[Riot]

Chait's emphasis on demographic shifts is powerful and mainly on target, but there is a broader historical context to his analysis that complements, extends and better explains the hysteria dominating the current rhetoric of the Republican party. In other words, there is content to all of this.

Most, if not all, political and social retreats from reality and descents into "once there was a golden age" fundamentalist fervor are the result of a panic reaction to fundamental change and a resistance to modernity that cannot be assimilated or accepted, and that so unsettles the ground rules by which they live and have always lived that they lash out at the changes, or what they see as the symbols of those changes, in a desperate, if ultimately futile attempt to hold back the sea.

This is what characterized the wave of fundamentalist politics in the 1920s in America, when the advancements of science (as especially symbolized by evolution) so threatened the world as many people knew it, that they arose in a wave of repressive reaction to try and block it.

This was also the period in which the world turned upside down when women won the right to vote (1920); it was the period when labor unions became strong and challenged the prevailing distributions of economic power; it was the period when the NAACP was created (1909) and the ACLU (1920). This is the period when Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood (connection to the present intended), was arrested every other day on the streets of New York for distributing informational leaflets and pamphlets on birth control; this was the period when the late 19th-century Comstock laws outlawed obscene materials, but also defined information about contraception as pornographic and banned its distribution; this was the period when John Scopes was tried and convicted for teaching evolution in Tennessee, a case so important in the evolving struggle to hold back the sea that no less than William Jennings Bryan was brought in to the small town of Dayton to prosecute Scopes. It was the jazz age, new, unbridled dances and scary music, most of it played by blacks. It was the time of Strawinsky, Gertude Stein and the new cubist art. It was also the time of Freud, and of Einstein's startling theories.

To many who lived traditional lives rooted in the past, these developments were profoundly unsettling; social patterns, indeed reality as many knew it, and the rules that governed reality, seemed everywhere to be in chaos and under attack. Many worried that everything valuable and important was ending, that society itself was becoming unmoored. Waves of fundamentalist revivalism developed, and seeped into American politics. This was when alcohol Prohibition passed (1919, effective 1920, not to be repealed until the New Deal). Much the same thing happened again as a reaction to the profound changes during the 1960s.

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