Rebecca Traister, at Salon, says “Republicans aren’t just nostalgic for 1950s-style social barriers. They want to rebuild them“:
… None of the stories of ye olde American achievement actually jibed with the convention’s “We Built It” theme. The tales were of white men whose class mobility and moon-walks were boosted by G.I. Bills, state-school educations, government-funded space programs and unions. These guys and their unconditionally loving wives were part of a white American middle class that was able to expand thanks to the kinds of post-Depression financial regulations and government-goosed infrastructure and housing programs that modern Republicans are keen to obliterate.
But the incoherence of message didn’t matter, because what all these stories were really flicking at wasn’t the size of the government, but the whiteness and the maleness of those who were helped along with their businesses and wealth and broods of straight-parented families. Just listen to Romney’s assertions about this “nation of immigrants” who came here seeking freedom, a sentiment that is both disingenuous from someone who wants this nation’s current immigrant population to self-deport, and that does not even bother to acknowledge those Americans whose forebears were brought here against their will in an exercise of freedom’s opposite. Romney didn’t include those people because they don’t exist — in a meaningful, threatening way — in the America Romney and his party are trying to bring back.
The keening desire to be back there, to be back then, was responsible for the presence of Clint Eastwood, an actor who came to prominence as a star of the cowboy show “Rawhide,” which aired from 1959 to 1965. People may disagree about whether Eastwood’s vertiginously awful appearance at the RNC on Thursday was intentionally aggressive or just loopy, but there’s no question that his creepy intonation of the phrase “We own this country” came off like a segregationist-era, George Wallace-inspired catchphrase – one the crowd went wild for….
Meanwhile, as Republicans vehemently affirmed their love for women – see Ann Romney’s enigmatic proclamation, “I love you, women!” – they presented a version of femininity mostly recognizable to contemporary eyes by its dental records…
Which reminded me: There was an audience-reaction shot during Eastwood’s performance, and I got a weird flash of deja vu. Janna Ryan looked like the photo-negative version of Marilyn Quayle at the 1988 RNC — an icy blond in a white-trimmed black outfit echoing an icy brunette in a black-trimmed white suit, both with the same dead eyes & piranha smiles. And she’s got the background to match, as another fiercely ambitious lawyer from a ‘good family’ embracing a 1950s-era public image as the Happy Homemaker. (One important factor that’s not parallel: Paul Ryan got a big jump on his career ambitions when he married the multi-millionaire daughter of a state-level powerful political family. Forty years ago, Marilyn Quayle was the hypergamist, marrying the good-looking but unambitious son of a very rich & ambitiously powerful family.)
In fact, both Anne Romney and Janna Ryan seem like weirdly blurred imitations of Barbara Bush and Mrs. Quayle. The thing is, while the originals were rather defiantly promoted as ‘old-fashioned’ back in the 1980s, today’s versions just seem grotesquely out of date. When Barbara Bush dropped out of college to marry her boyfriend-from-a-good-family and follow him around the country running a household totally dedicated to supporting his career, that was very much the norm… not least since Bar’s career options would have been both severely restricted and underpaid. But by the time Anne Romney was “welcomed” to the Romney compound in the 1970s, normal young women (even those who inherited and/or married wealth) were expected to show some kind of interest in being sufficiently credentialed, or experienced, to support themselves. Marilyn Quayle was a proudly vocal standard-bearer in the Schafly-era “feminist backlash”, when rightwing women made a point of “renouncing” their own hard-earned achievements (Quayle bragged that she’d had her first child induced early so she’d be able to take the bar exam on schedule) because being a wife, a mom, and a homemaker were more important, to her fundamentalist God as well as her husband’s political ambitions. It’s early days, but while there’s been a certain amount of style-section hoopla about how Janna knows “being with her children while they’re young is just too precious to waste”, even the lady-gushers acknowledge that she had a real-world career before those babies emerged, and she’ll have an active membership in the tax bar association once the kids are no longer adorable full-time props.
It’s one more facet of this year’s angry, off-putting Repub messaging — Gordon Gekko as Miss Havisham.
Fromda Gubmint
Speaking of nostalgia, these ice-picks are da bomb: http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/ice-picks-make-comeback-as-weapon-of.html
Trotsky got it with a related implement, the damned commie.
