A lot of the received notion of “The Fifties” being gray and sexless and repressed was really both the Boomers and the prior generation thinking the “Silent Generation” were lame and sucked, which is part of why if The Youth have sucked lately I’m sure it’ll turn around

Like it weirds me how pussy hat leftist writers keep so specifically insisting the right wants to bring back white Christian hegemony cause like, who exactly are the white non-Christians you see being excluded here and how far are they bringing back from?

I mean since the ‘50s things seem to have been basically comfortable for Jews and Mormons in general, included in the great American tapestry. There was the “Jewish Defense League”, but no one really wants to deal with the way the folks co-opting historical memory of Jewish street defense before antifa were basically anti-Soviets who responded to NYC getting rough in the late 60s by cultivating an intimidating reputation for their ethnicity.

Since the '70s seems fine for Buddhists, honestly I can’t really remember any disdain for wiccans after the 90s, at which point in fairness it was more that they had proved beneath notice

If you’re thinking about like, Muslims or atheists like, do you even have clearance to start redoing the 2000s right here? I don’t really think you’re equipped for it.

I mean hell if you want to go back before the 50s it’s actually Protestant hegemony

fruityyamenrunner:

heraldic-thunderbolt:

This one is a pretty good read, highly recommended

i remember there being a big war going on in 1940

The USMC was definitely facing the possibility of war and occupation in second-line undeveloped colonies at the time, just they were Japanese colonies.

Gonna start talking about The Rock having a path to being the second President in US history to have wrestled in the WWF

kontextmaschine:

my sides!

Like, the ‘90s settlement expected a situation where all Americans could be comfortably White together, even the brown ones, and the '00s efforts to diversify the officer class initially looked in keeping with that and could have been the foot in the door to infiltrate but “you” made such a great gallumphing spectacle of it that long before approaching hegemony you triggered a countercoalition

cryptid-sighting:

afloweroutofstone:

A statement which I’ve come to embrace, because it’s obviously true but still pisses most people off: Barack Obama was not a great president, and he’s the best president we’ve had in the last half century

Reagan and Clinton were better IMO, so that puts him middle-of-the pack, above Nixon, Ford, Carter and the Bushes

isaacsapphire:

kontextmaschine:

So before the internet, how did 60s-70s kidnappers even know who rich people’s children were, where they were, and what they looked like? The society pages? Was it more a case of people already in their orbit becoming kidnappers than kidnappers tracking them down?

Rich people have much better basic opsec now because of the shit that happened back then.

Like, you could find out where Charles Lindbergh lived pretty easily, it was front page news he had a baby, and it’s a pretty safe bet that the baby in his house is his baby.

I suppose that’s one more example of the entire American crime ecosystem shifting significantly and being wild for a few decades before regaining equilibrium, upon the coming of automobiles

It was a different time.

Y'know, I used to think all the ‘80s stuff calling Reagan a Nazi was just proof of how wacky the left’ll get if you let them, but in fairness he did bring about a palingenetic renewal where they had been gearing up for a liberatory moment by suppressing labor power, boosting the industrial economy through armaments spending and taking a more belligerent foreign policy to crack open rival-empire markets, revalorizing nonurban petty bourgeoisie and the iconically traditional family, and shifting law and policy to concentrate a national minority coming off early signs of inclusion into degraded and stigmatized “ghettoes”

Leftist American historians on Twitter like “uh, if history is any guide we are DEAD fucked right now” and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

femmenietzsche:

tanadrin:

I wanna start a secret society, but I don’t think “because it would be fun” is an ideological basis that would provide a coherent enough in-group identity to really support an actual secret society.

I mean, it’s enough to start at least:

The first Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, on December 24, 1865,^[42] by six former officers of the Confederate army:^[43] Frank McCord, Richard Reed, John Lester, John Kennedy, J. Calvin Jones and James Crowe.^[44] It started as a fraternal social club inspired at least in part by the then largely defunct Sons of Malta. It borrowed parts of the initiation ceremony from that group, with the same purpose: “ludicrous initiations, the baffling of public curiosity, and the amusement for members were the only objects of the Klan”, according to Albert Stevens in 1907.^[45]

AIDS History Is A Remedy

We weren’t told that former president Ronald Reagan’s then communications director, Pat Buchanan, claimed AIDS was “nature’s revenge on gay men,” or that more than 20,000 Americans died before Reagan began to address the epidemic, after years of refusing to even utter the word AIDSin public. We didn’t learn about ACT UP, the grassroots political coalition largely responsible for putting pressure on the government and pharmaceutical companies to find treatments for HIV. No one told us about political funerals, about activists scattering the ashes of their dead loved ones across the White House lawn. We weren’t taught that most of the 700,000 people who died of HIV/AIDS in the United States were queer men of color who succumbed to state-sanctioned neglect.

