America’s zombie politics

The passing of Jesse Jackson drove home for me one of the distinctive features of American national politics in 2026, illustrated well by Erik’s observation that, by the mid-1990s, aka 30 years ago, Jackson had largely faded from the national political scene as any sort of significant figure. Jackson was basically from the same generation as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Al Gore, and countless other people who were big players in American politics decades ago, but who haven’t mattered in a long, long time.

But Jackson was also more or less the same age as Joe Biden and Donald Trump. This captures a very weird aspect of contemporary American life, which is that major political and cultural figures from 35-45 years ago were revivified decades later. In 2008 Joe Biden was a largely washed superannuated senator, who had just faceplanted in his second presidential run, 20 years after his first disastrous campaign. He was ALREADY a figure from what was clearly a political generation that had faded away — and this was 18 years ago! Similarly, Donald Trump was, to all appearances, nothing more than a shard of ridiculous 1980s detritus, that was now being deployed on a “reality” TV show, in the way washed up actors from 25 years earlier would show up on the Hollywood Squares in the 1970s.

Speaking of which, imagine if in 1976 the major party candidates in the presidential race turned out to be figures who were big during FDR’s presidency. Imagine if, in the bicentennial year, Thomas Dewey had squared off against William O. Douglas, while Father Charles Coughlin was somehow still around, screaming about how Douglas was actually a communist. That was basically the 2020 presidential election — except that the Evil Star Trek Universe Thomas Dewey, fascist edition, got elected four years later.

I was in high school in 1976, and I might have been able to recognize Dewey’s name from the still-famous photo of Truman holding the Chicago Tribune edition declaring Dewey the winner in the 1948 election, but I doubt it. In any case he was some deeply obscure guy from the olden days, like Harold Ickes or Cordell Hull or Huey Long. The point being that, in the mid-1970s, the politics of the 1930s and 1940s seemed impossibly distant and irrelevant to the politics of 1976, and not just to 16 year olds such as myself. In that vein, I bet my law students, who were mostly born in the early aughts, have only the vaguest sense of who Jesse Jackson was, if that. Because the 1980s were forever and a day ago — and yet characteristic national figures from that era won each of the last two presidential elections.

One one level, this illustrates how the basic political conflicts of the Reagan era, which themselves represented an unending conflict with everything that is evoked by the phrase “the Sixties,” are still with this. But forty years later, those conflicts have morphed into something very sinister and decadent, and moving past them will require among other things escaping the political Walpurgis Night of the Living Dead in which we find ourselves trapped.