I fear that younger voters — younger than me, anyway, which is most people — will be very hard to win back to progressivism.

I’m 54 and a progressive from day 1 (lived in a Republican NJ town in ‘60, and I HATED Nixon, despite the fact that that got stones thrown at me). I “blame” that on parents and teachers who lived through the depression & WWII (but the Nixon hatred was viceral, not taught - my parents kept their mouths shut). From ‘72 to ‘04 I pretty much kept my head down - it was too depressing. ‘04 was too much, and outrage drew me back into politics (as a spectator, anyway).

I have 2 sons - one is 26, the other 14. Both are very progressive and have very progressive friends (and my younger is been raised in rural Maine!). They are “realistic” progressives, while I was a “naive” progressive, almost certainly because they’ve grown up during a rightward slide. My younger watches Democracy Now while his stepdad watches FOX news!

Add to that a lot of Reaganites who are horrified at how things have turned out (AmericaBlog is a good example). Or take Kevin Phillips and John Dean. Or the previous commenter.

So I do expect an anti-reactionary backlash. The question is whether a progressive coalition can be formed. I personally believe that global warming / clean water / clean air, and energy independence (solar, wind, efficiency etc) are two (related) things that will resonate with a very wide audience.

1) The federal government is making war against me. I use cannabis. Legally, according to state law. But there is always a risk, the patient records could get scooped up and we could all get hauled off to jail.

2) The federal government is making war against people in countries all over the world. Over oil, resources, religion, territory, or just plain desire for global hegemony. Dead and wounded innocent children. Should I want to be supporting that with my taxes or my votes?

I am an ex-rightie, as I said, and I want good social government. But if you want good government you can’t do it with bad people in charge, or in a large enough number to be able to control it.

So how do you solve this?

I’ll try to answer in a blog post on my site tomorrow. I need to sleep first.

I guess it depends on where you are, and also where you get your news.

I think there’s something to that, although if you look across the entire Gulf there are areas populated mostly by white conservatives that aren’t doing much better than New Orleans.

Now if a Katrina-magnitude cyclone managed to landfall somewhere a lot more white in color, someplace more threatening to their electorial prospects, say West Palm Beach, you can bet the Bush regime will suddenly become the spare-no-expense epitome of efficiency insofar as delivering relief, and pronto. Katrina was a cool way to make a red state more securly red, permanently, and distribute largesse to GOP contributers.

You’re right about the conservative demographic - the worst ones were born after the New Deal was taken for granted, after the right managed to turn liberalism into a byword for special interests, ie race. These conservative crybabies have no concept of how they are sucking on the teat of liberalism’s hard won achievements. See A Day in the Life of Joe Middle-Class Republican.

It’s an interesting contrast between our age vs the Gilded Age. We still have a judiciary somewhat left over from liberalism’s heyday, if under attack, yet an improvement over courts of the Gilded Age, but we are cursed with a sophisticated propaganda machine worthy of Stalin or Goebbels, which didn’t exist in the 19th century. I’d also say that we are cursed with a population that takes all of what liberalism created in America for granted, and thinks the Dream can go on forever, without any personal involvement.

America in the late 19th century was coming into its own, about to displace the big kid on the block, the UK. Today, we’re heading into the sunset, as Asia is coming online. When they decide they no longer need us, the music is going to stop in the good old USA. The prosperity that occurred at the peak of liberalism’s influence, the 1960s, was an anomaly, an artifact of our country being left intact after World War 2. The true costs of our vaunted lifestyle are becoming apparent by the appearance of Peak Oil. And yes, we have some major enemies and some major foreign entanglements that are slowly bleeding us dry. In short, a lot of external forces are arrayed against us, that didn’t exist during the Gilded Age.

It’s kind of a perfect storm that’s especially brewing against the little guy is my opinion. The rich can always ride it out, and use the ensuing chaos to rig the system ever more in their favor, gutting this country out, which is what they have been doing especially since W got into office. They did the same thing after the Civil War, taking advantage of the national chaos, to intensify their power grab, which resulted in the excesses of the Gilded Age and subsequently the Great Depression.

It’s been said that the Great Depression was Great only because Republicans refused to do anything effective about it. The Depression was the event that derailed their power grab for a few generations, but they resumed their quest after liberalism largely succeeded and began to splinter.

It’s interesting that our country almost went fascist during the 1930s, we fortunately turned socialist instead - good thing that socialism was in vogue elsewhere in the world at that time. In my opinion, it’s taken a few generations for them to learn from this mistake, but the Republicans have finally set things up so they can try this one more time, and get it right.