Response to a Proto-MAGA, 1981

OK, just one last thing from the boxes of my young adulthood.

This is a draft I wrote during my undergraduate student government days, probably fall 1981. I went to a generally progressive public university out east, and this was written just at the turn from what we now know, with hindsight, was the end of the New Deal decades to the rise of our current Reagan/Koch/Fox News oligarchy.

My school's student government was generally made up of students who were moderate to progressive, but there was one guy named Jeremy who was always staking out the Reagan-revolution position. I don't know why I wrote this specifically; maybe it was meant to be a response to an op-ed he had in the student newspaper. 

Here's what I wrote:

First of all, I'd just like to say that Jeremy's entire argument is based on totally false premises.

Primarily, his assumption that the past was a better time than the present is merely his opinion. I do not consider it a golden age when the reasons for a lack of child discipline problems was the fact that every three of four children born to urban parents died under the age of four. This was true until just a hundred years ago. I do not consider it a golden age when the reason children "stayed off the streets at night" was because they were exhausted from working a 10- or 12-hour day in a factory. Child labor laws were not instituted until 19XX, Jeremy. I do not consider it a golden age when working-class mothers toiled at lower wages than men, not by any kind of choice as it sometimes is now [2019 me says ! to that], but because of the necessity of starvation.

Your grandparents may have talked about the good old days, but those days never existed. While the poor were living under the conditions I cited, the rich who ran the factories had all the problems of our patriarchal families. Have you heard of the case of Leopold and Loeb, two teenaged sons of millionaires, who kidnapped a younger boy for the fun of it and then murdered him? It was one of the most startling cases of amorality in American history, and when did it happen? Not 1960, or 1970 — 1924, Jeremy, right in the heart of your golden age.

But I think the most ironic point in your whole view of the past is that you transpose only the good things from the present onto that time. Did you consider that there were no sewer systems, no paved streets, no extensive public school systems? You yourself might have been one of those unknown dead children.

What made all this change? Well, it's pretty obvious: Government and the people imposed on free enterprise. Unions were formed. Child labor laws were enacted. Public health became a major concern. Corporations were limited by the Sherman Anti-Trust Law. Something called social services were born.

There's only one last thing I want to say, Jeremy. You're a conservative, and like all conservatives, you're regressive. I just think you should be fully aware of what it is you'd be regressing to.

Reading it now, it's eerie to see how much Jeremy's early-1980s views would have resonated with MAGA Trumpism, but also the Grover Norquist "drown it in a bathtub" view of government.

I do notice there's nothing about immigration, which wasn't an issue much on the radar back then. Jeremy is, most likely, descended from Eastern European Jews who came to the U.S. in the early 20th century, so I wonder what he thinks about that issue now. Or really any of this.

Maybe his worldview has changed. I hold out hope.