The Presidential landslide for Donald Trump is not good news for the left (although there will be left groupscules who will find reason to think it is, and beyond the US a question was who would be most likely to make the world situation even worse- clearly neither candidate had plans to make it better).
In the US abortion rights, civil liberties and much else may be under question and threat. No doubt organisations from community and labour will fight to defend them.
It is an experience of defeat but on an historical scale much worse has happened.
Perhaps the original one in the modern era was the restoration of the monarchy in England and Wales in 1660 after the Commonwealth period from 1649. The restoration saw numbers of those who had signed the death warrant for Charles 1st- regicides- executed. Cromwell who had died in 1858 was dug up and executed in his absence as it were. Censorship of radical ideas was reinstated and those who held such ideas were persecuted.
Hill notes:
we know something of the practical consequences of defeat. After 1660 nearly one in five of the beneficed ministers lost their livings, without even the meagre compensation which the ejected of the 1640s and 1650s had received. Lay dissenters had to endure nearly thirty years (until 1688 KF) of sporadic but often very damaging persecution
Hill was interested in the radicals that had supported the revolution and how they came to terms with events after 1660, in particular the poet and radical activist and thinker Milton.
Even so its a reminder that defeats, often very serious ones, happen, but ideas and radical organisation survives.
We could at least look at the experience of the 1930s, I’m thinking of Victor Serge’s Midnight in the Century but this week is thankfully far removed from that.
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