The neo-fascist dream of America’s golden age
By 
I’m not on Facebook but a friend flagged a post that featured this photo:
The comment accompanying this photo was, “What did Democrats find so wrong with this version of America that they needed to completely destroy it and turn our country into the mess we live in today?”
The post generated various comments like this one:
This picture represents a hardworking mom and dad who did not ask for a free ride, they worked endlessly to make a better life for their children. The mother’s job was the most important, she kept the family together. What would we have done without mom.
To be fair there were also comments pointing out that the woman couldn’t have her own bank account and could be legally raped by her husband.
The photographer of this image was H. Armstrong Roberts, who I hadn’t heard of, but who apparently is an important figure in the history of photography, as he played a key role in the invention of stock photography, of which this image is an example.
My interest here is how this Facebook post and its accompanying comment, along with some of the comments from Facebook viewers about it, capture the current neofascist myth of an American golden age.
Elements of that myth include the idea that everybody, or everybody who counted anyway, was white, adhered to highly conventional sex and gender roles, lived economically comfortable and even luxurious lives (this photo is from the mid-1940s I think. ETA: Roberts died in 1947 so hence my guess at the date. Note that the average single family house at that time was about 800 square feet so the house in this photograph is very luxurious by the standards of the time, if not quite a mansion) in the fabled one income household, in which a man could “provide” all the good things for his family without his wife working outside the home, where the children were all well dressed and polite etc etc. All this of course is just a wildly ahistorical narrative, although I encounter many liberal-left people who still buy into the one income paid for everything everybody needed claptrap.
Anyway I thought this particular little cyber-anecdote was quite revealing in its own way, and I bet my homie Karen the Cassandra of Texas has some thoughts . . .