It’s the 1970s Again. Democrats Should Study Up on Reagan. |
It’s the 1970s Again. Democrats Should Study Up on Reagan.
Mr. Dionne is a contributing Opinion writer.
History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it doesn’t even rhyme. But it is always instructive. The moment we are living through is looking ever more like the 1970s — in the depth of the crises we face, and in its potential to create a genuine rupture with what came before.
To dispense with the obvious: It’s hard to imagine a president as unlike Donald Trump as Jimmy Carter, with his radically different approach to governing and to morality. But it’s also hard to miss the structural similarities between our time and the era that brought down Carter and shifted political and economic thinking globally to the right — as........