The Object of Nostalgia Matters…
Yglesias on Reihan Salam’s claim that white conservatives aren’t racist, but rather simply nostalgic about an American that has largely ended:
On its face it’s difficult to make sense of that. John Boehner was born in 1949. Does he feel nostalgic for the higher marginal tax rates of the America he grew up in? For the much larger labor union share of the workforce? The threat of global nuclear war?It’s difficult for me to evade the conclusion that on an emotional level, conservative nostalgics like Boehner are primarily driven by regret at the loss of social privilege by white men. In Boehner’s defense, I often hear white male progressives express nostalgia for the lost America of the 1950s and 1960s and think to myself “a black person or a woman wouldn’t put it like that.” But progressive nostalgics do at least have the high-tax, union-dominated economy and egalitarian income distribution as the things they like. But from a non-bigoted conservative point of view, what is there really to miss about the America John Boehner grew up it? The tax rates were high, but at least they didn’t let Jews into the country club?
There’s an obvious parallel with invocations of the “heritage” defense for displays of the Confederate flag. The American “South” as a cultural-geographic concept precedes the Revolution, and contains an immensity of cultural signifiers, many of them worth valorizing. Invocations of Southern “heritage”, however, almost invariably concentrate on five years of violent treason in defense of slavery. This isn’t accidental; the appeal of Confederate imagery cannot be separated from the 150 yearish effort to roll back the most obvious consequences of Southern secession.
The objects of nostalgia are political, often glaringly so. If Salam had bothered paying attention, he would have noticed more than a little nostalgia for 50s and 60s American on the left. The objects of this nostalgia, however, are the things that Yglesias mentions; a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth, a strong labor movement, and so forth. Nostalgia for these things makes complete sense given the political preferences of left-wing Americans. Nostalgia for a time in which white men held a complete monopoly of cultural, political, and financial power in America is… well, it says something rather different about the political preferences of conservatives.
To put it on a more personal level, I recall my late uncle (of whom I was, and am, very fond) once telling me a story about North Carolina in the early 1960s. The blacks in line at a counter, he said, would step aside when a white man entered the store. Not like that anymore, he said with some regret, using the term “respect.” There’s no doubt that my uncle’s sentiment reflected nostalgia in some sense, but this hardly made it either admirable or worth apologizing for.
Boehner grew up in Ohio and apparently did not have the easiest of kidhoods. He came of age during the 1960s, a time conservatives generally regard as When It All Went to Hell. He got out of going to Vietnam by literally a lucky accident. It’s ironic that a Republican would wax nostalgic for the economic opportunities provided by a liberal nation, but it’s strange that he and so many conservatives are nostalgic for a time they probably didn’t not enjoy living through.
Nostalgia dominates the conservative mind. That’s why they are always talking about taking their country back (To when? From whom?) or getting back to something (vaguely defined, if at all).
What’s more, the place, time, and circumstances that they pine for are often fantasy or myth. One illustration. Since I’m a high school teacher, my right wing family members often lecture me about failing high schools and the evils of unions. When I tell them that the dropout rate was three times higher in 1960 than now, they refuse to believe it. When I show them the data, they change the subject.
I think most of us have a version of that uncle. What’s disturbing is find out we have a cousin or a nephew with the same ideas.
The dominant vibe of American culture, post-Viet Nam, has been and continues to be anxiety. It is hardly surprising when people try to reduce that anxiety with nostalgia.
James, where did you get the data? I would love to have that for my own right-wing family member discussions.
I found the dropout rate here.
There are other sources I’ve read, not online, that have the graduation rates in some places at 50%. I don’t know for sure, but it appears that until the 60s, when education became associated with beating the Russians, nobody cared about the graduation rate. Dropouts went to work in factories.
link fail
Oh yeah, the 50s and 60s were worse in many measures when it came to teenagers – higher dropout rates, higher pregnancy rates, higher violent crime rates. But just try telling a conservative that. IT CAN’T BE TRUE, WE WERE A GOOD GOD FEARING NATION BACK THEN.
