The Rhyme of Leftist History
24th May 2021
The current scene keeps bringing back to mind the old saying attributed (incorrectly) to Mark Twain: history doesn’t repeat itself—but it rhymes. Right now the country seems to be repeating the cycle of the 1960s, when liberals in power gave us reckless spending that stoked inflation, social engineering like “model cities” and busing, degraded law enforcement with soft-on-crime policies contributing to a massive crime wave, and race riots that elicited ritual confessions of liberal guilt (i.e., the Kerner Commission report of 1968). By the time the cycle was done in the early 1970s, Richard Nixon piled up a 49-state landslide—a repudiation of liberalism that carried through Reagan’s landslides in the 1980s.