Election day 1980. I was in my second year of law school in Ithaca, New York, and invited about 15 of my fellow classmates/friends over to the attic apartment on College Avenue that I shared with my Sue and Sue to watch the election returns.
As the evening went on and it became clearer and clearer that Ronald Reagan was going to become the next President, the sense of disbelief in the room grew and grew. There were a few Republicans in the room, I think, but as you’d expect at a (relatively) exclusive Ivy League school, the vast majority were solidly liberal. Reactions ranged from incomprehension, to fear, to put-downs of those ignorant folks living in what were not yet then called the “Flyover States,” to pledges to move to Canada, to forecasts of national gloom and doom. I remember in particular one young woman sitting next to me with a look of dread on her face, saying nothing, just shaking her head. Confusion and distress filled the room. A second-rate right-wing actor was going to be President; the country was coming to an end.
But of course it didn’t come to an end. The country did OK during Reagan’s terms; even a Republican President couldn’t stop the ongoing technological, demographic, and cultural changes. And he likely did have a hand causing one of the truly amazing historical events of the last century, the liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet control. He kept us out of any major conflict. People continued to live their lives, work at their jobs, raise their kids.
While Donald Trump is an order of magnitude worse (Reagan at least had political experience as the Governor of California, and his attitude toward life was light and optimistic, in contrast to Trump’s pathetic everything-is-gloom-and-doom), if on the off chance he does get elected tomorrow, we should all remember this: Our country is bigger than one man, our institutions were designed to impair a President from doing too much damage, our people will continue to live and work and love and grow, life will continue on. If the worst happens, I’ll remember that night of November 4, 1980, and how wrong, at base, we all were in predicting the future.
Categories: Politics, Uncategorized