Earlier this month, two lengthy articles appeared almost simultaneously in the Financial Times and Washington Post aimed at addressing the persisting problem, how we’ve wound up with Trump.

One in the Post was entitled, “To Grasp Today’s Culture War, Look to the 1980s.” The other in the Times, was called, “The Decade That Made Donald Trump.” The publication dates are listed as June 8 and 7, respectively.

The Post account by Mark Athitakis is a review of a new book by Paul Elie, entitled “The Last Supper, Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy in the 1980s.” The other, by John Ganz, is subtitled, “What the America of the 1990s Tells Us About Today’s Politics of National Despair” and highlights a quote that says, “Trump leaned fully into the anger, resentment and despair he’d been watching brew since the early ‘90s.”

Anyone who has followed what I’ve had to say about such things, as a quasi-scholar and journalist who lived through and so observed these times from the vantage point of a counterculture activist, knows that my evaluation of this period, as well as those before and after, is straightforward.

Our culture was corrupted from without, though obviously not without the consent of its victims (all of us). If I had to identify one great deception that has been allowed to persist in our times, it is the completely fake notion that we, as a people, by some magical process, make the culture to which critics, historians and marketeers react, rather than the other way around.

Yes, there have been times when the people truly do rise up and set about to shape their world, and last weekend’s “No Kings” rallies that brought out 12 million to publicly express their anti-Trump dissent may be such a case, at least as an embryonic stage. It recalled the days of  the days of healthy countercultural free thinking and genuine creativity, back in the 1960s and early 1970s, when strident intellectual and moral pitched battles were front and center in places, as limited as they were, where true novelty was in play, like my haunt of Berkeley and the San Francisco area, along with places like Madison, Austin, Boulder, obviously New York, and rare enclaves here and there.

 The ruling class, however they might be described or understood, as to a greater or lesser degree akin to the mentality of a monarchy facing the threat of a deadly uprising of the masses, marshalled all of their resources toward a counterrevolutionary response. In the late 1960s, some of their fears were well founded, at least to a degree. 

Their response was a fear-driven and full-throttled one. It took the form of an age old tactic: to counter fierce morality with its opposite, in major offenses. That is, the decade of the 1970s that was characterized as the “Me Decade,” was their answer. And it worked.

Whether it was understood as “bread and circuses,” recalling the ancient Roman days, or more recently patented forms of radical hedonism, either faux or anti-intellectual offerings of Dionysian excess, knee-capping the feminist movement (among the most feared aspects of a national revolt) by means of a tsunami of degrading pornographic exploitation in the name of “sexual freedom,” a massive distribution of mind-altering drugs and music that dumped the folk social commentary lyrics with appeals to prefer sheer easy paths of pleasure seeking to moral action or thought.

On the philosophical or ethical side, this opened the door to a new form of nihilism that undermined an appreciation of truth, itself. The watchword of the era became, “Do it, 100 years from now, who will know the difference?”

I lived through this period and of course was not immune to its effects. Our culture was put through a paradigm shift to see freedom not in terms of justice or forms of universally valid behaviors, but as freedom to excess and anti-human depravity.

This was the world in which Trump thrived, where cheating, lying and exploitation became the watchword of the day, and failure to exercise those vices to their fullest was seen as weakness and in which lying and bullying were emulated and rewarded. This world spawned Trumpism.