The End of the Reagan Era and the Beginning of the Obama Era

I thought this was a rather lovely coda to a longer post from BooMan:

While young Barack Obama was embracing Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, Bill de Blasio was embracing the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua. In the circles I grew up in, neither position was uncommon or particularly controversial. But in Ronald Reagan's American, where he carried 49 states in 1984, including even Hawai'i, it was too much to hope that 30 years later one would be president and the other the mayor of New York City. In a way, it is a triumph of progressive thinking that signals to me that we, as a country, have finally moved on from Era of Reagan.

Reagan famously declared that "government isn't the solution to our problems, government is the problem," and last night I heard an interview in which Obama said again something I have heard him say before: "Government is us." 1983 was the year I graduated from high school and began college. Movement Republican anti-governmentality deregulation and looting driven by white racist resentments and patriarchal fears has driven public life in America the whole thirty years I have been politically active and aware. I don't think it is too much to hope that with the passing of the Reagan Era and the emergence of the Obama era citizens can work together to make a more sustainable, equitable, consensual, diverse country and world, I don't think it is too late yet to save the world and ourselves from ourselves through the democratic governance of ourselves.