Corner Stone
“vertiginously” ?
*swoons*
Violet
I agree, she’s got those dead eyes like her husband does but in a different way. The two of them are creepy.
Oh, and Janna Ryan worse sleeveless dresses two days in a row (last night of the convention and the send-off the next day). I thought sleeveless dresses were disrespectful. That’s what they said when Michelle Obama wore one in her portrait. Hmmm…what could possibly be different?
Corner Stone
There’s an obvious dichotomy here. The married “breeders” in public life seem to want to celebrate the ’50s.
But the women in positions like Condi are celebrated for their achievements, outside of what their man can bring home for them.
arguingwithsignposts
keen insight there.
Pavonis
Good Lord…
Dinesh D’Souza lives in opposite world,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQLcpuaCpdg
Bill Maher rips D’Souza to shreds.
handy
@Pavonis:
Maher totally torched D’Souza at that bit at the end about Politically Incorrect and 9/11 and Dinesh knew it. “Yeah thanks for having my back asshole.” That was awesome.
danah gaz
@handy: The Obama is “anti-colonialist” nonsense was my favorite part of his scam.
The entire time I was thinking to myself “Fuckin’ George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Paine! What a bunch of anti-American Marxists traitors!”
I really wish Maher had tossed that in there.
suzanne
@Corner Stone:
The problem is that women with kids aren’t allowed to have power like Condi. Job or family. Pick one.
That was the one positive thing that Palin brought to the table for me in’08. She had kids, and not grown-up kids or almost-in-college kids, but young ones, and the fact that she also had demanding career obligations didn’t faze anybody. (Yes, Palin’s kids ended up being gross and illl-mannered, but not because she worked outside the home.)
While I will always be angry with John McCain for thrusting Caribou Barbie on us all, I will give him credit for this one small thing. It was a good time to be a working mom in 2008.
handy
I’ve never been that impressed with Maher as a debater. He’s usually relies on his unstoppable skills as a smarmy douche and abandons logic pretty quickly. But he was chomping to own that asshole, he had that card waiting to play for a long time.
Xecky Gilchrist
This post is brilliant. (applause)
Corner Stone
Whoops.
KABUL — The senior commander for Special Operations forces in Afghanistan has suspended training for all new Afghan recruits until the more than 27,000 Afghan troops working with his command can be re-vetted for ties to the insurgency.
jl
What is this “homelife” you speak of? Some one can spend some time at home? What is that?
Look dude, there are the rich and powerful who control and the chumps. Pick your side. No time for “homelife” until you are a winner, and since only big winners deserve a break, then you hire out the homelife.
Homelife is for chumps.
We’ll have to prove our worth with Willard and Paul, dammit. Get out there, two people with four jobs at 9 bucks an hour. Homelife? WTF is that anymore?
Pave over that commie garden and knock out that hobby room for a second driveway, get on that communte, Mr. and Mrs working stiff 24/7.
danah gaz
@Pavonis: The thing that really gets to me about Dinesh D’Souza is that it’s clear to me that he was raised with an anti-African mindset – this is sadly all too common among Indians (not all of course, but many of his generation), and has a lot to do with their history with the British – I won’t expound further on this history here though – long story)
Anyway, he’s clearly projecting this onto Obama. It’s the only logical explanation for his backward bullshit about anti-colonialism and his obsession with Obama’s father.
The reason (for me) that this is worse than standard wingnut racism is simply that he never had first hand knowledge of the history of racism in America. He’s an outsider in that regard, and he’s stirring up shit without even having a full grasp of the consequences. He doesn’t know the rules of engagement here, or the particular consequences of the Lee Atwater inspired nonsense, but he’s more than happy to play the game. And wingnuts are more than happy to lavish money on praise on him for doing so, of course, if nothing else because he’s not white.
It’s bad enough that he’s spreading racist bullshit. It’s even worse that he doesn’t even have first hand knowledge of the game he’s playing. I want to slap the smug right off of his idiot face.
Linda Featheringill
Tangent:
I’ve collected pictures of the candidates from the internet and posted them on Flickr. Perhaps I did it correctly.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/86347988@N05/
A cute group of kids, actually.
Betsy
@jl: +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1!!!!!
Betsy
@jl: or, in other words, I agree.
