![]() “That was the last time things were really great in America,” the logic runs, “so we need to return to those conditions.” Over the last six years or so, a cottage industry has arisen issuing calls for a “conservative welfare state.” Instead of undoing the New Deal and the Great Society, this group of right-wing technocrats argues that Americans ought to use the tools of the administrative state to revive the social, political, and economic arrangements of the 1950s. Another group of young people on the right hold up the ’50s as an aspirational example in public policy debates: the technocrats. Sadly, edgelords and meme-posters are not the only right-wingers who idolize the 1950s. It was never real, and “returning” to an unreal past is not a legitimate program of cultural renewal. Both rely on a constructed past that has little to do with the realities of American history-and therefore neither type of ’50s nostalgia offers serious solutions to the country’s problems.Įspecially online, ’50s-era images of white, nuclear families will circulate as depictions of a past “they took away from us” and to which we must “ RETVRN.” The problem is that these idealized images represent a past that never really existed, except in advertisements and the near-socialist realist illustrations of Norman Rockwell. The 1950s have two main nostalgic pulls on conservatives: aesthetic and technocratic. Buckley said that “There never was an age of conformity quite like this one.” The founders of that magazine and others present at the creation of the conservative movement would be horrified by their intellectual heirs’ embrace of the conformity they so vehemently disliked. In National Review’s mission statement, written in 1955, William F. And the centralization imposed by the New Deal-which contributed to the hollowing out of communities and homogenization of American life-only made things worse.Ĭonservatives who lived through the 1950s did not view this decade as particularly conservative. Social alienation was widespread, despite the popular image of suburban families with white-picket fences remembered from Leave It to Beaver. Racial segregation and misogyny marred America’s victory over fascism. Increasingly, right-wing technocrats-mostly gathered in a few Washington think tanks and magazines-are looking back on the social and economic policies of that time for models to imitate today.īut the 1950s were no golden era. Postwar America is often remembered as some sort of utopia, where men were men, families were strong, and everybody went to church. The Norman Rockwell aesthetics of the 1950s have become a nostalgic touchstone for a certain kind of traditionalist politics. Other conservatives seek to return America to a “golden era,” a time before a fall from grace. Much of the confusion comes from the question “What exactly are we conserving?” Traditionalists and libertarians have long debated whether the conservative emphasis should be on virtue or freedom, for instance. ![]() “Conservatism” is a notoriously slippery word.
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