Retro Reactionaries

In case you haven't noticed, the Right in this country really wants to return to the good old days of the Postwar 50s when the average American family was supposed to enjoy suburban life.  This included the bliss of owning one's home, living in safe neighborhoods, and surviving on the income of one breadwinner, usually male. This is, of course, a fantasy, since so many Americans suffered from segregation, redlining, and other discriminatory practices. Only slowly did immigration and naturalization laws permit Asians to bring their families, settle here, and become citizens. The government also discouraged Native Americans from tribal affiliation, which meant many lost the benefits of that sovereignty. The government spent a lot on infrastructure, including what became our interstate highways, dams, bridges, and our electrical grid. We were also fighting the Cold War. This wasn't just building our military-industrial complex, and containing Communism. This meant infiltrating and subverting leftist movements in postwar Europe. It also meant overthrowing left-leaning governments of former colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. It meant replacing these with authoritarian regimes that would avowedly suppress Communism and any home-grown efforts at progressive reform. It meant continued heavy-handedness towards Latin American and US territories, such as Cuba, Guatemala, Brazil, Nicaragua, Argentina, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. It sowed the seeds of revolt in the Near East and Southeast Asia, where we would later regret our support of the Shah of Iran and our puppet governments in Indochina. 

International Communism was certainly a threat, make no doubt about it. The Soviets and, later, the People's Republic of China, built up nuclear arsenals. Communism sought to extend its influence to any faction which claimed to fight for national liberation. The vast territory occupied by the Red Army during World War II wasn't relinquished until 1989.  Communist influence prevailed in the Soviet Union, most of Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. It found friends in India,  Egypt, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe, and many other emerging nations. It stoked civil unrest in many countries. What proved its undoing was its inability to recognize local autonomy and the peculiar grievances causing internal conflicts. The commissars were no better at bossing their foreign clients than they were managing affairs in the Soviet Bloc. The top-down approach has never worked well outside of totalitarian rule and leadership cults.

Fearing Communist subversion, the US fell under the grip of McCarthyism for much of the 50s. Those who protested against nuclear proliferation, oppressive working conditions, militarism, and racial discrimination fell under the scrutiny of the FBI, which infiltrated the ranks of Civil Rights and labor leaders as much as the membership of the American Communist Party. Those in the arts and academia who questioned the veneer of normalcy propounded in American popular culture, the banality and vacuousness of what people thought of as the good life, were considered marginal and deviant. Yet intellectuals and sociologists saw much that was wrong beneath that Postwar Boom. Did no combat soldiers come home with what would later be called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Were housewives who had held down the home front, who had worked in factories, dealt with fatherless children, lived with the daily uncertainty of possible violent death of loved ones abroad, and wartime rationing, happy with their subordination to returning veterans? Or caring for scarred, disabled partners for years to come? What about the social status of women, single, widowed, and married? What about those on the fringes? Ethnic minorities? Workers? Farmers? Sexual outlaws? The lonely, oppressed, homeless, mentally ill, and other marginalized? The millions of displaced refugees without a homeland?

People still had to cope with the grief of a half-century of the most destructive, genocidal wars in human history. Two world wars had been fought, which brought indiscriminate destruction to noncombatants and wholesale ethnic cleansing. Stalinist terror, Nazi genocide, and widespread famines induced by Soviet and Maoist policies had left multitudes dead. Empires had fallen in the process, but intertribal enmities and internecine rivalries remained. European Jewry at last had a homeland and a military that would protect them from endemic antisemitism, but the enmity of its neighbors and displaced Palestinians would trouble Israel its entire existence. Democracy and a just, impartial judiciary then, as new, seemed illusory ideals. Munitions, deliverable by bombers or missiles, had been created with the potential of wiping out all human life on the planet. Instead, people tried to escape and forget that Mutually Assured Destruction hung over their heads. Dropping out of society while consuming liberal amounts of hallucinogens attracted many as a possible response. Some became the ancestors of today's homeless. Governments, both totalitarian and democratic, lied to their subjects about the survivability of nuclear war. They also lied about the winnability of many wars, including in Vietnam and, later, in Afghanistan and Iraq. One wonders, too, if Russia has a real exit strategy from Ukraine, or Israel from Gaza. Total victory sounds good on paper. But Ukrainians and Palestinians may not be so easily subjugated, except at great cost. Israel has nuclear weapons, like Russia. Will desperate political megalomaniacs resort to their use? Time will tell.

