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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsConservatives’ history problem: Why they’re doomed by their own “Golden Age” - By Michael Lind
Compare the heydays of progressives and conservatives -- and it's clear which one fared better for AmericansMICHAEL LIND
He who controls the past, controls the future, George Orwell wrote in 1984. One of the greatest weapons in the arsenal of a political movement is what the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks called a usable past and what the historian William McNeill calls mythistory. The most potent political narrative in any country on earth goes something like this: The past was a glorious Golden Age, and the present is dismal. Follow us, and we will create a future as glorious as the Golden Age in the past!
Until recently, neither the center-left nor the center-right in American politics had agreed-upon historical narratives. But recently each movement has moved toward a greater consensus in its view of Americas past, present and future.
The center-left consensus today holds that the New Deal era of the 1930s through the 1970s, and perhaps its Progressive Era prelude, constituted the Golden Age. The present dismal Bronze or Iron Age began with Ronald Reagan in 1980or, more accurately, in 1976 with Jimmy Carter elected as the first of three weak, center-right Democratic presidentsCarter, Clinton and Obamawho have followed the last liberal president, Lyndon Johnson. The Glorious Future, according to the emergent progressive consensus, will take the form of a new New Deal which, by some combination of policies, will check or reverse growing inequality and plutocracy, in the spirit of the New Deal and its echo, the Great Society.
This new center-left historical consensus marks the defeat of the alternate historical visions of both New Left radicals and New Democrat neoliberals.
New Left historians like the late Martin J. Sklar denounced the Progressive-Liberal tradition of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson as corporate liberalisma diversion and a substitute from what America really needed, some vague kind of democratic socialism. You dont hear many progressives, outside of cloistered campuses, denouncing FDR and LBJ nowadays as pawns of the capitalist class. After a generation of corporate conservatism, the supposed corporate liberal era looks relatively good in hindsight.
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http://www.salon.com/2015/03/30/the_rights_history_problem_why_conservatives_are_doomed_by_their_own_golden_age/
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Conservatives’ history problem: Why they’re doomed by their own “Golden Age” - By Michael Lind (Original Post)
DonViejo
Mar 2015
OP
starroute
(12,977 posts)1. So where's the part about conservatives being doomed?
All I see is something bashing the New Left from the perspective of some kind of centrist "capitalism can still save us all if we just regulate it" ideology. Not what I expected from the heading.
marked50
(1,350 posts)2. The article does go into conservative error
The article contains an extensive review of the conservative flaws of viewing history further down-maybe halfway down.
"If your theory as a conservative is that everything after the Progressive Era and the New Deal has been a disaster, and you dont want to idealize the Old South, then you are stuck with making the period from 1865 to 1912 your glorious past. In other words, the Golden Age was the Gilded Age."