(ThyBlackMan.com) The culture wars are now back full bore. Trump’s triumph is a distinct victory for the “right,” a series of interrelated movements (conservative, anti-abortion, gun rights, alt right, etc.). The campaign’s motto, “Take our country back,” expressed the fervent desire to take the nation back to when whites were more numerous, abortion illegal, women largely absent from the workplace and gays ostracized, to the time before the “culture wars” ushered in the multiculturalism that has been a growing fixture in our society. Today are all those issues back in play?
In olden times societies were static, that is, fixed and unchanging over very long periods as in Egypt, Babylon, Rome, China, India and ancient America. But under capitalism, with its ever changing means of production, and communication, social relations are in a state of 
flux. Demands for change take shape in social movements enlisting those most affected by each of the needs for alterations to the status quo, (e. g. the Black movement, the women’s movement, the Gay Rights movement, etc.).
Movements occasion counter-movements. The powers-that-be remain in control thanks to their ability to co-opt, direct and modulate the plethora of movements in this ever more rapidly evolving society. Will the coalition of counter movements under Trump’s banner succeed in turning back the clock?
Said Martin Luther King, “Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, standeth God within the shadow, keeping watching above his own,” quoting the staunch abolitionist James Lowell’s 1844 comment during the turmoil that led to the Civil War.
The abolitionists evoked a counter-reaction, the Secessionist movement, which caused the War Between the States which morphed into the Emancipation movement, after which came the Reconstruction movement which was challenged by the Jim Crow movement which, in its turn, was countered by the civil rights movement which today, along with its offspring, the many elements of the multicultural movement, led to the Trump movement. Though there may have been setbacks to the thrust towards absolute equality, overall forward progress has continued, which doesn’t mean it always will.
Many, in the face of the rapid social change occasioned by changes in the economy, strongly desire to maintain long standing, fundamental traditions. Fundamentalists, be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish or other, are not necessarily wrong, or right for that matter. It is just that economic history and economic necessity has, so far, kept them from prevailing. In any case, the present attack on multiculturalism is occasioning a great pushback in which the Black struggle will likely, as it traditionally has, play a significant role in the months and years to come.
Staff Writer; Arthur Lewin
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