As I blogged about yesterday, one way to see the 1970s is as a clash between those ready to reinvent America — more rights, less government corruption — and those who stubbornly pushed against giving up the glorious 1950s in which straight WASP men got to be in charge of everything. I think Murc, one of the commenters at Lawyers, Guns and Money (I didn’t bookmark the specific post), puts it very well:
“There was a broad consensus in the mid-70s that we needed to move past everything and the nation not devolve into an endless settling of scores.
However, a non-trivial part of the conservative movement decided “no, actually, we WANT to do that” and so went to work hard beavering away to build a national edifice of lies about who had lost Vietnam, about people spitting on soldiers, about filthy draft-dodgers, about fictitious MIAs abandoned in tiger cages (every time I see that fucking flag I want to burn it) and so on and so forth. It worked incredibly well. It was in many ways a modern, smaller version of the post-Civil War mythologizing. The north decided “okay, we won, so we can just move on.” The south decided “we will build a massive edifice of lies about how we were right the whole time and actually the War of the Northern Aggression was about states rights.” Same deal with ‘nam. It never ends with these fucks.”
This is a point I’ve made before: the right refuses to concede anything, forgive anything or get over anything. They raged at Kerry in 2004 because in the 1970s criticized the US handling of the Vietnam War, while not blinking when Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump did it. Hell, they saw no conflict between “don’t badmouth the troops” and George W. Bush supporters lying that Kerry’s purple heart was for a self-inflicted wound. Some of them (I don’t have the link) are still pissed Nixon had to resign. A lot of them are still PO’d anyone dared suggest accused rapist Brett Kavanaugh might not be the best Supreme Court pick, even though they won that one. The standard advice in politics used to be that if you win a round, you don’t worry about settling scores with the other side; not with the current crop of snowflakes.
This is bad in itself because now we have to fight for things like vaccinations, women’s rights and freedom of religion. And while we have to call out their lies, presenting it as a debate, as LGM puts it, gives them credibility by implying they have a point. Plus it drains off energy which could be used to make things better in various ways. Which is part of why right-wingers want to refight everything: it postpones any sort of reckoning for racial injustice, sexual harassment, LGBTQ oppression. It lets them keep telling themselves that being white/male/Christian/straight doesn’t confer any advantages or that if it does, they’re somehow entitled to it.
The right wing has a clear advantage here as they know what they’re shooting towards—1950s social hierarchy, 1800s lack of business regulation — whereas we don’t have a clear example of equality to aim at. As Celeste Davis says, patriarchy, white supremacy and their justifications are passed down from generation to generation where women challenging the system get systematically forgotten (part two here).
On the plus side, nothing about this is inevitable or natural. It’s the product of many people’s decisions and many people’s efforts to make misogyny, homophobia and racism look like reasonable mainstream positions (or pretend Trump is a normal president). It’s nonetheless infuriating it will take so much longer to push the boulder up over that hill.