Brachiator
Well, no. Barbara Pierce Bush’s pedigree was just as upper class as her husband’s. And she has long had the reputation of being both the brains and the steel spine of the operation.
What you have here are oily oligarchs selling a myth of an Ozzie and Harriet World to gullible conservatives. But don’t think for a second that Romney or Bush or any of these other Robber Barons have ever remotely lived the life that they pretend to want to protect from liberal barbarians.
Equally off the mark. Can you say Dirty Harry or the Cowboy with No Name from the Sergio Leone westerns? The writer here totally misses Eastwood’s appeal to conservatives, and more critically, to moderates. The Democrats are very lucky that Eastwood’s bizarre performance muddled his message. But the challenge remains. The GOP is trying to peel moderates and independents away from supporting Obama. They strategy is smart even if their tactics are clumsy.
rikyrah
I say that they long for the delusional days of Mad Men. I don’t nobody who is non-White that looks at Mad Men and says
rikyrah
any non-White person who isn’t anti-colonial…
there’s something wrong with you
pseudonymous in nc
For the GOP, every day is Throwback Uniform Day.
jl
@Brachiator:
And little pioneer wimmins were not usually barefoot in the kitchen servile dependents on their breadwinning husbands.
So the Rawhide Clint is not a good reference point in real reality. Though what was often a very faked up 50s housewife version of the frontier woman on the TV western shows was a good example of the fake reality the GOP is trying to peddle.
Brachiator
@jl:
The frontier women in TV westerns and movies were often depicted with grit and flint.
The various writers here are confusing the tv housewife stereotype with other tv tropes. And the references to Rawhide Clint equally miss the mark.
Romney is a creepy overlord. He is trying desperately to get people to believe that he is a fifties dad. But he is more the 50s corporation, or one of its products.
Sly
@handy:
His primary job is to be a comedian, which runs at cross purposes with his responsibilities as an interviewer. Great interviewers thoroughly research their guests and the topic intended for discussion. Maher doesn’t do that in the vast majority of cases, and the result is that guests who spew nonsense can make him look like a deer in the headlights. To avoid that, he either accepts their dubious claims as fact or quickly changes the subject.
And I don’t mean to be overly critical; because to be a conservative today is to live in an alternate universe, sometimes the conservative guests pull stuff so deep from their ass that it would probably take someone with a fair level of expertise on the subject in question to effectively counter it, and I don’t think it necessarily fair to expect someone to have that level of expertise when they do a weekly show on current events that has the primary goal of making the audience laugh.
jl
@Brachiator:
” The frontier women in TV westerns and movies were often depicted with grit and flint. ”
That is not my memory, but the heyday of western movies and tv shows were before my time. Maybe I’ve seen an unrepresentative sample.
Dennis SGMM
The GOP is peddling a version of Never Was. I was born in ’48 and I grew up during those non-existent halcyon days. They were the days of the Red Scare and weekly duck and cover drills in public schools.
Today’s GOP is practicing something very like those duck and cover drills.
Geeno
@Linda Featheringill: Did Stanley Ann Dunham have polydactyly? That picture seems like she does. I wonder why no one has mentioned that before.
WITCH! WITCH! BURN HER AND HER PROGENY!!!!
John M. Burt
@Dennis SGMM: I think everyone born between 1935 and 1965 is a PTSD survivor of the Cold War. I am totally serious.
It does explain a lot, doesn’t it?
danah gaz
@Geeno: LOL. At the risk of ruining a funny by over-analyzing it, that 6th finger/extra pinky is just the white cuff on Obama’s jersey sleeve.
Geeno
@danah gaz: Sure, that’s EXACTLY what I expected you
heathenslefties to say! Satanist!Or as the “Muslin” sign maker would say “Satinist”!
Frankensteinbeck
@John M. Burt:
I don’t think that’s COMPLETELY out of line. I was born in the 70s, and I remember the relief when the Soviet Union fell, because I no longer had to be afraid of nuclear war killing everyone on Earth at any moment.
TenguPhule
Republican appreciation for those who fuck rats transcends gender, race and species.
Dennis SGMM
@John M. Burt:
I wouldn’t be surprised. The fuckers frequently showed us movies of atomic-bomb tests (Los Alamos?) where buildings were blown away as if they were cardboard boxes. With the same breath they’d tell us to crouch under our desks to save ourselves when the predicted waves of Soviet bombers came and laid their eggs. Even as a child I figured that crouching under my desk would only result in dying in a weird position. My dad was in the Navy’s nuclear weapons program early on and he took us, while we were in Japan during the occupation, to Hiroshima. My suspicions regarding the ineffectual aspect of crouching under a desk were fully vindicated then.
I did manage, in the seventh grade, to distinguish my self by being the only kid to be thrown out of an air raid drill. The class in which we were ducking and covering included a very precociously attractive young lady and I suggested that she tear up her clothes to make bandages.
Geeno
Awwww, I’m hurt now, 20+ min w/o acknowledgement – I’m the husband of a sewer and thought that was a good fabric pun – if there is such a thing. Of course maybe it’s only funny if you live with a fabric addict.
I feel more alone now.
LOL – just kidding, I feel drunk now +6 (vodka drinks – don’t talk to me about your weak ass beers)
danah gaz
@Geeno: LOL sorry. I was listening to Melissa Harris-Perry go full-metal Truman on some plastic GOP arseclown. It was absolutely epic (thanks ABL!) and I couldn’t tear myself away.
(apologies if the quote is inaccurate, it’s from memory)
“What’s more risky than being poor in this country?!”
in response to some zombie bullshit about “risk takers”
I need a cigarette. =)
danah gaz
@Geeno: hehehehe! I’m a huge fan of satin. I don’t worship satin, but I like it very much =)
Mnemosyne
Not only am I short one ingredient for my potato salad (being made for a beach picnic with the family tomorrow), but I can’t go out and buy the missing ingredient because I have somehow managed to lose my motherfucking keys inside the apartment. I have been looking for them for 45 minutes and still have no idea where I put them, and it ain’t a big apartment.
Fuck.
Anne Laurie
@danah gaz:
Then you are absolutely not a sewer. Love the look, love the feel, but it is meaner than an RNC delegate with hemerrhoids to work with.
Geeno
@danah gaz: Must check that out online later – I love Melissa Harris-Perry – she has almost taken over Rachel Maddow as the woman I most want but can never have (not that MLP is gay, I have no idea – but the odds that a pudgy middle aged white dude like me could get that – puh-leez).
Okay – that was probably TMI – but +7 is my excuse.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
Heh. Nuclear weapons are still around, major powers who disagree with each other are still around, and the international relations game goes on. We haven’t heard the last of these things, that I’m positive of.
Geeno
@Anne Laurie: OMG You sound like my wife. She loves satin, but tends to work in more forgiving fabrics.
wayne’sworld
she’s not worthy
/wayne’sworld
Brachiator
@jl:
RE: ” The frontier women in TV westerns and movies were often depicted with grit and flint. ”
Well, out here in Southern Cal, we’ve got the Museum of Television and Radio. And I saw a ton of reruns of these shows growing up. While some were candy coated, there was much that was more tough minded. Hell, Miss Kitty ran the Long Branch saloon on “Gunsmoke” and hung out with Marshall Matt Dillon. And although viewers never saw it, you didn’t have to change much in the episodes to recognize that she was also a tough operator running a gambling operation and a brothel. And even the women showing up as guest stars on a comedy western like “Maverick” were rarely school marms and shy, retiring homemakers.
Anyhow, I get the point that the GOP is selling a fantasy, but writers and pundits trying to oversell 50s tv as simplistic Leave It To Beaver Land are being lazy or deliberately misleading as they strain to make a point. This rankles because they then miss larger issues and themes. Worse, they can miss what is really appealing to, or repulsing, voters.
Romney and Ryan are starting to craft the message that they want to sell outside the wingnut cocoon of the GOP base. And that message will have little to do with a false nostalgia for robotic, compliant wives and dusty memories of 50s tv shows.
Dennis SGMM
@Mnemosyne:
Aw, fuck. Sit down for a moment and try to think of anything but keys. Always works for me.
Mnemosyne
@Dennis SGMM:
I’m trying, but between, “Gotta get the laundry out of the laundry room WHERE ARE MY FUCKING KEYS?!” and “Gotta go buy green onions so I can finish the potato salad WHERE ARE MY FUCKING KEYS?!” it’s hard to put them out of my mind since everything else on my mind requires me to find the goddamned keys in order to do it.
