Make America 1952 Again

I'm reading James Patterson's Grand Expectations, the Oxford History of the United States from 1945-1974.  It is striking how awful the United States was for certain groups in the late '40s and '50s.  Consider a few of the following examples:

- The Murder of Emmet Till, beaten to a pulp for flirting with a white woman and his body thrown into a river.  His murderers were not found guilty by a white jury.  That is only the most egregious example of lynch law in the South.
- Joe McCarthy was every bit as erratic and dangerous as Donald Trump, and in some ways more dangerous.  Mainstream Republicans like Robert Taft empowered McCarthy in order to damage Democrats, and he did lasting and profound damage to the civil liberties in this country.  There's an excellent argument that McCarthy created the climate that made Vietnam a "necessity" for Kennedy and Johnson.
- There were effectively no rights for women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians or homosexuals.  Jim Crow is the best known of these structures, but homosexuality was literally illegal in most places.  Women had no workplace rights and were under extraordinary pressure to conform to a domestic role.
- Poverty was arguably as high then as it is now.  Large swaths of the country did not participate in the robust economic growth of the post-war boom.
- Holding an unpopular political position or even knowing a radical leftist was enough to get you fired from your job. Thousands lost their jobs via "loyalty programs."
- The world was perhaps even more dangerous, especially during Kennedy's reckless and feckless Cuban policies from the Bay of Pigs through the Missile Crisis.
- The Cold War ushered in a paranoia that warped every aspect of American society from movies and entertainment to the quest for civil rights.  Red baiting was a part of both party's politics.

Trump ran on "making America great again" and it is clear this is the America he remembered fondly from his youth.  As a rich white guy, the '50s were swell and the '60s were a time when that unchallenged prestige began to slip away.  Boomers - despite the Woodstock nostalgia - are probably America's most conservative generation.  For most of them - Nixon's Silent Majority - the '60s was a time when it all went to shit (while there's some truth to that, it's not for the reasons they think).

Trump's old, white, rural voters are the last battle cohort fighting the old fights from the '60s.  Once they're gone, I'm hopeful that politics will no longer be in thrall to the vestigial nastiness created by the gradual erosion of white, male supremacy.  It will still be there, of course, as long as there are young white men with access to penis replacement weaponry.

But a guy can hope.