Happy Monday, faithful readers, guests and hangers on! Hope everyone had a nice weekend. As always, Monday’s post comes to us from Stephen Hall. Thanks, Stephen!!
Previously was discussed a spin upon the 1950s marginal tax rates and the willful misinterpretation of those tax rates to imply that the American tax burden was higher in the ‘50s than current taxation. However, this discussion was founded upon an internet interaction which I found puzzling because I had never mentioned the 1950s but they kept bringing it up out of left field.
But, why the ‘50s? Why do leftists want to rewrite that decade?
There were a number of times in American history which coincided with a blooming of conservative values simultaneously with an economic resurgence; the Reagan era of the ‘80s, the Father Knows Best times of the ‘50s, the Roaring ‘20s, even the 1890s, but so few people remember that these days.
The Reagan era was much more proximate in time, yet still before the time of the millennial, so it seems like a much easier target for leftist rewrites of history than the more distant Eisenhower era. Alternatively, if the Reagan era is too recent and harder to rewrite historically, then it would seem that the Coolidge era would be even easier, with the added bonus of a cronyism scandal of the Teapot Dome.
Culturally speaking, ignoring the economic aspects of a prospering economy, leftist imagine that the television shows of the 1950s depict what they project upon the conservatives in America as their ideal, the conservative utopia.
The now aging leftist flower children hippies of the LSD era of free-love, Woodstock, and Bill Ayers and the Weathermen grew up in the ‘50s though we associate the post war baby boom generation with the ‘60s, that was their college years, being born in the ‘40s and ‘50s.
Their teenage rebellion did not recall the halcyon days of their youth with fondness but with a deep seated hatred and resentment. They were rebelling against everything their parents represented, and everything America represented to their parents.
What do they imagine was so awful and horrible that an entire generation would have such a deep hatred for their parents’s generation and their parents’ culture. What was this horror that was the ‘50s which haunted them so?
Understand that every generation is in some way a reflection of the generation before it and a rebellion against what that generation got wrong. To understand this rebellion, one has to look at the previous generation, the one egotistically called “the greatest generation”.
That generation grew up in their formative years in the midst of the Great Depression where the economy tanked, unemployment high as 25%, the dust bowl, worker strikes, and political turmoil. Further, when they hit their would be college years the entire world erupted into a bloody global conflict, the men were drafted into the military and the women went to work in the factories while their parents grew victory gardens in their back yards to supplement the family income.
Growing up in the depression, fighting a devastating war, they came home, got married, bought a house, and had children. They wanted all of that drama left behind them, to build a simple, calm, stable life, married with a car, two kids, and a house with a white picket fence in a suburban neighborhood. And that was what the television reflected back to them.
The economy was booming, if a man got a job he could expect to hold that job until he retired, he could work towards paying off his mortgage and saving his money so that his children would never have to face the hardships he grew up enduring. Women expected their marriages to be stable, their children to never go without food, and even the poorest households enjoyed the most modern labor saving devices like washing machines, cloth dryers, coffee makers, and many other luxuries they did not have growing up in the depression.
Of course that was the aspiration and not everyone achieved that, there continued to be social problems. Segregation was the law of the land, the cold war was picking up rearing the specter of communism/socialism threatening to plunge their children into another war,
Back to their children who grew up in this era with parents who seemed to focus on everything material, spoiling these children with everything they could not have when they were young, yet pinching pennies to save for a rainy day, and generally trying to avoid anything disagreeable.
The children rebelled.
They embraced much of what their parents feared, embracing socialism on the college campuses; free love hook-up culture, drug experimentation, rejecting all of the trappings they felt their parents valued more than them. Feelings became more important than anything else in their lives.
They have spent the last sixty years trying to destroy the American dream of their parents and vilifying the 1950s.
Opposing a time when they imagine women were stuck in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant which they decided had made their mothers miserable, they have insisted women be liberated with corporate careers, readily available abortions, equal pay, no fault divorces, and college education all in the name of “feminism”.
Meanwhile, the men were pursuing shaking off any and all of that weight and responsibility of family, a mortgage, frugality, children, and manual labor jobs which they decided made their fathers miserable, so they stopped saving for the future and striving for independence rather they found it more convenient to embrace the ideal of a social safety net and government retirements.
One of my favorite terms for the millennials was “the boomer echo” because these were the children of the baby boomers, who often waited until their thirties to have children, which explains much of the political echo of the ‘60s and ‘70s. (Though we are now moving past that era into a new one and starting to see a more conservative shift we might properly term a Gen X echo.)
Carry this a few decades into practice and we see that with the encouragement of the welfare state, out of wedlock births have skyrocketed, Many of the traditional American values, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, right to bear arms, private property interests, nuclear family, and the rule of law are openly under attack by a generation which has been indoctrinated by their parents into anti-American ideologies.
Urban decay follows the rise of the welfare state, crime rates follow the bastardization of the children, political tantrums follow the decline of educational standards, but people will tolerate almost anything so long as they are given a simple enemy to vilify, and that enemy is the conservative utopia of the 1950s.
It doesn’t matter that actual conservatives do not hold that time up as some type of golden age to be emulated. It matters that this generation follow their parents in an irrational hatred of that era, the specter of all the evils of American society.
This boomer echo is now finding it’s voice, a simultaneously whiney, complaining, and demanding voice thinly echoing their parents’ complaints against the image their parents have pained for them of the horrors of the American dream.
So if you find yourself in a conversation where the ‘50s are suddenly brought up as an example of a horrible time in America, know that this comes from a place of misplaced hatred from irrational childish resentments passed down through the generations.
Every time has both good and bad, but those who dwell upon the bad will always be miserable, and they will pass on that misery to people too easily molded. Fortunately, people often change their politics with experience, so there remains hope.