The reality, of course, is that social problems back then were just likelier to be invisible to the white middle class. That’s how conservatives really want it – it’s not that they don’t want people to suffer (ha!), they just want to be able to sweep those suffering people under the rug. Which is one reason welfare anc abortion piss them off so much.
I’m 66 years old, and there’s nothing, not one damned thing, about the 50s and 60s as time periods for which I pine.
I don’t miss the cold war, or the Berlin Wall, or Vietnam, or the draft. I certainly don’t miss five world-shaking assassinations (JFK, RFK, MLK and Malcom X, plus the attempt on Wallace) in five years. While I’m a liberal and a Dem, I don’t have any nostalgia at all for hippies, yuppies, or the Chicago 7. I always knew Nixon was a crook, and I guess I’m glad he was found out, but I have no nostalgia for Watergate (although I do miss Barbara Jordan). I don’t feel nostalgic about my dad being stationed, in the late 50s, at Aberdeen Proving Ground (north of Baltimore) and realizing years later that the brand new school I attended, built largely with federal money, was segregated, and the black kids went to an old, dilapidated school literally on the other side of the tracks. I don’t miss Lester Maddox or Orval Faubus or Ross Barnett or old Senator Eastland. I can’t miss I Love Lucy because its still running. I don’t miss Bishop Sheen or Kate Smith in the afternoon after Howdy Doody. I have no nostalgia for three TV channels only, in black and white, if you could get them. I wouldn’t ever want my mom’s wringer washer back; I don’t miss vinyl records and moving about 3500 of them multiple times. You can have the riots in Watts, DC, Louisville, Chicago – and France. Also the shootings at Kent State, Jackson State and South Carolina State, not to mention the murders of Viola Liuzzo and Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner. I don’t suppose anybody except the anti-vaccine wackos misses measles, mumps and chicken pox.
Which is to say something we all recognize: The time and place they’re pining for never existed. Its like Reagan remembering WW2 from a movie set.
Freakin’ idiots.
My, i do get long winded at one in the morning. Time for bed.
Correctomatic. I don’t long for Bishop Sheen and Kate Smith, but especially I do not want Howdy Doody back. You had three B&W channels. Luxury! We had one channel, and when I got home from school there was the despicable Doody.
Nostalgia is the inability to remember. Someone said that if women could remember pregnancy and giving birth they’d only do it once, and yet ….
efgoldman,
Beautifully put.
And I, for one, wouldn’t have minded at all if your comment was longer.
As James E. Powell above said, nostalgia is a powerful but false emotion. Of course, the 1950s seems like a simpler, nicer time to me. I was just a kid! (b. 1947) I grew up in Maimi, and I remember well blacks having to sit in the end zone bleachers in the city-owned Orange Bowl. Ah, the good old days!
By the way, I think that whites’ dwindling share of the U.S. population has many of them freaking out. the white population in my home county, Howard, MD, went from 75% white to 57% from 2000-2010. Demographics is destiny.
Fantastic comment.
Powell & ef, above, are correct.
All nostalgia is false.
Alcoholics call this “euphoric recall” — , remembering only feeling buzzed and great and being witty, and somehow not associating that with waking up on the bathroom floor feeling like death or throwing up in the plant in the hotel lobby barely able to stand.
Everyone learns the lesson that you can’t really go back [home, or whatever] — it isn’t the same, and probably never was. This is shitty, and a tough lesson.
Never learning — or willfully ignoring — this painful lesson is how I define “reactionary.”
Right on, as we used to say in the oh-so-awesome 60s. I do sort of miss Donna Reed, though, who reminds me of my sainted mom, who worked outside the home and provided me with the liberal education I received at the private, all-male Moeller High School in lily-white Montgomery, Ohio. Just like Crying John Boner.
I’m Helen Boyd who used to be Helen Smith, and I’m 64. I too was at Aberdeen Proving Grounds and went to Aberdeen High School. I think your blog was brilliant and very remindful of those awful and scary days that the Republicans seem to remember as Donna Reed and which were a nightmare if you were an outlier in any way. My father, although a colonel, was against the war, which you can imagine was very popular, and he never rose any higher, so I was quite used to the position of being outside. Thank you for your comment.
