You live in the most advanced time in human history. If you’re an American, you live in the wealthiest and militarily strongest country in the world. There are now apps that can look up virtually any fact on the face of the Earth and feed it to you in seconds, all you have to do is interpret them (thanks AI!). There are stoves that can connect to Wifi. Your car will yell at you if don’t buckle up. You can put money into an investment account every month and that money will make you money over the long haul. We can fight wars with drones instead of people. We have cars that run on electric. Solar energy can power your house. We have planes that can fly you around the world safely, and faster than ever before. I mean, we have the internet.

But God dammit, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.

Sure, we’ve sacrificed a lot to achieve the greatness of modernity. Income inequality is higher than at any point in modern history. We pile debt onto you to buy houses, cars, pay for your education, even get married. Your labor is less secure than it was when more of America was in a labor union. Globalizing the market made a shit ton of money for most people, comparable to times when we were more domestic, but it also gutted out “low skill” work and devalued it. Basically we got more comfort and amenities, we made life easier in most ways, but we also traded away any sense of security and protection from ruin. It’s scary. It’s uncomfortable.

However, it is better.

The past really wasn’t that good. Any analytic can tell you that, provided that we even measured these things then. People watched black and white televisions in the 1950’s. Households might have had one car. The internet, personal computer, laptop, Wifi, and social media were completely unheard of, not to mention they didn’t exist. People were poor compared to today:

There probably is some benefit to recognizing that lots of middle-class Americans managed to have good lives and happy childhoods despite growing up with material living standards that would be typical of poverty in the contemporary United States. 

That said, nothing is stopping you from dropping out of the workforce to be a full-time domestic worker, eliminating your family’s child care expenses while cooking more economical meals at home. Yes, even with those savings, you would have less money than the average married couple, but you could also choose to live in a smaller-than-average house like the one in the picture. The problem is that you probably don’t want to do that, and your spouse probably doesn’t want you to, either. It’s fine to make the case that the norms around this today are bad and wrong as a matter of values — the Amish show that people certainly can choose to live materially poorer lives if they really want to. But factually speaking, living standards have risen dramatically since the era of that photo, and people who lived like that would be poor today. 

And of course actual poor people in the 1950s lived in terrible conditions. The Census says that 35 percent of homes in 1950 lacked complete plumbing facilities; that fell to “only” 16.8 percent of homes by 1960. 

In 1950, most homes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia didn’t have complete plumbing. By 1960, the numbers in some of those states were still chillingly high by contemporary standards, but they’d fallen a lot and every state had full plumbing in the majority of homes. To the extent that nostalgia for that era makes sense, it’s that people who lived through it got to experience extremely rapid improvements in living conditions. More recently, things have continued to get better, but they’ve gotten better more slowly.

Yes, life was simple and good back then, because you didn’t know better. You didn’t know better, and life improved. Today you live in remarkably better conditions. It’s just that ten years from now your life will not naturally be so dramatically better than it is today. You’ll have better technology, more access to data and information, and better services available to you- but we’re not going to make poor people billionaires without inflation, or solve how to beat death, or end everything wrong in our world. We’re just going to keep marginally improving, with an occasional breakthrough that accelerates improvements and alleviates pain. I think it’s perfectly fine to point out how our society’s growth over the last 70 years has had flaws- the loss of union jobs, the rise of climate change, the rise of divorcees and co-parenting, mental health issues and mass shootings rising, and on and on. Those things aren’t great, and yes, both the government and the market need to help fix them. But they are.

The best way I can explain this is straight forward- I had a grandfather who died from a brain tumor in 1972 that today probably would have been completely treatable. He was about the same age I was when I almost died last year. If you reverse our chronological order, I would have been the one dead at 41. So in many ways, my grandfather may have lived a more fulfilling, simpler, and happier life than I do. I almost certainly am living better, and in fact, in a better time.

None of the nostalgia on both the left and right is about technology, housing, or economics though, as much as we would like it to be. If that were the case, we would have broad national and international consensus about reversing course on income distribution and labor protections. We’d build more affordable housing and allow for easier migration, at least within national borders. No one other than the most over-privileged brat young conservatives would actually argue that those in the service economy, or gig economy, or any low skilled job deserves to make crap wages, not receive access to quality health care, and shouldn’t be able to afford housing in their community. We are not pre-disposed to hate our neighbors like that. Especially not on the behalf of some rich person.

So let’s be honest, none of this is about economic nostalgia, it’s about demographic changes and identity.

So since both the tweet above and the writer who wrote about it pinpoint the 1950’s, I think it’s worth noting that this was exactly the right place to start our conversation. Yes, it has been 109 years since the last Presidential Election in the United States where only men could vote, and yes, some conservatives actually outright say they think we should go back to some approximation of that (either just men voting, or one vote per household). In the 1950’s, the lion’s share of women were either not voting, or voting how their husbands told them. We were still a solid decade from meaningful Civil Rights legislation that gave even Black men a right to vote. We had an electorate that was overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly white. As late as 1988, close to 9 in 10 voters were white. Women couldn’t have their own checking accounts without permission, Black children went to segregated schools, most of our immigration was from Europe yet, Roe v. Wade and no fault divorce were abstract concepts at best, red lining was a thing, and hell, we were still fighting into the 1950’s about desegregating the military. Boy, what changed since the 1950’s, I wonder? The sexual revolution? The Civil Rights Movement? An increase of visas for educational and work purposes for people from non-European countries? The rise of global power nations that aren’t white, such as India, China, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia? Suddenly you lived in a world where women had their own bank accounts and could get a no-fault divorce, so they didn’t have to stay in bad (and often unreported abusive) marriages. Suddenly both parties could enjoy sex for non-child birthing reasons. Suddenly Black people had a vote and could raise their own issues and concerns. Suddenly gay people were just out as gay. Your doctor was less likely to be a White man, or even born in America. We have street signs, instructions, and messages in languages besides English. Hell, we’ve had a Black President now.

