The 1950s are coming back - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15053718
Many liberals see the rise of Trump and far-right leaders in Europe, the Philippines and other parts of the world as a repeat of the fascist rise of Hitler and Mussolini. But if history is truly repeating itself, the defeat of fascism in this century will be followed not by a progressive paradise but by a post-World War II-type era of social conservatism and bourgeoise ideals: the “1950s,” a period often mocked and derided by the left.

(The social description “the 1950s” encompasses the post-war period of 1946 to 1963, before the social revolution ushered in by the Beatles and the Vietnam War protests.)

When the neo-1950s come back, still years away, look for woman to focus more on family and children and less on careers. The alphabet soup can of LGBTQ will be pushed to the rear of the pantry. The self-segregation by ideology occurring now may be extended to self-segregation by lifestyle and race. The cosmopolitan elites will persevere, but they will lose much of their influence in the media.

While the culture will move right, a liberal amount of government intervention will be required to focus on the family. For example, generous Social Security credits might be given to stay-at-home moms who have gainfully employed husbands.

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#15053726
Robert Urbanek wrote:
But if history is truly repeating itself, the defeat of fascism in this century will be followed not by a progressive paradise but by a post-World War II-type era of social conservatism and bourgeoise ideals: the “1950s,” a period often mocked and derided by the left.



History isn't like baking a cake.

On one hand, you saw the rise of the American Empire in the Fifties, but what you will be seeing is the decline and fall of the American Empire.

While the country is prosperous, the growing income inequality is going to create all sorts of problems, and hasten the decline of the country.

It's a sticky wicket..
#15057683
In the 1950's it was also normal to have high corporate tax rates and heavy regulation of the financial sector. Without either it's unlikely the social conservatism of the time could have existed (along with its terrible racial composition) and it's even more unlikely that Trump is going to usher in some kind of conservative renaissance. Even Reagan was only capable of freezing the culture wars until the 1990's. Social conservatism requires a symbiotic relationship between different groups that is no longer possible today. The divine forces that once gathered the different interests of conservatism have now turned them against one another. The conservative psyche is fractured as such. What is left now for them is only a Dream-scape politics, a series of mass hallucinations that will masquerade as a new era of American prophetism.
#15057702
The social description “the 1950s” encompasses the post-war period of 1946 to 1963, before the social revolution ushered in by the Beatles and the Vietnam War protests.)


Well up to this point....

The Beatles had nothing to do with a social revolution at all and the Vietnam war did nothing to further it.

It is easy to forget that what you appear to be calling the social revolution actually began in the depths of the depression. Banking controls, public works projects, subsidies for the arts, Unemployment insurance and Aid to Families with Dependent Children are all pre-WWII inventions. Perhaps the biggest and most obvious is Social Security. That was 1935 and I would hesitate to credit Fred Astaire (who had the biggest song that year) for ushering it in.

The generation that fought WWII was inclined to pay itself back generously with the US's post WWII riches. The GI Bill paid for their college, down payments for their homes and free medical care in the VA system. It was easy to do these things for two reasons. First of all the US was awash in cash. It was richer than the rest of the world combined. It had tax rates that gave the government unprecedented spending power. It had a self-righteous opinion of all things GI and this sense of "nothing is too good for the troops who destroyed fascism" was an easy sell. Expanding these programs to others was a natural extension of this sense that nothing bad can exist in the US.

@late said: On one hand, you saw the rise of the American Empire in the Fifties, but what you will be seeing is the decline and fall of the American Empire.


Do you mean Empire literally? If you do I respectfully disagree. If the US ever had an empire it was the most poorly exploited on in history. But even if I grant that the US had a huge empire I would tell you that we are not seeing any fall of it now. Where is your evidence that the US is any less influential in the world now than it was when it was (for example) stymied by the USSR? Granted we are not the richest country in the world anymore but we are still the most powerful economically and especially militarily by a fair margin.

China is coming on strong but I would commend to you the thought that China is not "winning". It is becoming more like us and less like "itself" every day. IT may well be that the result of Trumps trade wars will be that both sides get tired of the hassle and settle down to forming the hybrid capitalist alliance that both want.

Income inequality is a huge problem but you can see that ice breaking. For example, the rapidly growing minimum wages imposed by the states now has the majority of states higher than the US minimum wage. The people like Obamacare and want health care increased. The Me Too movement is a real thing. The country is moving slightly to the left but the government has yet to follow suit. But watch the election. You will not see the republicans running on the repeal of the PPACA.