Actually, I was thinking of the Halls Cross Roads grade school, which I think had just opened within a year of when I first went there in 1955.
My dad was a warrant officer personnel specialist. He was against the war, too, but had to go to ‘Nam for a year to get two years in grade prior to retirement.
I miss :
+ optimism.
+ Johnny Carson
+ the Dick Van Dyke show.
+ more-credible TV newscasting, and the kind of reporting that would show us something closer to the face of war in Viet Nam than any news source will show us in Iraq or Afghanistan
+ Rye Chex, and the Chex Press on the back of the box
+ home delivery of milk
+ children allowed greater freedom because their parents weren’t panic-stricken about accidents and stranger abduction
Agreed. But journalism as we knew it went into the toilet so slowly, we didn’t realize it until it was too late. And of course, its awfully hard to fight a straight profit motives with high-sounding abstractions.
Sure. But the counter to that is, in those days there was no child or spousal abuse. There was, of course. But it wasn’t reported, by the media or by the police.
Actually, it just was not considered abuse, but the proper exercise of paternal authority.
I am only 59, but attended segregated schools for the first few years in Oklahoma. There is very little that I miss about the 1950s or 1960s except a strong union movement, a highly progressive tax system and low economic inequality, and the optimisim.
Conservatives take umbrage when people read their nostalgia as racism, but the times they are nostalgic for (the 1950s) are notable for the peak of government-subsidized middle class prosperity. Since they repudiate any government support now, it is a small inferential step to conclude that what they are really nostalgic for is the prestige that was inherent in being white and middle class.
That post-war prestige was largely based on racism, as the government subsidies were carefully designed to exclude minorities. Since their nostalgia is so inconsistent with their claims about policy, the burden is on them to come up with an explanation that makes sense. In the absence of such an explanation the rest of us are free to make whatever adverse inferences that make sense.
Privilege is hard to see from the inside; it appears to be the natural state of affairs.
To be fair, some of them might be nostalgic for gender and sexual repression. It’s still OK in a lot of circles to claim society went down the drain with no-fault divorce, working moms and aknowledging gays exist.
or taking the Bible out of public schools
I do not miss, and in fact after 1962 was very grateful for the absence of, the Lord’s Prayer at the start of the school day. And Bible verse, Old or New Testament, also too.
but that is another touchstone on the right for when the USA started going down hill
He often hears this? From whom exactly? I don’t know anybody to the left of Eisenhower who gets misty at the lost America of the 50s and 60s, and I don’t recall reading any either. Specific items like marginal tax rates, the strength of labor unions, or rock & roll, maybe, but WTF?
IF you ask me, the time Republicans are most nostalgic for is 2003, when they controlled everything, luxuriated in tax cuts and an ocean of Wall St. casino profits, were positively tumescent about their military invasions and visions of the New American Empire, and, oh yeah, a black guy wasn’t president.
Krugman, on occasion, no?
I’ve only read excerpts from the book, so you may be right. But from my reading of Krugman’s columns and posts I’d say he’s not nostalgic in the sense that conservatives are. I don’t see him longing for a return to the 50′s*, but pointing to the economic benefits of the era for middle and working class people — less income and wealth inequality, stronger labor unions, etc. My sense is that it’s all about history, not nostalgia. Just like his facetious claim to “miss” Richard Nixon, what he means is
At the same time he knows damned well that
In other words, just because I’d like to see Obama be more like FDR doesn’t mean I’m nostalgic for the Great Depression.
*I suspect that conservatives do indeed long to return to the 50′s — the 1850′s.
or the 0050s
FTW
They’re nostalgic for a ‘Leave it to Beaver,’ Mayberry, all white TV world, where, if there had to be black people, they could at least be funny ones like ‘Amos & Andy.’
But why, oh why, did the two nice white men who did the radio voices of Amos and Andy have to lose their jobs to colored boys when the program went to television?
Why, that was reverse discrimination!
If Groucho could get away with painting on a grease-paint mustache in the movies, why couldn’t these nice white men just put on some black face and shucked and jived just like real colored folk for television?
Basically, the ones who are nostalgic for the era right after WWII, pine for the days when America was ‘King of the hill’ in the world, and Rosa Parks still remembered her way to the back of the bus, and Martin Luther King wasn’t yet that uppity, outspoken n*gger preacher, making them damned Yankees and Jews stick their noses in where they weren’t welcome.
Why, the crowds used to part when a white man walked into a place, and black people knew their place – behind him, and at the back of the line.
‘And don’t be lookin’ at the white women, Boy, lest your family wants to cut down some blowtorched, “strange fruit,” hangin’ from a nearby tree limb, with his black dick and balls shoved firmly in his mouth. You hear me, BOY?!?!’
It’s not really nostalgia that burns in their minds, it’s firey crosses on lawns that they miss.
They’re not bigots. They’re just … you know … nostalgic for a time when their race, religion and genitals granted even the lowliest of their caste instant superiority over those who were not of the same race, religion and genital type.
Curiously enough persons born years or decades after the Golden Years of America are nostalgic for this time.
Is PBS still running that show where the cast had to live under the conditions of a certain era? It would be fun to stick these dingdongs in a 1950ville complete with appropriate social behavior.
I bet they like their microwaves, cable TV and cell phones a heck of a lot more than the knowledge some African-American somewhere is being shooed away from a water fountain.
I think you had a typo and left out part of the sentence. ” The blacks in line at a counter, he said, would step aside when a white man entered the store.” You left out the phrase, “who wanted to live”
Remember, the noose is a second amendment solution.
And no noose is good noose.
what’s good for the noose is good for the nander
Ok folks, that’s the noose for the day…
Pace efgoldman, there is one thing for which I do pine (I am very nearly as venerable), and that is a sense of optimism that things were going to get better. Things sucked in many ways, but they sucked less than in the 1930s (except for the very rich), and the voices of equality, always present somewhere, were getting a hearing. The optimism came from the bottom up: the poor were getting less poor, which has not been the case for a while now, and oppressed minorities (and majorities) were emboldened to demand or at least request change. This was accompanied by a widespread feeling of noblesse oblige, which may have been paternalist but did lead to JFK being shocked by Appalachia and LBJ risking electoral suicide to pass the Civil Rights Act. (Note: all this is over-simplified!) I think modern conservatives, including those like Boehner who ought to remember better, fundamentally misunderstand what was happening, even as they yearn for it. They want the old privileges, yes, but especially they want the “can-do” spirit that in practice was in opposition to those same privileges.
This guy uses the word “fair” the same way as my pre-adolescent daughter.
And their grandfathers in the 1920s longed for an America that was less Italian, Irish, and Eastern European.
Does Krugman count? He wrote a paean to the 1950s a while back.
I miss “The Fugitive” myself. And AM Top 40 radio.
And “The Honeymooners!”
Shows that are still around somewhere on some cable network can’t be “missed.”
People in general, no matter what side of the political aisle that they fall, aren’t nostalgic for the past as it really was but as it has been mythologized and written into the narrative of whatever group with whom they self-identify. So to point to the past and say because someone is nostalgic for a certain era with faults x, y, and z or that because they are nostalgic that this is evidence of serious character flaws amongst the group as a whole, is to miss the mark of the real reason for their nostalgia.
I’m not fond at all of the “treason in defense of slavery” formulation, which seems more polemical than explanatory. The American Revolution was “treason in defense of tax evasion,” but we don’t call it that. Going on about treason seems obnoxious and faintly reactionary to me. What is wrong with the Confederacy is not that it was “treasonous”, but that it was an entire state formed to defend a monstrous injustice.
Beyond that, this is obviously true, as far as it goes, but how far is that? Obviously, Confederate nostalgia is partially driven by racism, and can only persist if one remains in a state of racial insensitivity. But surely confederate nostalgia also draws on a profound sense of grievance that is only tangentially related to race and slavery. The North conquered the south after a brutal war in which the whole of the (white) south had come together to form its own nation. That’s a pretty profound common historical experience. The nostalgia was a product of complete racial insensitivity, but I don’t think that confederate nostalgia is necessarily, in the first instance, a product of racism. It depends on racism, but it isn’t necessarily the racism that drives it.
I’d also note that I tend to think that for most conservatives, what gets them nostalgic about the 50s is the sexual and gender issues, not racial ones. Certainly racist nostalgia places a role (especially for white southerners and, to a lesser extent, white ethnics who fled their old urban neighborhoods after the 60s riots), but the sex stuff is more important.
The point of emphasizing the treason aspect is because it’s remarkably common for American conservatives to attempt to simply side-step the democratic process when that process doesn’t go the way they want it to. It’s not like the Southern states were underrepresented in Washington – but like the modern Tea Party, they didn’t see why anyone else should be allowed to have a say at all.
I don’t know how the comparison to the American Revolution is helpful. You won’t find a lot of romanticization of it on this blog. Yes, it was treason in a sense, and plenty of people called it that at the time.
because it wasn’t. It was treason in defense of participation in the decisions about taxation. The cry was, after all, no taxation without representation
which is why the “in defense of slavery” portion is included
Right. The rather obvious difference is that the colonists weren’t represented in the legislature that imposed the taxes. The South seceded because they lost an election fairly conducted under rules that they had agreed to. There’s nothing objectionable about “treason in defense of slavery.” It was treason, and it was in defense of slavery.
I guess my issue is that I don’t really care about treason in other contexts, so I’m not sure why I should care about treason in this context.
Certainly it is not hard to distinguish between the case of the American Revolution and the American Civil War. But whether or not the colonists voted for parliament (they didn’t, but they generally had a lot more self-government than most people in Britain or Ireland at the time), what they did was indisputably treasonous. “In defense of slavery” is doing all the work of odium here. “Treason” is just thrown in to be inflammatory.
I guess my basic feeling is that “treason” is mostly a reactionary term, and that those who are most motivated by abhorrence of treason are reactionaries. The forces of progress have generally been on the “treasonous” side in most historical conflicts – in the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution (the latter of which could very easily be described as “treason in defense of protestant bigotry,” but which was nonetheless an important step in the development of constitutional government), in the American and French Revolutions, in the revolutions of 1848 and so forth. The American Civil War is an exception, but it’s not a coincidence that the European powers which were most sympathetic to the north during the Civil War were also the most reactionary ones, Russia and Austria. Their attitude towards the civil war was defined by a dislike of “treason,” and they saw the Civil War as being on the model of the “treasonous” rebellions they themselves had recently experienced in Poland and Hungary.
I don’t see how a liberal/progressive historical analysis can get so up in arms about “treason”. A repeated bit of historical name-calling which is based entirely around the premise that there is nothing worse you can accuse someone of than “treason” seems like a real problem to me.
Yeah, I think you’re right, John. In the “treason in the defense of slavery” line, it’s defense of slavery that’s doing all the work. After all, John Brown committed “treason in attacking slavery,” but I don’t see John Brown and, e.g., R.E. Lee on the same plane simply because they both committed treason. One fought against slavery, and one fought against it, and, to me anyway, that’s what really matters. That the right is often incensed when democracy doesn’t go its way (Confederacy, Tea Party) I think is true, but, I don’t know, treason just doesn’t bother me that much.
I agree. I don’t give a damn about treason. Almost all situations where one part of a country secedes from the rest of the country can be called treason (if the extant country did not give permission for the split to occur). It can also be called a fight for independence. I don’t consider the various former members of the Soviet Union like Ukraine and Georgia as traitors – the same goes for Bangladesh and many other examples.
The problem with the South is that its war for independence was, in actuality, a war to preserve slavery forever. Treason, IMHO, is just a word that the winners pin on the losers.
In terms of the Soviet Union, that wasn’t even technically treason, because the Soviet Constitution actually considered the member republics to be sovereign and gave them the right of secession (I believe the same was true in the former Yugoslavia).
But otherwise, yeah.
Disagree on the treason part. The same people who hold the Confederate South in such high esteem are the same people who believe that the rest of us are not “Real Americans” because we live on the coast, or vote for Democrats, or etc. etc. etc. These are people who believe Keith Ellison should not be allowed to hold office because he’s a Muslim or that Obama couldn’t possibly be a real American. These are people who claim to be defending the Constitution while at the same time valorizing a generation of people who committed the act of treason as it is defined in that Constitution because they didn’t like the outcome of a democratic election. They are waving the flag of people who declared war on their own country while simultaneously calling other people insufficiently American for not wearing a big enough flag lapel. So, yes, the word treason is doing important political work here.
Yes. As another poster says, the treason is relevant because the confederate states weren’t willing to live with the outcomes of political processes conducted under 1)rules they had agreed to and 2)had generally advantaged them. And, moreover, they seceded just because they lost, not because the new president had even done anything. The north didn’t secede after decades of federal government dominated by the slave power. Less than five years earlier the Supreme Court ruled that the primary northern party was organized for an illegal purpose and the north didn’t secede. That the political descendants of this faction are now claiming to be the only “Real Americans” fully justifies using treason in the pejorative sense.
The logic of this seems similar to the logic of attacking Larry Craig by calling him a fag.
The North didn’t “conquer” the South enough. Imagine if, in the aftermath of WWII, all attempts at de-Nazification had been suspended, the Nuremburg Trials called off, and the SS sent home with strict instructions not to be so naughty again.
I have no sympathy with the “conquered” South. They may have suffered the destruction wrought by Sherman, but they also gave the world Quantrill’s Raiders, Andersonville, and the burning of Lawrence. After the war, they pretty much went right back to what they had been doing before shelling Fort Sumter.
A group of people whose identity depends on permanent victim status and the myth of the Lost Cause aren’t bound by “a pretty profound historical experience”, especially when a large percentage of those people never lived in the former Confederate states.
Doc,
FYI, while agree with everything you wrote, and you probably know this, but while Andersonville was horrendous, the North also had some equally horrible POW camps.
“Andersonville,” is, though, one of my favorite American novels. I reread it every 5 to 10 years.
If anyone hasn’t read it, please do. It’s an amazing work of art.
I am not aware of “equally horrible” POW camps as Andersonville. To cite Battle Cry of Freedom, the highest death rate in a Northern prison was at Elmira (24%), which wasn’t typical, while Andersonville was 29% and another one (Salisbury NC) was 34%.
I don’t think it’s a good example overall since the state of your average Confederate solider by the end of the war was horrible, so what sort of resources was available for a prison camp? To me, a horrendous thing was fighting the war long past there was ANY chance of winning.
Hood’s insanity at Nashville, for example, was basically a gigantic loss of life in a hopeless cause.
To continue the point of comparison, Andersonville had 33K people at one point given 34 square feet of room in Southern heat vs. Elmira NY which had less than 10K with 180 sq feet. The latter had barracks, the former had to rig up some sort of tents of their own making.
[prisoners at Andersonville] had to rig up some sort of tents of their own making.
Worse than that, if Ken Burns’ source is correct. The claim in Burns’ series is that the commandant of the camp expressly forbid the prisoners from building any kind of structure.
De-Nazification was actually incredibly weak. The most prominent former Nazis were of course tried and imprisoned, but tons of former Nazis found important positions in both East and West Germany. High-ranking former Wehrmacht officers like Erich von Manstein were prominently involved in the establishment of the West German army.
The post-war settlement basically occurred through ignoring all but the most egregious offenders.
And, of course, the Nazis were responsible for wartime atrocities the likes of which humanity had never really seen before. Andersonville was awful, but largely as a result of neglect and a lack of funds, and beyond that I don’t think it’s really fair to compare the Nazis to the Confederacy. Slavery was a crime against humanity, of course, but it isn’t really commensurate with Nazis crimes, especially since the North surely must be held to be fully complicit in the existence of slavery before the war, in a way that the allies cannot be held complicit in Nazi war crimes.
The idea that incredibly harsh treatment of former confederates was in order strikes me as problematic. The South had to be reintegrated into the country some way, and it wasn’t wrong to think that this required some sort of reconciliation with the defeated enemy. What you are suggesting should have been done looks a lot more like the Baruch Plan than it does like what actually happened in Germany after World War II.
After the Civil War, the median opinion in the north was essentially that, on the one hand, the rights of the freedmen should be secured, but that, on the other hand, efforts should be made to reconcile the White South to the Union. Over the next decade, it gradually began to seem clear that these two goals were not compatible with one another, and northern whites decided that they’d rather have the reconciliation than the protecting black civil rights. This was wrong from the perspective of racial justice, but wasn’t the reconciliation ultimately necessary? Treating a whole region of the country like a conquered province for decade after decade seems like a recipe for disaster.
Even beyond that, going on about these counterfactuals rather ignores the fact that surely the main explanation for the failure of Reconstruction is northern racism. Ultimately, after the immediate resentment of the war itself was over, most northerners in the late nineteenth century simply didn’t care very much about protecting Black civil rights. Given that fact, and given that the vast majority of the White South was determined to repeal those rights, I’m not sure how you’re going to get any different results. The nineteenth century was racist, and, despite a few bright examples of tolerance and high-mindedness, and a short-lived experiment, it’s not at all surprising that America in the late nineteenth century was not ready to give blacks political or civil rights. This had at least as much to do with northern racism as with southern.
True, slavery corrupted the human soul for over 300 years and spanned nations and continents. The Nazis did their dirty work in, what, 20?
German efficiency — they Taylorized cruelty.
Umm, no, really not the whole of the white south.
Outsie of a few specific mountain areas (western Virginia, East Tennessee, western North Carolina, etc.), it was close enough.
Also, plenty of individuals within the states left and joined the Union Army. Every state but Mississippi had a regiment in the federal army, or some such statistic.
Also there was a significant minority of whites who became Republicans during the short period democracy was enforced in the south after the war. Likely a fair share had been against secession the whole time.
In shows like “Madmen” make the early ’60s seem glamorous as hell. Sharp suits, cocktails, hats for men.
“Madmen” makes the point again and again that male privilege and the harassment and belittlement endured by the women characters is appalling. But like an ad for cigarettes, its wrapped in a glittering package.
Another thing that strikes me about this nostalgia* for Days Past is it falls squarely within the neo-cons’ habit of wanting things they can never have and therefore can whine about forever.
I’m not talking time machines, I’m talking the armed forces required to kill/intimidate all of the people who DON’T think the social/political climate of the 1950′s was all that dandy. They sure as hell aren’t going to fight in that war.
*Help me out here. What’s the word for nostalgia for a period or event one did not experience? ‘Cos some of the people pining for the good old days were but twinkles in their parents’ or grandparents’ eyes at that time.
I don’t think that there is a word like that in English, but I’d be surprised if there isn’t one in German.
“What’s the word for nostalgia for a period or event one did not experience?”
No-stalgia?
The median age of the American voter is what, mid-40s? How can someone BORN in the 1960s be nostalgic for the 1950s? It’s not possible. American conservatives are angry about what they imagine they’ve lost from that era, and angry at the people they think took it from them. “Ignorant” is the most charitable word for American conservatives who want to “get the 1950s back”.
American conservatives (young and old) practice a sort of nasty cultural revanchism — calling it “nostalgia” is an inaccurate kindness.
How can someone BORN in the 1960s be nostalgic for the 1950s?
The magic of television. They’re not nostalgic for the 1950s, they’re nostalgic for the TV-land version of the 1950s.
The Society for Conservative Anachronism.
This is actually fairly normal for this kind of cultural nostalgia, which longs for a lost golden age. It always helps the idealization if you have no first hand knowledge of the era in question.
“five years of violent treason in defense of slavery” (NB “violent”)
Dude … do the math. It’s FOUR years. Here, watch: April 1865 MINUS April 1861. Subtraction is fun!
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