In the past half century, since the tumultuous year of 1968, acknowledged by many scholars and experts as the most significant single year in American history since 1945 (the end of World War II), America has gone through much turmoil and tragedy. This includes Richard Nixon and Watergate; the end of the Vietnam War; the rise of terrorism in the 1990s, leading up to September 11, 2001; two other unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; and the Great Recession of 2007-2009, which finally has led to full employment and an economic revival after nearly ten years, but with many Americans left behind.
It has also been a fifty year period of much progess toward civil and human rights amid massive social change , with the Barack Obama years being seen as a positive time in so many ways.
But now, 2017 has revealed that we are in a dramatic retreat from much of the reform and change that has gone on since 1968, and the nation and the world are in total chaos and anarchy, due to the rise of a truly Fascist wannabe, Donald Trump, who has clearly stolen the Presidential election of 2016 and is in process of destroying all of the positive changes of the past 50 years.
Domestic and foreign policy, and constitutional law is in revolution, and 2018 will likely be a continuation of the nightmare of 2017, but with the hope that at least Donald Trump will be forced out of office in some manner, not yet clear.
But the likelihood that Vice President Mike Pence will become the 46th President sometime in 2018, bodes ill for the future, with his extreme right wing evangelical conservative beliefs, which would make him more conservative and extremist than even the most conservative Presidents of the past century, Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan.
So we who are progressives have a lot of work to do next year to attempt to bring America back from the brink of destruction perpetrated by a man who is the most evil President in American history; and a party which has tarnished the reputation historically of Abraham, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and so many others who proudly carried the Republican mantle in the past 150 years until now.
It is time for progressives to fight with all their energy and strength to return this nation to the great advancements promoted by a century of Presidents and Congresses from the time of Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama.