(05-23-2017, 07:02 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(05-23-2017, 04:54 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(05-22-2017, 12:47 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: As far as that goes, the concept "Make America Great Again" is reactionary in the sense of suggesting that something noble has been lost. All that I see worse about America since the 1920s is that America is more crowded and that real estate is much more expensive in real terms. But go back to the era of 120 years ago -- I don't want elixirs of opiates and liquor sold as alternatives to seeing a physician. I don't want children then seen as trash (then Irish-Americans, largely) being run over by trolleys. I don't want black people being consigned to conditions reminiscent of serfdom. I don't want children drinking booze or toiling in mines and factories. The forty-year lifespan and seventy-hour workweek for workingmen as a norm is something to avoid -- not to recover.
I miss the optimism and energy of the GI generation. They grew up in the last ugly remnants of the Gilded Age, the Great Depression being a final reprise of the economic ugliness of what came before. From the New Deal through the Great Society I think we did pretty good. Getting back that spirit and energy wouldn't be a bad thing.
The Great Depression and World War II were not fun. The Gilded Age was just bad. Thinking those times the peak of America doesn't feel right at all save in the context of a Churchill misquote. If the nation lasts a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour." But in terms of when was our time of broad sunlit uplands, that would be the heyday of tax and spend liberalism.
Ironically I don't interpret Make America Great Again as "go back to pre-WWII" or "pre 20th Century." I interpret it as "go back to the 1T (and maybe the 2T?)"
The Boomers who are the most firebrand about Trump are recalling their childhoods and for the older ones, early adulthoods, and wanting to recreate that magic. But being from a sector (or having been recruited by the sector) that viewed FDR as "that man" and JFK as "a horny drunk Catholic Mick" they only consider a sliver of those past days. They are irrational in that it was the New Deal and the relative unity that arose after the "America Firsters" and their evil opposites the Bosheviks were marginalized during the late 1930s and 1940s that made the 1T what it was and gave the 2T its "seed capital. "
I think the same can be said about many of us progressives of all ages who supported Sanders in the primaries, there is a lot of pervasive New Deal nostalgia, a want to go back to the 50s prosperity (what Colin Woodard calls "national liberalism") only without the racism, sexism, and homophobia.
#MakeTheDemocratsGreatAgain