased dramatically thanks to favorable tax laws written by politicians of both parties, resulting in a handful at the top barely having to lift a finger in order to get richer by orders of magnitude, while tens of millions of the rest of us have to work even harder just to stay afloat. And the needle has barely budged at all for the average Black American since the 1960s.
But in the aggregate, and especially with regards to social and cultural issues, the United States and much of the rest of the world have made progress. While complacency would be a mistake, so too would a preoccupation with what amount to temporary setbacks, like the last four years of Trump. We know the world can be a better place because in many respects, it already is.
