The Good Old Days

Donald Trump's ascendancy in the Republican primaries & caucuses is completely understandable. people are upset, people are frustrated and Trump took advantage of that anger and frustration by telling people what they wanted to hear. But is that anger and frusration legitimate? Or is it based on ignorance, bigotry and a lack of understanding about how things work?

A large segment of our population is convinced that the country has gone to the fictional hell in the proverbial handbasket and that if we'd only elect people who will go to Washington and shake things up, everything would be fine. We have had several waves of this conservative backlash over the last twenty years. Newt Gingrinch orchestrated a Republican takeover of Congress after forty years of Democratic ascendancy back in the nineties. In the past decade, the so-called Tea Party movement has pushed out many Republican lawmakers and moved the party farther to the political right. This demographic is not only frustrated with the Democrats, but also with the Republicans, even so-called Tea Party types, who they believe sold them out once they got into positions of power. Many of those, like Ted Cruz, elected on a Tea Party platform, quickly realized that you couldn't snap your fingers and make things happen instantaneously, but that effecting change is a long, slow process.

Many of these people hold the opinion that "the liberals", and in particular President Obama, are ruining, or even hate, our country and that they have to "take it back". They are sure that the homosexuals are out to destroy "traditional" marriage, that minorities have all the rights and advantages, and that Christianity is under assault. These folks often support bringing religion into the schools and government ( as long as it's their religion), are for the "right" of people to discriminate based on their religion and cutting all government programs that help the poor (except for those that benefit them). They look to a time when things were supposedly better and long to return to those times.

Some of what they recall about the good old days is true. There was a time when someone with just a high school education could get a good job that would enable them to live well, buy a home, send the kids to college and retire to Florida. Many of those jobs have moved overseas or have disappeared altogether. Not because of godless liberal policies, but because business owners are looking out for the bottom line (as they always have) and not the needs of their workers or the community. But even in the midst of the apparent prosperity of bygone times, there were shadows. Much of that prosperity was not available to African-Americans. Women did not have equal rights. Racism and sexism were "normal" and accepted. Gays were "in the closet" and discrimination against them was considered acceptable. And with this loss of prosperity, people look for someone to blame. Minorities are blamed, the poor, who are forced to accept government assistance to survive, are blamed. It's somebody's fault.

So people look to someone who promises to make it all better, to make America great again. It doesn't matter that there's no real plan, no real agenda, no real understanding of how things work. As long as we're hearing what we want to hear, as long as scapegoats are identified, we have our hero.