During the Reagan - Bush years, I recall reading the Handmaid’sTale and then a book by Susan Faluda, Backlash. There was a real fear that our society was regressing, that women were losing our rights, that the environment was under siege. We had a President who was contemptuous of people on welfare, who ignored the AIDs crisis, who launched his 1980 campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, who promoted huge tax cuts for the wealthy under trickle-down economics leading to huge budget deficits. It was a depressing time and the 1988 campaign was vicious. But we managed to recover from that.

We are going to get through this too.