No one saw Donald Trump coming.

Like a heart attack in the dead of the night he has awoken a slumbering political class. Simmering tensions have begun to boil over. The world seems completely enthralled by him, continually guessing what he will do next. A trade war with China. The “Muslim Ban”. Today’s policy is tomorrow’s outrage.

Why, the question goes, would people vote for such a man? Or from the other side, why would you not?

In Britain, an establishment is taken aghast at Brexit, in the EU it is the rise of populist parties. These disparate events and people are defined more by what they oppose than any alternative. Political correctness and social justice. The free market and globalisation. It is this strange cocktail of ideas which form the backbone of the political discourse.

But it was not always so. All ideas have their origin. All rivers have a source.

This is the story of the ideas which divide us, and the people who brought them about. It is a story of the rejects and renegades. Outsiders, who took on the existing systems, who battled ageing ideologies and offered radical alternatives. And who, most surprisingly of all, won.

The Times They are a Changin’

“If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam.’”

– Martin Luther King

Pax Romana was the long peace of the Roman Empire. The calm after the storm of expansion, when the emperors could stretch their legs. But Rome understood peace is kept at the point of a sword. Or in Roosevelt’s words “speak quietly but carry a big stick”. Pax Americana was no different. Superman became an icon for the era, “limitless strength tempered by compassion”. Yet, Superman is not known for diplomacy, he beats his enemies into submission, and those with big sticks sooner or later start swinging. If you’ve got it, flaunt it.

The Cold War it may be called, but across the unaligned third world the fires raged. It would be the Vietnam War which seared itself into the American psyche and turned a people against its government. Amongst them was C. Wright Mills, an enigmatic sociologist with a tremendous appetite. He would come to define the opposition to the war.

Mills had grown up a nomad, his family shuffling between the bustling Texan cities. Lasting friendships were rare, and the isolation forced him — like many lonely children — to immerse himself in the world of ideas. Unsurprisingly, he chose to pursue an academic career, and was incredibly successful. But the gypsy life never left him, and whilst many find themselves weighed down by academia, Mills remained footloose and free.

C. Wright Mills, the rock star of academia, on his motorbike.

At university, surrounded by flannel-suit professors, he was a curiosity. A stranger to moderation, Mills would eat a cake in a sitting, chain-smoke cigars from dusk till dawn, and ride his motorbike to and from class. He wrote fiendishly, railing against the perils of a mass society. Above all, Mills feared the trapping of the human spirit by the “iron cage of bureaucratic rationality”.

Of himself he said, “I am an outlander, not only regionally, but deep down and for good.” This isolationist outlook made him fiercely combative in his work. Mills fearlessly lampooned both the conservatives and the liberals. He saw the US and Soviet Union as converging bureaucratic monoliths.

What was needed was something new.

Mills left the US in exile after the academic community turned on him. He would tour Latin America and Europe, even visiting Castro to discuss his work. He had always been a “man in search of his destiny”, instead he found his people. Back home, a constellation of groups ranging from the African-American civil rights activists to the feminists were linking arms in opposition to the war. Young meritocratic students who had entered university in mass numbers looked out at the world and saw an old guard as obsolete and archaic. The images beamed back from the war told a story in black and white, but the new generation dreamed of a world in technicolour.

Collectively, Mills called them the “New Left”.

This movement shed the ideas of the class struggle (the working class was a “legacy from Victorian Marxism”), instead focusing on the ideas of alienation and commodification which Mills had championed. Marxist ideas of oppression persisted, but were reframed around race, gender and sexuality.

In 1962 Mills would die of a heart attack. He was only forty-five. But he would live on in the movement he had named.

“His argument that an overlapping triumvirate of economic, military, and political forces constituted an elite that called all the shots in American life, keeping a perpetual war economy going, was a staple of oppositional thinking in the anti-Vietnam War era.”

Two activists set themselves on fire in 1965 such was the raw feeling, and in 1967 100,000 people marched upon the capital. MLK opposed the war, and Muhammad Ali risked prison for refusing the draft. Countercultural movements drew inspiration from groups like the Black Panthers to create a broad-based, grass roots movement.

Students of Kent State Univerty, Ohio protest the US bombing of neutral Cambodia. By the days end four students had died, nine were injured, and one suffered permanent paralysis, 4 May 1970.

It worked so well it gave birth to the environmental movement, and reinvigorated the feminists, who formed the off-shoot Women’s Liberation Movement. Cultural change had been central to the New Left, and this second-wave of feminism began to question everything — sexuality, family, the work place, and the ‘othering’ of women were all discussed during ‘consciousness raising sessions’.

The patriarchy formed as a central thesis. Drawing upon the Millsian idea of oppression, women were seen as an oppressed group by a male-dominated social hierarchy. Similar concepts emerged in the gay liberation movement, where heteronormality was seen to oppress the gay (and later trans) community; and in terms of race, where whites were seen to hold perpetual power over oppressed people of colour.

Shulamith Firestone laid it out:

“[T]he end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.”

Later writers like Judith Butler took this further, asserting a post-modernist interpretation where sex and gender are simply artefacts of language and culture devoid of biology.