Anyway. I am interested in what others think. For me the countries move to the left is far older but far slower than most people realize.
#15057928
The era of the 1950s is part of a regular historical cycle in which a “morning” period of rebellion and irrational exuberance eventually leads to decay, which is followed by an “afternoon” period of war and suppression, and then a “night” period of recovery, such as the 1950s, marked by prosperity and conservative social values.

We can see a 1950s-like period from about 1871 to 1901, in which the morally conservative Victorian Era in Britain overlapped the Belle Époque, a period of settled and comfortable life in Continental Europe. That was followed by the more innovative and rebellious “morning” years of 1902 to about 1929, followed by the harsh “afternoon” years of the Depression and World War II.
#15058016
Donald wrote:You've been reading too much Strauss-Howe theory


My cyclical theory is derived from an Egyptian trinity.

Thus spoke Re: "I am Khepera at the dawn, and Re at noon, and Tem in the evening."
#15064161
The only three things I liked about the 1950's were the clothes, the music and the dances.

Oh and the style of the cars. I also liked Drive-in theaters.

The beat generation were from the 50's and the movies were interesting. All those Alfred Hitchcock films and black and white classic television shows.

My mother said the fifties had a lot of intellectuals questioning authority that later exploded in the sixties.

I think my mother got a job as a young woman at a dental office back then, and the dentist boss of hers tried to lock her in a room to show her a 'blue' movie and force his unwanted attentions on her....sexual harassment by a male boss over some young woman underling was tolerated and no one reported it back then. She just fled from the job and that is what many women did back then. That is why the men would say, "See you give these women a chance to work outside the home? They are so ungrateful." Whatever...

There is both good and bad. The artwork from the fifties was beautiful. The musical concerts, quality of books, film, etc. was very worth preserving.

The TV dinners? Fast food shit and artificial flavors? Not a good thing.

But life is like that. A mixture of both good elements and bad elements @Drlee .
#15064193
But life is like that. A mixture of both good elements and bad elements @Drlee .


Yes. And it still is.

In the 1950's I was the absolutely typical white American middle class kid. I was what it was all about to the casual observer.

But I want to say some stuff about life back then that will not resonate with the younger people here. People who do not remember life before the internet, or even home computers. Many people who are my age still can't separate life from the internet. Here is a list of things that we did then that you do not do now:

We conformed. Not because the climate was oppressive. Just the opposite. It is because the list of things that we had was very small. We had a small house. We had one television. It had three or four channels. They offered soap operas in the daytime, westerns in the early evening and what we called "variety shows" in the evening. And this is not because I was deprived. It is because it was all I could afford.

Cars got terrible mileage, you had only one per family unless (shudder) there was a working woman in the house, and gas cost more as a percentage of income than it does now. If you had two one was old and one was new. You fixed them yourself.

Your mom and father came from the generation that lived through the great depression. Think really bad recession with absolutely no social safety net. Then the war where scarcity was the order of the day. SO these little things, the one television, small house and car was a really big deal.

We took care of everything. We did not throw things away. If the toaster broke you took it to the small appliance repair shop because it was expensive to replace it. Consider. In 1955 a toaster cost $21.00. About what it costs today. In 1955 the average income was $5,000.00 a year. This is the equivalent in buying power of $25,000 today. But today the average income is $40K. So we had less and it cost more than it does today.

Now. There was less stuff to buy. The stuff we bought was not thought to be expendable. You patched your jeans. You had your shoes resoled and you polished them every day or two. Even the kids did this. And since I had a little brother, I had to care for my clothes because they were destined to be his clothes. And again. We were not poor. We were solid middle class. That was just what middle class meant.

Now here is the kicker. It is impossible for me, or you @Tainari88 , or anyone here to remember how little we knew about stuff compared to today. Like this:

About politics we knew what we read in the paper. Most cities had several but we got the morning paper (Moderate Republican) and our neighbors got the evening paper (Moderate Democrat). The News happened at 6PM Local and national news including sports and not including commercials was about 45 minutes. And we did not choose what to look at. It was presented to us. There was one news program that interviewed one person a week. There was the 10 O'Clock local news that included as much local sports as it did local news. That was it.

