THOSE OLDIES BUT GOODIES REMIND ME
The New York Times has reported that nearly 70% of Republicans think America was better in the 1950s than it is today. I know a little bit about the Fifties, having lived through the decade.
I was born in 1947, so I experienced the Fifties as a kid. I was largely oblivious to the decade’s worst aspects, like the Korean War, MCarthyism, and the casual racism and sexism of the era. I cared about comic books, baseball cards, and candy bars. The Cold War economy kept my father employed throughout the decade, and the modest allowance he gave me meant that I could indulge in those luxuries. Even better, the Fifties gave us television and rock & roll. As William Wordsworth wrote about a different place and time, “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!”
In other words, the Fifties was a pretty good decade – as long as you were white, and especially if you were a guy. If you were a minority or a woman, to say nothing of being disabled, gay or lesbian, maybe things weren’t quite so great back then. And I think that’s precisely the point for those Republicans who want to set the Wayback Machine for the Eisenhower era. As Gore Vidal once said, “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”
But you can’t outrun your insecurities, even with a time machine. Even if Republicans could go back to the Fifties, when men were men and non-whites (and non-men) knew their place, they’d encounter other threats to their ego. As evidence, I offer Atlas Shrugged, the Ayn Rand novel published in 1957, and which resonates strongly with a lot of Republicans.
(I can’t resist quoting TV writer John Rogers: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: Lord Of The Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." The one that involves orcs was published in 1954. What a decade!)
In Rand’s make-believe world, success comes to those who are strong and self-reliant. As Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum noted, “A fair number of men share the fantasy that … they’ve been held back by rules and regulations designed to help the weak, and in a libertarian culture their talents would be obvious and they’d naturally rise to positions of power and influence.” Change “weak” to “women and minorities,” and “libertarian” to “Republican,” and that sentence describes much of Donald Trump’s appeal to white male voters.
The Fifties, even with a two-term Republican war hero in the White House and patriarchy-affirming TV shows like Father Knows Best and Gunsmoke dominating the TV ratings, still weren’t good enough for Ayn Rand, who blamed government for penalizing the Makers and rewarding the Takers. Maybe Republicans would be better off skipping the 1950s and setting their Wayback Machine to the 1850s.
Resentment of change coupled with nostalgia for a more innocent time are perennial human responses to stress. In 1913, Popular Science Monthly quoted an inscription (almost certainly apocryphal) which they claimed was from ancient Chaldea, dated 3800 BCE: “We have fallen upon evil times and the world has waxed very old and wicked. Politics are very corrupt. Children are no longer respectful to their parents.”
Same as it ever was, whether the quote is 5800 years old or only 103.
The 1913 article went on to say that “This old and ever-recurring complaint does not depend upon any actual deterioration of the times, for the times are constantly growing better. It comes usually from older people whose outlook may be biased by subjective conditions due to decaying powers and by the tendency to regard all changes as changes for the worse, the only really good times being the bright days of our own youth.” That sounds about right.
And that brings me to an internet quiz I took recently. It was sponsored by PBS and went online last spring, months before the election. They called it their “Do You Live in a Bubble” quiz. It had 25 questions, based on Charles Murray’s 2012 book “Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010.” The questions purport to determine how disconnected you are from the “average white American.”
Of course, average white Americans don’t watch PBS or take PBS internet quizzes, so the aggregate results are skewed towards disconnect. Scoring ranged from 0-100, and the lower your score, the more disconnected you were. PBS has logged over 120,000 responses, and the average score is 42. I’ll reveal my score in a minute.
I haven’t read Murray’s book, and the fact that it comes highly recommended by National Review is a red flag. But what I take to be Murray’s thesis – that the cultural gulf between upper and lower class white America has grown to the point of becoming adversarial – is believable enough.
Nevertheless, I was put off by the term “bubble.” It glorifies the “average white American” by suggesting that they’re somehow more American than everyone else, and patronizes them at the same time, feeding their resentment of everyone who’s not like them. Disconnection is a two way street. Maybe it’s the average white Americans who are in a bubble.
Would it be good to understand them better? Sure. Everybody needs to understand everyone else better. Connection is good. But becoming like them is not the best way to establish that connection. We don’t need more smokers, more people whose education stops with high school, or more couch potatoes whose main activity is watching television. Those are problems we need to solve, not behaviors we should emulate. And who wants to be average, anyway?
My score on the quiz was 30, which according to PBS pegged me as “a first generation upper middle class person with middle class parents.” They got “first generation upper middle class” right, but my parents were working class. If I’d taken the quiz when I was in high school, I’d have had a much higher score.
But here’s the thing. I don’t want a higher score. When I was a kid, my parents’ generation used to insist that they worked hard so that their kids could have a better life, with more opportunities than they had. They believed, correctly, that education was the key to those opportunities. To their everlasting credit, they willingly paid taxes to fund public education for my generation, from kindergarten all the way up through college.
But what some of them apparently didn’t realize was that sometimes those better lives would turn out to be different lives, in different places, with different priorities and maybe even different values. Education will do that to you. That’s why a lot of Republicans are committed to destroying public education. Ignorance is their key to turning back the clock to some mythical golden age.
The “get off my lawn” generation would rather blame immigrants than microchips for the social changes they hate, but whether they like it or not, advances in technology generate waves of social disruption. You can’t have one without the other. And if they were honest, I doubt that many of my fellow baby boomers would be willing to give up the advances in medicine that have allowed them to live longer lives, or the advances in technology that have made their lives more comfortable and interesting.
The “Fight the Future” party will use its minority presidency to erect some roadblocks to progress in America over the next few years, but progress will continue elsewhere. Even here at home, the children and grandchildren of the grumpy old men who elected Donald Trump have no interest in going back to the Fifties. They’re looking forward, not backward.
My motto for 2017 is: “This, too, shall pass.” Democrats were reminded of the truth of that maxim on election day last November. Republicans will learn it soon enough. In the meantime, the rest of us have a responsibility to do our best to minimize the damage until we can take back the government and begin making progress once more.