How do you turn your normal Republican leader into a racist in three easy stages? Let’s see: On Aug. 19, Reihan Salam writes a post saying that conservatives are “overwhelmingly white” in a country much less so, that some feel that immigrants from Bangladesh or from Mexico may not share their values, and that these voters, most over 50, “are looking for champions … people who are unafraid to fight for the America they remember” because they have “a sense that the country they grew up in is fading away.”
This is seen by Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress and linked to a statement made by House Speaker John Boehner over a year ago that, under the Democrats, the country he grew up in was being “snuffed out.”
Boehner was born in 1949. Yglesias takes this to mean Boehner pines for the 1950s. Yglesias looks back at the things that defined those years, finds things no one liked (the Cold War, the fear of nuclear warfare), things liberals liked (high tax rates, strong unions), but little to strike a conservative’s fancy, except for one thing: Jim Crow.
This means Boehner is really a racist, according to Yglesias. “From a non-bigoted conservative point of view, what is there really to miss?” he asks us. “It’s difficult for me to evade the conclusion that on an emotional level, conservative nostalgics are primarily driven by regret at the loss of social privilege by white men.”
Toss this ball to Isaac Chotiner at the New Republic, who comes up with this: Concede Boehner and others like other things in mid-1950s America. They are still racist, as they want to return to an era that had segregation — no matter what other good things it held.
But conservatives never say they want to revive the ’50s in their entirety, just transpose some of the better things into the present environment. And have liberals any qualms about their love for the ’60s, after which misguided welfare experiments created the underclass and undermined the black family? The most sinister bigots could hardly have done things more vicious than that.
Salam is right that white conservatives are looking for champions, but doesn’t say that they found them in Susana Martinez and Marco Rubio, Latinos; in Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal, children of Indian immigrants; and, in the current Tea Party heartthrob, the melanin-rich Allen West.
There was a great deal for (social) conservatives to like in the 1950s, including the low divorce rate, the low crime rate, the fact that public schools were much better, the fact that burning the flag wasn’t considered an art form.
Born in 1949, Boehner grew up in the two decades following, and, if he was like all other children, did not become conscious of public events until his mid-teens.
Thus, the first public order of which he was conscious would have been that of the 1960s, not the 1950s, while his main memories of the earlier decade would have been of his school and his home.
He thinks of his rise as the American Dream, and sees its promise dying out for the next generation. Growing up poor after the civil rights revolution, it is unlikely he saw much of “white social privilege.” Nor would his father, in downscale Ohio, raising 12 children while running a bar.
There were many things wrong with the 1950s — and the 1940s, and the 1930s: no wonder drugs, shorter life spans, polio panics, which ended in the late 1950s with the Salk and the Sabin vaccines.
Polio killed and paralyzed hundreds and thousands of children. Next up: “Boehner, Tea Party, indifferent to polio!” Are they “nostalgic” for polio, too?
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
