"I AM AN AUTO WORKER," an interviewee told CBS News just before the 1972 election. "I never dreamed that I would vote for a Republican. But the blacks and the kids need a kick in the ass." This statement struck us as a key reason to understanding George McGovern's crushing defeat. Having begun with the murder of black and white students at South Carolina State, Kent State, and Jackson State, reaction was setting in and it was intensified by the United States' defeat and rout in Vietnam. (This should not surprise us when we consider what happened to France after Waterloo and to the Weimar Republic after the German defeat in World War I.) Add to the civil rights and the peace movements the subsequent struggles of feminists and gays. And the backlash again. (To resist a future backlash, we must build a politics that is anti-war, defends the rights of gays, women, blacks, and immigrants and at the same time challenges corporate power and the attack on wages and benefits of so many.) Perhaps surprisingly, many of our main gains have not been overturned, despite strong efforts by the Right wing. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and abortion are still in place (although some of these have been whittled down, one -- assistance to low-income parents -- almost destroyed and another -- abortion -- seriously threatened, and improvements in the lives of the vast majority of African- Americans have been rolled back to an alarming extent).

Now we may be witnessing a major sea change. The 2006 elections were overwhelmingly a vote for peace, though the Democrats seem set to betray that vote. Recently a prominent conservative clergyman, Rev. Gene Carlson, said, " The religious right peaked a long time ago. As a historical, sociological phenomenon, it has seen its heyday. Something new is coming." (NYT Mag., 10-28- 07).

Is the nearly forty- year period of reaction coming to an end?

It is fortuitous that this issue of New Politics features a special section on Latin America, perhaps the only continent where people are fighting back with some success, the only continent where the word socialism is taken seriously. Other articles and reviews range widely: the Palestinian crisis, the U.S. labor movement, the failure of U.S. efforts to win hearts and minds in the Near East, immigration, the French political situation, feminism, civil rights, ecology, etc. None of these articles claims a clear victory for progressives, but all of them show keen awareness of forces struggling to beat back the reaction.

Something new is indeed coming.

MARVIN AND BETTY