Baldwin’s 1980s return to the South chronicled a failed political order’s collapse

Evidence

On one level, I Heard It Through the Grapevine chronicled the collapse of a particular political order shaped by the New Deal and the emergence of another based in the conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Baldwin stood in the interregnum (“Lord, they know not what they do”), and his return to the South aimed to make it all explicit. He implicitly surveyed the ruins of the New Deal consensus, with its optimistic faith in human freedom and its belief that government policy could affect profound changes in the quality of people’s lives. He saw what was to take its place in the charming mean-spiritedness of Reagan, a B-list Hollywood actor, all too willing to feed the country’s fantasies. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 486

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core argument about ‘the after times’ as the period after a failed reckoning — Baldwin standing in the interregnum is the literal position of someone who has seen the reckoning fail.