America has changed, and there's no going back

Perhaps the most salient backstory of the current political climate in America is the projection that sometime in the 2040s native-born whites will become a minority in the U.S.  That's just a generation or less away.

There are plenty of qualifications on how the U.S. Census Bureau is defining majority and minority and ethnicity, and what role self-declared ethnicity plays in making any projection.  But the very fact that the projection has been officially announced, and the defensive reaction it has generated in right-leaning commentary, give it significant cultural import.  Lots of people in the white majority don't like it.

One can empathize with that anxiety. It exacerbates the dramatic changes that have eventuated in America in the last fifty years.  The culture is barely recognizable to people born before the 1960s.  Single-earner households are rare; women move ever closer to full equality and rights; sex is commonly portrayed and discussed in the media; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender sexuality are out in the open and increasingly protected by law; half of marriages end in divorce; most personal communication is electronic; union strength is at historic lows; recreational drugs are a commonality; and having the greatest impact, perhaps, minorities have become equals.

That's not the world anyone's grandparents grew up in.  Virtually all the values that defined society and the individual fifty years ago have come under question or attack, and many have fallen or have changed composition.

[Populist anger upends politics on both sides of the Atlantic.]

These changes have been disorienting for many who feel America is in a steep moral decline, that basic freedoms are under assault, and that neither government nor commerce can be trusted.  Pat Buchanan declared a culture war at the Republican convention in 1992. As Archie Bunker said once, for many in America, it's become a world of meatheads, by meatheads and for meatheads. But as Charles Wohlforth pointed out in his recent column on Rev. Jerry Prevo, defenders of the older values have lost that war.

The values that have changed and many which continue to come under assault constitute many people's core identity; they are a measure of what it means to be human, to be an American, and therefore how they assess other people and the world.  For many of these there is a sense of profound frustration, even desperation, exacerbated by a globalized economy that seems to have little place for them.  It's little wonder that the woods in places are populated by survivalists waiting for a civil or race war, prepared to go down fighting an America they find unacceptable and threatening.  They know the older America no longer exists, but they want fervently to bring it back, to make America great again.

Most people have experienced the frustration and disillusionment of losing, of seeing a cause or candidate one embraced or endorsed suffer a defeat or setback.  But the comprehensive nature of the culture change of the last fifty years is of a magnitude encountered only a few times in American history.  The Civil War was the greatest of these, and there are those in the South still haven't been able to let it go.  The New Deal is another, a period of extreme and widespread reform, and again, there are those in the country who still can't reconcile themselves and America to welfare, union protection, banking and securities regulation, social security and the later health care provisions.

All of the political attempts to roll back change and the security and the freedoms it provided have been unsuccessful.  John Quincy Adams led the attack on Jacksonian democracy; he failed.  Despite concerted resistance, Lincoln cajoled Congress into adopting the 13^th Amendment, freeing slaves.  It took another hundred years, but the promise of that change finally is being realized.  The conservative reaction to the many Progressive Era reforms generated by the industrialization of America blew up in the Great Depression, the solution to which spawned more intensive reform.  Opposition to the redefinitions of freedom and equality which characterized the cultural revolution of the 1960s has failed to stop the changes that discomfort so many today.  Freedom, equality, diversity, tolerance – their advance will not be denied.

Sympathize with the disaffected as we may, as we should, there's no going back.

Steve Haycox is professor emeritus of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

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