One lesson of the 70 years since William F. Buckley promised to stand athwart history is that the left and the right tend to take turns driving history’s semitrailer and likewise take turns throwing up stop signs while the other side is slamming on the gas pedal. From Lyndon Johnson to Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, the spirit of history has moved back and forth between coalitions and ideologies, with reactionary moods yielding Reaganite or Gingrichian or Trumpian revolutions, while radicalism shorn of power falls easily into the kind of nostalgic cul-de-sac that’s commonly associated with conservatism.
A case study in this ebb and flow is the most lauded motion picture of this Trumpian year, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a former domestic terrorist forced to return to the revolutionary fray to protect his daughter from the forces of white supremacy and immigration restriction.
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