After Vietnam and the coverup of the dangers of nuclear fallout. After Watergate, Contra-gate, and many other scandals. After the Big Lie which led to our invasion of Iraq in 2003. After the Great Recession of 2008, for which few perpetrators suffered. After America's deindustrialization of the past 50 years and the ever-growing wealth gap between financiers and the average citizen. After the failure of our Global War on Terror, coupled with our Global War on Drugs fiasco. After our recent pandemic and the existential threat posed by climate change. Is there any wonder that people have so little faith in government, increasingly under the sway of billionaires, or in corporations, which cull the payroll at the slightest hint of profits ebbing? Is there any wonder so many worldwide are captivated by propagandists, extremists, and conspiracists, rather than official sources of information? 

Is there any wonder then, in a world of social upheaval and cultural pluralism, that some profit by appealing to nostalgia? A nostalgia uncolored by nuance or factuality? Many believe that if America reasserted its original identity as a Christian nation, then God would bring back that lost golden age. They conveniently ignore the fact that America never declared itself for any particular faith. Still, they believe that steps to achieve this must include criminalizing what was, for a time, decriminalized. This will include putting the state in charge of women's reproductive matters, including scrutinizing every miscarriage that occurs. It must include the suppression of any history or literature dealing with unpleasant controversies regarding race, sexual identity, labor relations, indigenous people, enslavement, or environmental degradation. It must ban public expressions of non-heteronormative sexuality. It must exclude adults and children from dressing rooms, bathrooms, and sports if they do not identify with their gender assigned at birth. It was so much better when they stayed in the closet.

Just as people worried then about anarchists and Communists coming to our shores and destroying our way of life, there is constant agitation today about migrants bringing crime and taking American jobs. While this nation of immigrants has never been happy with a foreign presence, it is still a fact that the population is declining in many rural areas. Though farm labor is poorly paid, people still need to eat. Agricultural and other "dirty" jobs are not as coveted by ordinary Americans. Contractors still exploit immigrant labor. American immigration law is unwieldy and unfairly applied. Lawmakers refuse to implement needed reforms. Instead, populists raise public ire against non-existent threats. It is the migrants who really suffer. We might as well be living in the 1950s.

Furthermore, it assumes that departments of diversity, equality, and inclusion, like the principle of affirmative action, are no longer needed because today's society is color-blind. It presumes that there is nothing wrong with defunding public education or discouraging people from voting because we are, nevertheless, a free country. Today, after years of ignoring the warning signs, any faltering steps toward discontinuing fossil fuel consumption are met with pushback. Americans, we are told, just aren't ready to give up on their gas vehicles. Just like we can't use public transportation like people do elsewhere. Just like we can't build express railway service between cities. Besides, electric vehicles are too expensive. Let the Chinese build all they want. American manufacturers, instead, are discontinuing their e-vehicle specialty products. If we didn't have them in the 1950s, why should we have them now?

What can you call this era except retro? Abortion is illegal once again. Books are either unread or being put on someone's modern Index Librorum Prohibitorum. You can discriminate against the general public if their lifestyle is disdained by your religious faith. Some places are unionizing, but organized labor is still on the decline. There is no discrimination so long as we don't say it exists. Kids will be proud to live in a country whose history is free of blemishes. People should feel safe knowing every citizen has the right to be armed. You should be honored by a country where so many make their fortune. You should be grateful that we are so free of national health insurance and our military is immune to prosecution by any international court. With few exceptions, we still have enough ordnance to blow most countries to bits. White people still have babies, even if not so many. We can still hope God will punish the infidel and prosper the churchgoer. Let the rest of the world rot, for we are the exception.

Yes, ultimately the utopia envisioned by the Right excludes vast swathes of the population. Whereas many utopian schemes seem designed to work out the differences in people, the Right wants a world untroubled by gender confusion, unwanted pregnancy, ethnic diversity, unbelief, endangered species, traumatized refugees, domestic violence, mental illness, disability, endemic poverty, pollution, war, and environmental degradation. The world's largest Home Owners Association. Where outsiders are met with walls, gates, and sentries. Where non-compliant insiders can easily get the boot and be incarcerated with the rest of the deviants. Where property rights trump human rights. Where only the disadvantaged pay for their crimes. Where children are taught to reverence only the achievements of white people, who all must have been believing Evangelicals. Who, of course, were all self-made men of European descent, of the purest stock. A country where every God-fearing man can succeed, with the backing of a good woman and suitably docile children. Who may love Jesus, but who loves entrepreneurship and political power even more. Who believes in divine protection, but has plenty of firepower to fall back on. Just in case.