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Originally Posted by goofyballer
Is that true beyond the dumbass centrists that write in the New York Times opinion section or whatever? I'm not sure what era in my lifetime that woud have been, and I think liberals generally don't look back favorably on the era before my lifetime given that they know all the evil **** that era was founded on.
I think it's common. It's even global on the left; Marcon and Corbyn have both tapped into it. Perhaps we can make the case nostalgia is simply a common political tool at all times but the left has certainly been guilty of embracing a whitewashed version of the 1950s-70s (before the Reagan/Thatcher/Chicago School/free market orthodox consensus) set in:
http://www.newsweek.com/1950s-1930s-...s-mudde-531546
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Two of the main beacons of the so-called “radical left”, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, also find inspiration for their future ambitions in a slightly less distant past. Referring to a somewhat similar period, though also including the 1970s, they mostly emphasize different points. While both Sanders and Trump heralded the well-paying (white) working class jobs of the past, only the former also lauds the strengths of the trade unions and the public sector. They defend institutions of the welfare state that the Greatest Generation profited from, such as the National Health Service (NHS) in the U.K. and Social Security in the U.S.
The main message is: it used to be better (rather than, it gets better).
http://theweek.com/articles/622463/b...sidential-race
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Sanders, the 1960s radical, actually talks a lot about the 1970s. His policy agenda largely involves bringing to America the European-style government-sponsored health care and education enacted after World War II, but in his speeches he sounds almost wistful for the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations.
"I want you to think about this one," he told a rally last week in Bloomington, Indiana. "Forty years ago, in this country, before the explosion of technology and cellphones, and space-age technology and all that stuff, before the explosion of the global economy, one person in a family — one person — could work 40 hours a week and earn enough money to take care of the whole family." Later, he recalled that "40 to 50 years ago, you had a high school degree, you were pretty well educated. You can go out and get a good, middle-class job. But the economy and technology have changed, and today people need more education."
In West Virginia a few days earlier, Sanders explained why his plan to provide tuition-free public college isn't radical. "You may not know this, but 50 years ago in the United States of America our major great public colleges and universities were virtually tuition-free," he said. "If we could have virtually free tuition 50 years ago, we damn well can do it today."
http://www.aei.org/publication/retur...he-us-economy/
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SANDERS: ...
We have people who are working two, three, four jobs, who can’t send their kids to college. You know what? Sorry, you’re all going to have to pay your fair share of taxes. If my memory is correct, when radical socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, the highest marginal tax rate was something like 90 percent.
Maddow:
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I’m not too much of an expert on what people think about me. It’s hard enough to quantify the general perception of anyone—I think it’s impossible to do it about yourself. That said, I’m undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I’m in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform. Our politics have drifted so far to the right now that, for example, no one believes there is a single, confirmable judicial nominee out there who is as liberal as the Supreme Court Justice he or she will replace—a Republican appointed by a Republican president in the ’70s. Justice Stevens didn’t become a liberal once he was on the Court—he maintained his moderate Republican-style views, while the Court (and the rest of our national politics) shifted so far to the right that he ended up on the Court’s far-left wing, simply by standing still.
Sanders and Maddow pretty clearly pining for the politics of the 50s and 60s: far less partisanship, one laborer per family could make enough to earn what the family needed. There were high marginal tax rates. Institutions like labor unions had impact and power. The right and the left shared common interests and goals and consensus about the primacy of the middle class. That's the story anyway. Obviously when pressed, I think we all recognize the era was not nice for blacks, for women, for gay people. The nostalgia remains. I'm sure I'm guilty, even just earlier today, of saying many of the same things. I think there's a lot of truth to the meme though that inequality, segregation, partisanship, and discord with institutions are on the rise, and there's been a dismantling of a politics of shared national interests. I think that's mostly a product of unadulterated market forces being unleashed.
And then to bring it all back: there's an element that people clearly really liked about that. That's why the nostalgia is effective even though fewer and fewer people lived through the era. They like the story and the fiction, anyway. Think about how durable it is on the left, among American liberals, that politics are genteel habits and limited to a set of basic differences among a larger broad consensus and only a small set of procedural transgressions from those norms are allowed. Censorship and regulation of mass market media created that. I am not asking us to return back to it. I am OK with Russian propaganda mills feeding grandma racist tripe as a matter of law.
My objection is with the people who *aren't*. Who seem really wedded to the 'politics as genteel hobbysport' and don't like the icky feeling that these are contests of life and death and stark differences in how the state collects and distributes resources and want to behave accordingly. It's THEIR distaste and alarm about Russian Fake News which tells lurid stories of immigrant invasion crimes and black violence in urban America cheered on and precipitated by Hillary Clinton and George Soros -- I don't get it. What are they objecting to? This is our system now. It's simple results oriented thinking; if you believe information should be free, regulations of the media and the internet are bad, global trade is to be cherished, then you have to accept the lowbrow products created in bad taste by aggressive foreign competitors will be part of our ecosystem like just cheap Chinese products and Japanese anime and Molson beer or whatever. Obviously you can criticize the taste and consumption of it but that's about the extent you can go. It's not cheating. It's not a hack. Our democracy isn't subverted and imperiled by it; if you argue it is, then time to take a big step back up the process chain.
Last edited by DVaut1; 07-16-2017 at 02:37 PM.
