About 25 years ago, I spent about eight-and-a-half months in northwest Wisconsin. (Probably a bit less than that if I take in the two trips I took) I learned two things: They are very suspicious of 'big-city people' and they hate Democrats (even though a bar I frequented had a plaque above the Men's Room that said, "JFK took a piss here in 1960" - I kid you not). Like many in my generation, I have a functional memory of when the Democratic Party was the party of the white working class and middle class. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, that started to change. We're now living through the third incarnation of the "War on the 60s." The first wave came between 1968-80, chronicled brillantly by Rick Pearlstein's books, "Nixonland," "Invisible Bridge" and "Reaganland," articulated by Archie Bunker (All in the Family) and the 'Hard Hat Riot,' in New York City.
The second wave was between 1980-2008. The age of deregulation and the Great Shift. Everything shifted. The Christian Right (something even Goldwater warned about) became intertwined with the Republican Party, the media started to fragment and consolidate and the Red and Blue states became clearly defined. Michael Moore's map of 'Jesusland' following the 2004 election is the best illustration of this. During this time, more wealth was pushed upwards, the middle class began to shrink, the economy went through two meltdowns.
The wave we are going through now, the Age of Hope, Anger and Isolation are pretty clarly defined. Obama's "Hope and Change," ran into a brick wall of Republican obstruction and even though he won a second term by nearly the same margin in the Electoral College, many people were angry that a Black Man was in the WHITE House. Then along comes Donny of Queens* and here we are. We have, seemingly, a placeholder president, who would, today, probably lose a reelection to The Orange King of Mar-A-Lago. Unless the backlash to Roe is so severe that women vote overwhelming Democratic, the House, Senate or maybe both will fulfill the GQP's desire to make Biden a two-year president.