Leftist history is a swirling mosaic of groups in constant (and often violent) flux. The ideas of the sixties gestated in the womb of the university, as each passing year the faculty moved further left-ward, crystallising around what today is called identity politics.

A question remains why such movements grew so quickly. Some have argued American power and affluence was the root cause of the unrest, a ‘beat generation’ had formed which refused to conform, becoming innately countercultural. By the beginning of the 70s the movement had begun to fracture. The violence of the radical elements pushed the moderate members into the Democratic party. Feminist, black and gay voices formed new pillars within the Democratic establishment. Nixon began winding down of the war, and an economic downturn spelled the end of the movement. As Hunter S. Thompson wrote ‘” Consciousness Expansion” went out with LBJ … and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon’.

The good times were over.

Don’t Stop Believin’

In the early seventies, the two great American parties overlapped, with many senators and representatives lying between the most conservative Democrat and the most liberal Republican. Within ten years that had changed.

The traditional narrative blames Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’. Republicans (previously the party of Lincoln) would woo the Deep South with dog-whistle racism due to outrage over the Democrats backing the civil rights act. This is a myth. Nixon himself lost the Deep South in 1968, whereas Jimmy Carter would sweep the region in 1976.

Scholars have argued economic pressure explains the movement of conservative voters over to the Democrats, not race. The segregation would not be of blacks and whites, but Democrats and Republicans, unable to agree upon the role of government. The recession of the 70s was just the fuel on the fire. Anger over Vietnam had created a growing cynicism, when Watergate erupted trust evaporated.

In his inaugural address Reagan said “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.” The people agreed. The Right under Nixon had argued from an economic standpoint, under Reagan it would embrace the identity politics of the New Left. Reagan’s message at its core was economic but it was wrapped in morality, like a rifle in a blanket. The role of government became a matter of belief. This was no accident.

In 1968 a man called Paul Weyrich infiltrated the New Left grass-root organisations, he saw a well organised movement able to mobilise in a way the Right could not. He entered out of a fear the Left was about to take over, now he began to worry this was a foregone conclusion. Frantically he searched for an untapped conservative population who could be relied upon to spread the message. He settled upon fundamentalist and evangelical Christians.

The group had mostly shunned politics living a quiet moral life dedicated to the immaterial. Yet in a short time they would help bring to power a set of policies which ushered an era of rampant materialism. It was nothing short of miraculous.

The politics of the Left and Right have always been a push and pull, a ying and yang. The former pushes forward with towards a vision of a better world, the latter pulls back warning things can always get worse. It was this dynamic which Weyrich relied upon. The liberal agenda of sexual liberation, gay rights, and abortion, as well as the banning of public-school prayer (Supreme Court 1962) had began to rile the Christian populace.

Previously, they had reckoned if government left them and their families alone, they were happy to return the favour. President Jimmy Carter, a devout Christian, would surprise everyone by shattering this tacit agreement. He straddled both sides of the conflict, yet when he abolished charity status for fundamentalist religious schools, he placed himself firmly amongst the liberals. Conservative Christian America felt stabbed in the back. As Baptist minister and prominent televangelist Jerry Falwell diagnosed in 1976 “Americans have literally stood by and watched as godless, spineless leaders have brought our nation floundering to the brink of death.”

In 1979 Weyrich met Falwell and other activists in a Holiday Inn outside Lynchburg, Virginia, forming ‘Moral Majority’. Utilising Falwell’s shows, publications and mailing lists, Weyrich and the others set to work pushing an agenda which was pro-life, pro-family, and above all “pro-American”. Falwell claimed the 1980 Reagan victory as his own. It’s hard to disagree.

The Left had been beaten at its own game.

Reagan tried reimplementing prayer in the classroom, elsewhere little would be done. Abortion remained intact and gay rights were unaffected. It was as if he had been playing lip service, preferring to champion a radical economic agenda. Reaganomics would change the world, heralding a global economy as radical in scope as the vision of any revolutionary socialist. But he had helped awaken the slumbering beast of evangelical America — it remains to this day.

Everybody Wants To Rule The World

Back in 1943, at the height of the war, a year before Bretton Woods rewrote the economic world order (creating both the IMF and World Bank) a Polish economist had prophesised a turbulent and polarising future.

His name was Michal Kalecki. Sceptical by nature, he stated the proposed full-employment of post-war economies would yield disaster. The worker and labour unions would grow in power, wages would rise as a result, eventually outstripping productivity. Increasing prices would precipitate spiralling inflation. Strikes would become the norm. It would peak with a capitalist class rebelling to enforce market discipline and price stability. Welfare would be rolled back, unions busted. Kalecki called it the future, today we call it the seventies.

Britain suffered constant strikes. Inflation peaked at 20%, and national debt rose sharply. Edward Heath would institute a three-day week over worries of black-outs. Even when the recession ended growth remained sluggish. The Labour government was forced to go cap in hand to the IMF for a bailout. Strikes became an emblem of the era, and the chaos seemed without end. In 1978, the infamous ‘Winter of Discontent’ proved to be a breaking point. Strikes meant waste was piled high attracting rats, while bodies were left unburied. The people lost faith in the system.