What if we wanted to know what US Grant thought about slavery? We went to the library and checked out a book on US grant and read the whole damn thing. Every house had an Encyclopedia. World Book or Britannica. Many volumes. In it were scholarly articles about Wool and Wolsey. A few hundred words on each. There was no debate. It had all been curated by people who were thought to be "objective". And that, folks, outside of school, was all we knew about everything.

So much of what we all know now was yet to be invented. Textbooks still spoke of the canals on Mars. There was no such thing as a computer in any real sense. Calculators were expensive, the size of typewriters (which few could afford) and would not have been allowed in school.

Kids all got measles, mumps, chickenpox, whooping cough and polio. And we all knew kids who died, were crippled, made blind or deaf, etc. You saw people with braces from polio every time you left the house. Cleft Palates were poorly repaired. There were no contact lenses that real people could afford. Cancer was a death sentence. Everyone smoked and died in their 50's and 60's. When my grandmother died at 65 in 1962 they said, "well she was an old lady".

Last blast. School was well behaved and completely directed. Grades were not on a curve. We did not do multiple choice tests. The very idea that half of the class got A-s or B-s would have been unheard of in my public schools. You could get spanked at school for misbehaving and your parents approved. You had a widely varied curriculum. You did math long hand. You did tons of memorization. Dates were important in history and there was only one version of it. Spelling always counted so you carried a dictionary to every class. Penmanship was an important class. We played outside from sunup to sundown and after about five years old without direct supervision. We rode our bicycles (sans helmet) all over town. You came when you were called. If the neighbor told you to do something you damned well did it or your mother would know why you were disrespectful to the neighbor. You said yes mam and yes sir. A child did not speak with adults unless they spoke first. You went to church every Sunday. Your yard was immaculate, you were not fat and you ate only three meals a day. And these meals were small by today's standards. A cookie was a "snack" and rare.

So you see Tainari, it was a very different world. I seriously doubt that someone today, going back in time to the fifties, would like it much or be very successful. It was not an ideal time if you were black. If you were Mexican here in the Southwest it was not an issue but go somewhere else and you might not be seated at the restaurant. There was blackface on television and Pancho and the Cisco Kid were nice stereotypes. Blacks did not hold office in any real numbers. Catholics were given side-eye in much of the country. Jews had their own country clubs and did not go to the "white" one. And yes we knew this was not ideal but we were not into ideal. The US was by far and away the richest country in the world. By far. It was the arsenal of democracy, the world's policeman, and the place virtually everyone wanted to live. Everyone. Communism was bad and socialism was the same thing as communism. You could be a communist you just couldn't work or hold office if you were one. And we knew all of these things for certain. They were facts. They were not questioned within earshot of the overwhelming majority of Americans.

That is a taste of the real 50's. Are we going back? No. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. The internet has changed all of that. But we oldsters here know something that nobody much younger knows. We know what it is like to have privacy. We know what it is like to be alone. We know what it is like to be somewhere where no one knows your whereabouts. What do I want back from the 1950's? I want two things. I want civility and even more I want privacy. And there is not the slightest chance I will every have either.
#15064194
Drlee wrote:We know what it is like to be somewhere where no one knows your whereabouts ...


Frankly that also means one still has risk of dying like Benny Hill, i.e. alone at home without anybody finding out what happened for days.
#15064222
Frankly that also means one still has risk of dying like Benny Hill, i.e. alone at home without anybody finding out what happened for days.

uhhhhh. K. :eh:
#15064232
1950s are not coming back, but some insanity that has crept in over the subsequent decades will have run its course and get rolled up. The demoralisation program orchestrated by the KGB decades ago (see the testimony of Yuri Bezmenov) no longer has any working intelligences guiding it (because the KGB are no longer in running it). The demoralisation program is surviving only on inertia while working against it is an active realisation that something is amiss in society by those as yet unaffected.
By late
#15064236
SolarCross wrote:
The demoralisation program orchestrated by the KGB decades ago (see the testimony of Yuri Bezmenov) no longer has any working intelligences guiding it...



Ever hear of this guy, Putin?
#15064243
late wrote:He's improved it. A lot.

He is a pretty smart guy, unlike his predecessors. :hmm:

----------------
@late



Sweet innocent normie millenials meet yuri bezmenov for the first time, lol.

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