As our regular readers are aware, I’m hard at work plowing away at a new political book. It’s a sequel to The Revivalist Manifesto, which though it’s now three years old has held up quite well; the new title is The Revivalist Revolution. The goal is to get this thing out into the world sometime in late April or early May.

One of the big themes of both books is that American political history has been marked by three distinct political eras and we’re now at the very beginning of the fourth. The Third Era — you’ll hear me refer to the Third and Fourth eras a lot in this and future columns — began with the 1932 election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president and the subsequent New Deal blizzard of (almost universally bad, but often quite popular) economic policy.
The Third Era ended with a thud on Nov. 5 of last year, and the Fourth Era, in which most if not all of the assumptions, policies, and pieties of the Third Era are due for a re-examination, is now underway. (RELATED: The Left’s Crisis Might Be Getting Started. Ours Is Actually Ending.)
Donald Trump has been compared a lot to Grover Cleveland, in that his second term is nonconsecutive in the way Cleveland’s second term was nonconsecutive. But Trump’s first few weeks in office since reoccupying the White House are much, much more reminiscent of FDR than of the comparatively sleepy Cleveland.
And though our modern culture barely even bothers to note the history, the feckless and ridiculous opposition to Trump is reminiscent in some ways of those poor stiffs trying to stand in Roosevelt’s way in those heady early days.
Republicans in 1933 weren’t trying to send deranged hooligans to heckle congressmen at town halls like the Democrats are doing now. They were filing court challenges to New Deal legislation; interestingly enough, so many wins were had that FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court in order to force his agenda through, and the threats were sufficient that an anti-New Deal judiciary soon knuckled un...