G is trying to help, but he knows that if I put too much pressure on my brain, it will just refuse to cooperate. Stupid ADHD brain.
danah gaz
@Anne Laurie: “Then you are absolutely not a sewer.”
I should hope not. I shower frequently.
Dennis SGMM
@Mnemosyne:
I’m an old Buddhist. There are times when letting go is the best you can do.
Dennis SGMM
@danah gaz:
That, was perfect.
pseudonymous in nc
The Melissa Harris-Perry bit on how there’s nothing more risky than living poor — that is righteous. Not particularly civil, but fucking hell, that’s an argument that you so very rarely hear on American news shows.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
One day soon there will be an app for that.
Meantime, good luck, try not to get too frustrated, and have a good holiday.
PS, if you can’t find the keys after looking hard for them, hot wire a neighbor’s car. Potato salad, like fezzes, is cool.
Mnemosyne
@Dennis SGMM:
@Brachiator:
Still keyless, but I got the laundry out of the laundry room and made the potato salad without green onions. At this point, I’m hoping to wake up in the middle of the night remembering where the goddamned keys are.
Either way, I will be on this beach tomorrow playing in the tidepools, so it’s all good. Unless I still can’t find my motherfucking KEYS!!
CarolDuhart2
I wonder what we will do with a First Gentleman?
I always felt that the “Leave It To Beaver” world fantasy that they’ve really tried to convey wasn’t so much Happy Homemaker, but the world where Everybody Knew Their Place. That suburb was lily white and non-ethnic, (Read WASP). Not even a black or Hispanic maid, no Jews, no Asians. You knew they were there (did you really think June Cleaver did her own laundry?), but they were servants with no hope for themselves or their children of ever actually having the jobs or living in the neighborhood. And they never challenged the assumptions of their betters regarding intelligence or anything else.
That’s what the Republicans think about when they think about nostalgia. And that’s why Obama has completely freaked them out.
Fort Geek
@Mnemosyne: Stephen Lynch has a song for that: What if the guy from Smashing Pumpkins lost his car keys?
Grumpy realist
@Mnemosyne: I take it you’ve already tried the Retracing-Your-Steps strategy and the Process-of-Elimination-Cutting-down-the-space-I-know-They-Aren’t strategy.
(also suggest checking front and back pockets of pants and jacket.)
(One reason why I return my keys to my purse, always, always, always. Even if I’m just going to need to put them down on a counter for 2 minutes, they go back inside my purse and the purse goes on the counter. Otherwise I’d lose them every day.)
Rex Everything
This is great stuff, and “Gordon Gekko as Miss Havisham” is freakin’ gold. Ms Laurie, you should write more instead of touting Paul Constant & Charles Pierce all the time; IMO you’re very much in their league.
Woodrowfan
If they want to redo the 50s there are better things to recreate, like a more progressive income tax schedule, strong labor unions, a strong industrial sector that provided a decent wage, lower consumer debt, etc.
dance around in your bones
@Fort Geek:
Gawd, where else but on Balloon Juice would I find comedy gold like this?
@Dennis SGMM: I remember in addition to “duck and cover” under our desks, being told to stick our head into our school lockers.
Yeah, THAT would have worked.
gene108
@danah gaz:
In all honesty the Maher interview is the first time D’Souza’s obsession with anti-colonialism made any sense to me.
He said there’s an anti-capitalist side to being anti-colonial and he pointed out the failed Nehru-style socialist policies in India.
He’s trying to use Obama I’s anti-colonial (thus anti-capitalist) sentiments as a means of projecting how much of a Marxist-Lennist Obama II is and how Obama II wants to have the government take over the auto industry, healthcare and everything else in a march towards a Soviet style command economy.
JohnnyMac
@John M. Burt:
There could certainly be something to this. It explains a little why the same kind of feelings aren’t as strong in contries that weren’t as affected by the Cold War, like Canada where I live.
Chet
@suzanne: Actually, some of the more committed members of the socially reactionary Christianist base did, indeed, have a big problem with Palin, for the very reason you cite. Here’s one example of their reaction to her selection by McCain.