How recently did you get involved in AIDS healthcare that this was new to you? Like, unironically, I’m open to the possibility that this doesn’t represent some failing of yours but a new awareness of generational progression on my part, because we were absolutely told this stuff, by the people who lived through it

The thing is over here the American Revolution worked as a substitute for the French Revolution in “everything is based on either the French Revolution or Imperial Prussia”, but the other half is absolutely based on Imperial Prussia.

ltwilliammowett:

clove-pinks:

The “War of 1812 Scented Candle”, complete with miniature White House near the wick, is, I cannot emphasise this enough, AN ACTUAL REAL PRODUCT THAT YOU CAN BUY (even if it’s currently sold out).

The candle is funny enough by itself, but the ad copy on the maker’s website is gold (and surprisingly astute):

It goes on to add:

We should also note that even though the British Army DID burn Washington, it was only after Americans had burned and looted the capital of Canada, as well as a bunch of other Canadian cities. But no one ever makes a candle about that! (Including us.)

THE BEST PART AND MOST 🔥🔥🔥 TAKE:

You forgot one thing :

argumate:

kontextmaschine:

All the left-wingers hyperventilating about crossing state lines with the Rittenhouse thing in for a big dose of awkward when Roe falls and that’s how you get an abortion

or a divorce!

This was substantially what Las Vegas, Nevada existed for for a while

shivroy:

birlinterrupted:

i like playing guitar as much as the next girl but it is actually really interesting how the idiosyncracies of a very specific moment in American pop cultural history has sort of concretized for some people its like place as an absolutely necessary and transcendental instrument is completely fabricated. Like it’s something that came about as a particularly U.S. phenomenon (or else it could have been the accordion) of a specific time (or it could have been the banjo).

For Decades, Southern States Considered Thanksgiving an Act of Northern Aggression

Although meant to unify people, the 19th-century campaign to make Thanksgiving a permanent holiday was seen by prominent Southerners as a culture war. They considered it a Northern holiday intended to force New England values on the rest of the country. To them, pumpkin pie, a Yankee food, was a deviously sweet symbol of anti-slavery sentiment.

Eh, we did a generation of self-reinforcing national Democratic control in the mid-20th century, it happens

slatestarscratchpad:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Like, everyone does realize that when the Republicans take the House back they’ll use the precedents of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar to normalize stripping minority committee assignments as a standard tool of the majority?

We have basically been reinventing a parliamentary legislature backwards ever since the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 made the GOP relevant in Congress again (after the thumbs FDR put on the scale to create a permanent Democratic majority finally fell off)

Can you explain (or link to a good source) about the thumbs FDR put on the scale to create a permanent Democratic majority?

Well part was just “I’ve got such a solid majority, we can pass such big bills, take credit for them, and route the citizen satisfaction back to us!” (while routing finance, hiring, project selection &ct. to local party machines, urban bosses and rural “courthouse gangs” alike – to a significant extent they weren’t making the unitary national Democratic Party stronger than a Republican equivalent but making sure the local Democratic Party was everywhere the strong horse). A strong enough majority will tend to favor its continuation in the immediate next election and investment in long-term party building

Part was jumping onside to the rise of expertise as distinct from ownership, the rise of college-trained hired executives of publicly owned firms, research scientists, and officers of an expanded military (from which the first two took cues and contracts). With industrial, tax, education, military, and securities policy the FDR administration grew this new class and empowered them, and they came to dominate midcentury America (until Vietnam at least).

Where the prewar Babbitt and the postwar Man in the Gray Flannel Suit might both skewer middle-class life and sensibilities as conformist and unfulfilling, it is telling that the former represents a bourgeois, local (but same as everywhere) model of the middle class fundamentally held together by a commitment to stasis and the triumph of local elites; the latter an executive model where a man shaped by the experience of military service operates a national campaign in pursuit of state funding, entirely compatible with postwar Democratic rule

Then there’s the more egregious stuff. Leaving aside that many of those local party machines were corrupt and fraudulent, at the unitary federal level you have things like the throttling of opposition media.

I’m thinking of things like the Mayflower Doctrine, where broadcasting radio stations (which were, by definition, owned by the owning class) were enjoined from presenting editorial content as a condition of broadcast licensing. This was replaced by the “Fairness Doctrine” in 1948, demanding “balanced” treatments of controversial issues (implicitly, as understood by the intellectual-administrative class the FDR administration empowered, and not the ownership class they eclipsed) which until its abandonment in 1987 was considered to make presenting a clear ideological line impossible and engaging with controversy at all as impractical. Following this conservative talk radio gained substantial audience and influence; Fox News is of course not broadcast subject to FCC regulation but it does suggest that vocally conservative broadcast media, if not prohibited, may have exerted influence.

And then, radio licensing reached back into the newspaper industry. Many newspapers (a high-margin but low-growth industry) expanded into high-growth broadcasting and saw their future there, and were pressured to show they were suitable stewards of the common interest for licensure by taking an editorial line compatible with current practice and thought by all the “best” minds (who were being elevated to positions of influence by the system they affirmed) and not demanding the restoration of the pre-New Deal order (this complimented a world where cities with multiple differentiated newspapers consolidated into one seeking to serve the geographic area in its ideological entirety)

Which I suppose was better than WWII where they just refused to allocate rival papers any rationed newsprint