The Good Old Days

“It couldn’t always have been the way it is now. It must have been different in my grandfather’s time. You were there. You had Kennedy. I didn’t. I’ve never heard a president say ‘destiny’ and ‘sacrifice’ without thinking, ‘bullshit.'”
– Primary Colors (the movie)

Nostalgia is a universal human conceit. An ache, as Man Men‘s Don Draper called it, to return to a time or a place where we know we are loved.

America’s right wing has long held the prize for nostalgia-speak — think Reagan and Morning in America. If we could go back to a simpler, more idyllic era, goes the notion, we’d revive that which is lost in our fallen times.

The validity of that notion is dubious — the halcyon 1950s weren’t so great for gays, or blacks, or women, or a host of other groups. So imagine my surprise to hear another group wax nostalgic about America’s post-World War II past: the progressives.

For me, the realization of that trend began with Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, an excellent look at how the American right captured those part of America once known for wildfire leftie populism (including, of course, his titular home state). I saw evidence of this again in the protests this winter against bills stripping unions of their collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin and Ohio. All of America’s political sphere seems united in one thing: a notion that these are not the country’s best days. Heck, I’m even seeing it on an anecdotal, street-level basis in the form of general malaise and nastiness out there — even in relatively well-off San Francisco. People have become downright mean to each other these days — or else, channeling Donald Trump, are prone to fits of vulgar self-promotion.

As a techie with a philosophical bent, I’ve always looked with suspicion on bouts of nostalgia. This skepticism has a long tradition in my family: while her contemporaries pined for the simple life back in Poland, my great-grandmother reminded her fellow immigrants to these shores in the 1920s about the poverty, the rickets, the state-sponsored anti-semitic riots in the old country. No, she said. The good old days are now.

And yet, there’s something about leftie nostalgia for the Bad Old Nineteen-Fifties that rings true: for all the conformity and repression of the era, it was, the statistics tell us, one of markedly reduced economic inequality. Money is by no means a measure of everything, but in these crazy times it matters a lot. This has to be one of the strangest recessions ever: while folks all over the income spectrum are struggling, the very wealthy are in fact better off now than three years ago.

Which makes the current Republican hissy fit about the debt ceiling all the more insane: they’ve adamantly opposed any increase on any taxes — even on the fabulously wealthy, even on corporate jets. Well… during the glorious era they revere so much, taxes on the wealthy were much, much higher than they were now.

I’ve always believed the label “conservative” is a misleading one for the American Right. They have little interest in “conserving” the status quo, and the real era they lionize is not the “socialist” Fifties but a time far further into our past: the euphemistically-named Gilded Age of the late-1800s. That was an era of staggering unfairness, where corporations routinely cut employee wages to guarantee higher stock dividends; when robbers barons paid off police to beat the crap out of workers trying to organize unions; where the notion was that life was risky, dangerous, and hardscrabble — and if you failed, so be it. I’ve long quipped, when right-wingers in America complain that “the Democrats are trying to turn America into a European social-democratic state” (as if that were such a terrible fate)” that they have an opposite plan: to turn this country into a banana republic, with a mostly-poor populace and a tiny elite of wealthy plutocrats. Defaulting on our debt would turn that joke into something all too serious.

I think, then, that the smartest thing to do with nostalgia is identify those parts of the past that worked well, and strive to integrate those into our future. But it’s equally important to recognize what didn’t work, and, well, not head in that direction as well. It seems obvious, doesn’t it… so what are waiting for?