George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my bi-weekly KVMR commentary that aired on 24 June 2011.]

Many of us small time political philosophers have long maintained that progressives are really not all that progressive.  That most of their ideas are pretty moss-backed, have been around for more than a few centuries, and have been tried again and again since at least the French revolution in the late 18th century – all to no avail.

For such thoughts we backwoods conservetarians – yes, that’s a new feather in our political plumage describing a conservative with a dash or a dollop of libertarian thrown in – we backwoods conservetarians have been pilloried by collectivists of all hues.

This week Michael Barone, a big media gun and fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a piece entitled ‘The Surprising Roots of Liberal Nostalgia’.  In it he draws a taut line between the American ‘Midcentury Moment’ – the years from the late thirties to the early sixties – and the longings of today’s progressives working once more to fundamentally transform our country.

Barone argues that America emerged from the Depression into a mega-war which naturally fused us into a cohesive and coherent society, a society with a unified purpose to rid the world of its two conquest bent tyrannies.  (You history buffs know that the third one changed sides after the war started, and became our huggable ‘ally’.)  So there we were, all having to work together building and fighting, and taking part in the success of big government melded to big business and big unions – big things working well together was the watchword of midcentury America.

And we all complied by adopting a tight-knit culture, becoming “unusually conformist, content to be very small cogs in very large machines.”  We married early, had lots of kids, became organization men, and “flocked to mass-produced suburbs”.  We even “worshipped in seemingly interchangeable churches”, and “celebrated the average, the normal, the regular.”  Our cultural choices were few, and we seemed to like it that way.  Government and the other big institutions were making the right decisions, and we prospered.  We all believed that ‘what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.’

Along the way, the socialism of the Soviet and Chinese communists became an aberration – central planning gone amuck.  But the work of our own central planners of the notorious “military-industrial complex” was of the good kind.  And as we settled into the Cold War, we still believed that America retained FDR’s “righteous might”.  Things were then going so swimmingly that the Socialist Party of America closed its doors, claiming that their mission had been co-opted by the Democratic Party, and that duplication was no longer necessary.  Eventually, the age of “enormous cultural conformity” started unraveling in the mid-sixties, and “by the late 1970s the Midcentury Moment was long gone.”

In spite of this, liberals with long memories and an occasional peek into history books still see that as the golden age of big government done right.  Tax rates were high, goods were flowing out of factories, and debt was low.  From 50,000 feet or 50 years on, it looked as if the paradigm for American governance had finally been perfected.  And today’s progressive cannot do enough to point out to their “regressive right” that we could return to those halcyon days, if we would only bring government back into bed with big business, nurture the regrowth of unions with full employment at fair wages, and levy high taxes on the rich.  Happy days would indeed be here again.

But no one seems to have noticed that today government is already bigger than ever, and cohabitation with big business has become the necessary norm.  Only the private sector unions need to be pumped up to match their public sector brethren.   And government has not slacked off in the monies they take from us annually.  If anything, the fraction of GDP we pay has increased.

Today, our leftwing contingent is again enforcing their brand of cultural conformity through the forceful application of political correctness at all levels.  This conformity, of course, is hidden under a blanket of institutionalized diversity.  Nevertheless, we all sense that daily we are herded into tighter and tighter norms of correct behavior dispensed from above.  And so, the long march back to a new and nostalgic midcentury future is in full swing.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on these and other themes in my Union columns, on NCTV, and on georgerebane.com where this transcript appears.  These opinions are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.