Progress & Backlash: Remarks at the Good Trouble Lives On Rally in Dallas

You can call my speech, “How to be a Happy Warrior in Bleak House America,” 

President Trump has said that America’s “wealthiest era was the period from the 1870s through 1913.” This must be when he thinks America was “great” – the era of tariffs, before the income tax, before women could vote, before child labor laws.

You probably know this period as “The Gilded Age,” but it is also the period of a vicious white backlash against Black progress made during Reconstruction, after the Civil War. This progress for people newly freed from the House of Bondage ended with a bi-partisan compromise. To settle the disputed election of 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes would become President and federal troops would be pulled out of the South. What followed was the rise of Jim Crow racial codes and “Lost Cause” mythology, so-called “states rights,” and an era of racist violence that included more than 4,000 lynchings between 1877 and 1950.

This kind of struggle & progress, met with a backlash, is a common pattern in our history. 

Here’s how the pattern played out in recent Presidential elections. 

Let’s start with John Kennedy in 1960, and think our way to last year’s election. In this time frame of 64-years, Democrats held the Presidency for 32 years, and Republicans for 32 years. In a divided country, whatever else voters may be thinking, their go-to philosophy appears to be “throw the bums out.”

Richard Nixon’s election in 1968, coupled with the candidacy of segregationist George Wallace, was the backlash against progress made under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in civil rights, women’s rights, the movement for peace in Vietnam, and expanded immigration policies. In 1972 Nixon won 49 states, picking up all the Southern states that Wallace had won in 1968. 

But Watergate tarnished Nixon’s backlash, and his resignation in August 1974 led to the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter and further progress, for example, ending the draft, greater sexual freedom, more school integration, solar power at the White House, and the first federal climate change study (The Global 2000 Report to the President). President and Mrs. Carter also tried to revive the stalled Equal Rights Amendment.

Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 was the ultimate backlash. His campaign, like Trump’s, was a white nationalist movement against civil rights and women’s reproductive freedom. Reagan kicked off his campaign with a rally in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers – Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman – were murdered in 1964. His speech that day, August 3rd 1980, was a ringing endorsement of “states’ rights.” Reagan became the first President to publish a book while in office – the subject?  Condemning abortion.

Reagan’s two terms saw the decline of working class incomes, increases in poverty, decreased efforts to integrate schools, failure of ERA, big hikes in military spending, and tax cuts for the rich – in a word, backlash. 

The first President Bush, elected in 1988, began to build today’s rightwing Supreme Court by appointing Clarence Thomas, in a backlash against civil rights champion and the first Black Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, who had resigned for health reasons.

Voters elected Bill Clinton as a change candidate, but he consolidated the Reagan-Bush backlash in many ways (for example, “ending welfare as we know it” and “don’t ask, don’t tell”). 

George W. Bush opened the gates of hell in the Middle East, and at home tanked the economy. War and recession often move in when backlash takes over the White House.

The election of Barack Obama promised a new era of progress – expanded health care, pullback from Iraq war, legalization of gay marriage, more focus on social justice, and racial progress, especially in political representation. 

The backlash against Obama began immediately with the comical Tea Party and the Birther conspiracy, led by Trump, followed by the armed militias of Trump’s white nationalist movement after his 2016 election and his 2020 loss. 

President Biden and Vice-President Harris tried to use traditional government programs to counter Trump’s social poison, his cruelty, his racism. During the pandemic, Biden/Harris’s expanded child tax credit reduced the rate of poverty among Black children by one-half; the overall number of all children in poverty decreased by one-third.

But MAGA voters didn’t want “good government.” They wanted revenge. Trump dished it out like ice cream. It wasn’t the economy. It was racism and misogyny. Trump’s return to the White House continues with a vengeance his first term backlash. 

At this point, you might be thinking, this sounds hopeless. Where’s the Happy Warrior part? 

Let me close with the basis for unconquerable hope. 

That is, the backlash never goes all the way back. The abolitionists won the struggle against the slave power. That victory, as we saw after Reconstruction, was contested but never overturned. The victories of the Civil Rights movement against Jim Crow, have been contested but the backlash can never go back all the way. Every victory brings another, setting the stage for the next expansion of freedom and justice. Not without struggle, but never without hope. This is why we can trust that, in the words of America’s greatest theologian, “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” 

Thank you. And let me thank you for all you are going to do over the next decade to bend it further.

John Fullinwider is the co-founder of Mothers Against Police Brutality and a longtime human rights activist in Dallas.