I used to think that the corrupt, reactionary forces dominating our current politics seek to repeal all progress since the New Deal. I was wrong. As I pieced together their actions over the last years, I came to see the much larger target in their sights: the Enlightenment itself. As the civilized order of the 21st century crashes all around us, the Dark Ages may be staging a comeback. Every day produces growingly sinister omens.

Just this morning the New York Times reported that 49.5 percent of white church-going Protestants believe that God, having looked with favor upon a certain orange-skinned presence, placed him in the White House. Not just Christian-right evangelicals, mind you, but half of all observant Caucasian American Protestants. Sometimes I wonder if the only possible response to all this provocation is a primal scream.

Veteran Austin singer-songwriter Eliza Gilkyson has a better idea. Call up America's better angels, she vows. In particular those who sang for peace, civil rights and the environment in the 1960s and beyond. They represented causes that till just months ago appeared defeated and retreating. In my youth those voices, which I still hear both aurally and imaginatively, belonged to folk singers.

Perhaps the first I heard (because it got played on the radio alongside the teenybopper hits) was Peter, Paul & Mary's version of Pete Seeger/Lee Hays's "If I Had a Hammer," originally "The Hammer Song," inspired by the 19th-century spiritual "Hammering Judgment." If PP&M, bravely and outspokenly political, were still around, one easily envisions their cutting an album something like 2020.

Gilkyson's sound is more contemporary and very much her own, of course, but both she and PP&M draw from a long topical-song tradition. Gilkyson acknowledges a connection with Yarrow, Stookey and Travers in her original (with Tim Goodwin) "My Heart Aches," which quotes "Hammer." In addition, she covers Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" also recorded by PP&M.

On "Beach Haven" Gilkyson takes a letter Woody Guthrie wrote to Fred Trump, racist slumlord, and turns it into a statement of the unity of all peoples, in other words into affirmation of a sentiment which, to all available evidence and none to the contrary, Fred's son does not clutch closely to what passes for his heart. There's also her stirring hymn of the natural realm, called "Beautiful World of Mine." Let us hope it survives the ruling clique's brutal assault against it, a crime against nature in no merely figurative or prudish definition.

Gilkyson's reading of the Dylan classic "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is as powerful as any you're likely to hear. Not much like Dylan's rage-defined evocation of death and chaos, most of it sounds like the testimony of a numbed, traumatized witness to evil. The singer gradually rises to courage and defiance, at which point a horror story transforms into a kind of anthem of hope, however faint and uncertain. It's a parable eminently suited to our time.