The world is dramatically different in most democratized, Western societies, whether we mean the United States, France, England, Italy, or wherever. You can be whatever you want to be in the West, and that’s not really what I think bothers most people bothered by that, it’s that you can be that wherever you want to be it. Yes, we’re going to send jobs to India and China, and then we’re going to take their children in for educational and work purposes, and they’re going to compete with your children. That’s unpleasant. Your son may not want to find a wife and have kids, but if he does, women might be more picky now and demand more from a guy they pick, so your son may not find one. Not only is the world changing, and rather rapidly, but there’s really no good way to be shielded from it. There are no carve outs for you to live in a past world where you didn’t have to interact with people, cultures, and behaviors that you frankly don’t like or want to interact with. If you want the old traditional Christian family structure it will cost you somewhere. Middle, Upper-Middle, and wealthy life styles today are just more expensive than they were for my grandparents. My grandparents bought their home in Pohatcong, NJ for $25,000 cash, some of which they borrowed from family members. When my grandmother died in 2023, I had more than $25,000 cash to myself, and didn’t even think of buying it. It’s on the market now again, and listed at over $400,000.

Politics in much of the Western world today has very little to do with class issues, and there’s no real way to put the genie back in the bottle here. For many people, social welfare and social safety net are just round about ways to say you’re going to give our money to people who aren’t from here, didn’t earn our national wealth, don’t speak our language, aren’t members of our churches, and aren’t a part of our culture. They don’t want the changes our society has undergone, and they have no way of avoiding them. So they’d rather burn it to the ground than help them. Some go so far as to say they are white nationalists, white supremacists, Neo-Nazis, and skinheads. Others say “fuck the poor, cut my taxes.” Running some supposed left-populist political candidates that are white, blue collar men across the nation is not going to meaningfully move any significant portion of these voters, and probably will alienate (at least) an equal number of voters who are currently voting left-of-center. It’s futile, it misses the point all together, and frankly it’s just embracing bad, outdated, poorly thought out policy goals that won’t work. These people are almost cartoon characters. Running away from the main divide in American (or any other pluralistic Western democracy for that matter), how people feel about a less traditional, more pluralistic, changing post-60’s society, is not going to work. They are not going to look away from the culture war issues that motivate them, anymore than a 35 year old single woman in graduate school today that doesn’t want to get married or have kids wants to hear how much you’re going to sell her out. Could it work for one election? Sure, I guess, anything can happen for a short period. It takes a longer term trend line to really change anything though.

I would be remiss if I didn’t scold my brand of liberals for exasperating these issues more than a little bit. We have folks who think the more female/non-white/LGBTQ/Atheist/immigrant you are, the more they want to elect you. This sort of adversarial push has forced a lot of voters who are not very comfortable with Nazis or Hamas to make a very stark choice, and Trump is the living proof that this forced choice doesn’t really work well for us. I mean, it’s worth noting that the only time this guy lost, it was to a 78 year old white man that was viewed as the “moderate” in the Democratic primaries. Even a lot of immigrants, the very group of people that Trumpism rails against the most, are really uncomfortable with what the face of the Democratic Party is to them, and an increasing number of immigrants and non-white people voted for Trump in each of his three elections. Saying “absolutely fuck all of your traditionalism” and pushing them to accept social minority policies and far left economics scares the living shit out of these people. That’s frankly to be expected.

People long for a world where they feel they can do well. That is still the defining question most voters ask, and that is not at all, let alone entirely, an economic question in our modern society. If reading all of this has made you feel dark and gloomy, don’t. There are examples of social progressive movements succeeding even in our modern American society, after the 1950’s. The Civil Rights Movement and the battle for Gay Marriage were won by progressives, even against long odds and an American society that is still overwhelmingly neither Black nor Gay. Both movements achieved success focusing on two things. First, optics. There was a reason that MLK Jr.’s marches were attended by people wearing their Sunday’s best, or that Rosa Parks was the woman that sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The movement for Gay Marriage had won less than a decade after George W. Bush largely ran his 2004 campaign targeting gay marriage bans across the country, and that was because every day, very average to successful American LGBTQ people became the face of the movement. The second thing both movements did was focus on the discussion of rights. You’re not going to convince a White, straight majority that the alternative to them are better than them, but you can convince them that they should be treated as human beings that deserve decency and dignity. Putting forward leaders that are credible with the majority and making the case for simple fairness can give agency to many voters that are even a bit uncomfortable with social change to walk away from their side when they have gone too far.