If you really go back to study U.S. history, you would find two things: The past was worse, and conflict has always been the norm. https://t.co/IrDEP6cXp0
— Jennifer Truthful, Not Neutral Rubin 🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@JRubinBlogger) December 31, 2023
As someone else whose lived experience extends prior to 2016, I endorse this message [gift link]:
Nostalgia is a powerful political tool. Wielding nostalgia for a bygone era — one that is invariably mischaracterized — is a favorite weapon for fascist movements (Make America Great Again), harking back to a time before their nation was “polluted” by malign forces. In the United States, such nostalgia none-too-subtlety appeals to white Christian nationalism. Even in a more benign form (e.g., “Politics didn’t used to be so mean,” “Remember the days of bipartisanship?”) plays on faulty memories. If you really go back to study U.S. history, you would find two things: The past was worse, and conflict has always been the norm.
The past was simply not “better” by any objective standard. Economically, we were all a lot poorer. “In 1960, there were roughly 400 vehicles per 1,000 Americans, about half of today’s car ownership rate. In other words, a family in 1960 could afford a car on one income, but today they would have two cars,” Matthew Yglesias wrote. Tom Nichols has written extensively on the politics of false memory. (“Times are always bad. Nothing gets better. And the past 50 years have not been a temporary economic purgatory but a permanent hell, if only the elites would be brave enough to peer through the gloom and see it all for what it is,” he wrote. “This obsession with decline is one of the myths surrounding postindustrial democracy that will not die.”)…
You might rightly decry income inequality today. However, since 2007, income inequality has been on the decline. The 1930s? The Great Depression. You prefer the 1940s? World war. Then came McCarthyism and the Cold War. The 1960s? Riots, assassinations, the Vietnam War. You get the point. Though those who rail against modernity, urbanity, pluralism, tolerance and personal freedom in service of an authoritarian perch would like to turn back the clock, a perusal of history suggests now is the best time to be alive…
What we have not had before is a president who rejected democracy, attempted to retain power by force and wound up indicted on 91 criminal counts. So yes, four-times-indicted Donald Trump was worse than every president who preceded him. The resulting venom, violence and loss of faith in elections have taken a heavy toll on our democracy.
Where does that leave us? The past (especially the immediate past president!) was infinitely worse in myriad ways. (This is not to say that we don’t have our problems, from climate change to homelessness to suicide; we do, however, have more resources and knowledge to address these.) Conflict and even violence have been a constant presence in American life. But so, too, has been progress, albeit halting at times, toward greater freedom and prosperity. We generally are living healthier, longer lives. If nothing else, the 21st century is evidence that we are a resilient people.
So, as we look forward to 2024 be wary: Nostalgia, especially nostalgia for a time of less freedom, less opportunity and fewer rights for many of us, is the stuff of snake-oil salesmen. Instead, bet on American progress.
I firmly believe that life in America today, for all its obvious flaws, is vastly better than it was in every previous era for those of us who aren’t straight cis white men with some financial cushioning. The fact that white men with money currently own our major media has a lot to do with the perception that we’re in a state of decline.
Eye Opening – How Soon They Forget
Baud
OMG, thank you, AL. I hate fake nostalgia, especially on our side. It’s so pervasive.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
It also has a lot of responsibility for whatever real decline exists. The white patriarchy will always choose maintaining power over its own actual material wellbeing.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: This. In many instances people yearn for the past because they were children and someone else was taking care of them.
80s and 90s weren’t particularly peaceful and wonderful.
skerry
I think American women’s healthcare was better a few years ago than it is now.
narya
The two exceptions are guns and abortion. And voting rights, actually, so three. The current SC has overturned multiple precedents to make it harder to limit gun ownership, harder to choose whether to continue a pregnancy, and harder to protect the right to vote. And they’ve also been trying to sweep away the ability of government agencies to do their jobs. In general, of course, I agree with you, and the exceptions I’ve identified are, I think, a reaction to things getting better, in the ways identified, for a lot of us, i.e., a truly reactionary SC is pining for a return to a past where white men controlled things.
Anne Laurie
I was in high school when Roe was implemented; in case you don’t remember, it was not an easy, universally popular decision. Manipulating cheap nostalgia for ‘the good old days’ (when women ‘knew their place’ — as chattel) is a large part of why Roe was overturned.
RandomMonster
I long for those bygone days when nostalgia wasn’t so deep and widespread.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
@RandomMonster: Love it.
I long for the days when I could show up to the corner store with two quarters and leave with a whole candy bar or a giant bag of sour patch kids. A frequent reward for buying my parents’ smokes so they didn’t have to.
I remember hearing during the first Iraq War that Saddam Hussein was using poison gas and my little child brain didn’t understand this was happening halfway around the world. I was terrified.
WaterGirl
@skerry: My first thought, as well.
Chris
@schrodingers_cat:
TBF, this (the “children” part) is why I always thought liberals should go in on nineties nostalgia: it’s an era that a huge part of the country (millennials) remember fondly because they were children (same reason so many Boomers remember the fifties fondly), a Democrat was President at the time, and the “remember all the peace and prosperity before Bush v. Gore derailed all that and we had twenty years of Republican wars, Republican recessions, Republicans fucking up national emergencies, and Republican coups?” basically writes itself.
(The reality is irrelevant; nostalgia a fact of life, might as well take advantage of it when it hands you an easy narrative).
pthomas745
Until 1974, unmarried women could not get their own credit card. If married and applying, they had to bring their husbands along to cosign.
Get a credit card in their own name
Banks could refuse women a credit card until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 was signed into law. Prior to that, a bank could refuse to issue a credit card to an unmarried woman, and if a woman was married, her husband was required to cosign.
Many banks required single, divorced or widowed women to bring a man with them to cosign for a credit card, according to CNN, and some discounted the wages of women by as much as 50% when calculating their credit card limits, according to an article from Smithsonian Magazine.
Gvg
It’s not a straight line improvement up.
Women’s healthcare was better.
False nostalgia is anti vax people who don’t know the chances that they would be dead or never born because most of their recent ancestors had died before propagating. They can’t look at a graph of the history of human population growth and understand the significance of vax inaction. It wasn’t that long ago.
RSA
Right on guns. Ownership of any gun per household has held pretty steady in the 40-50% range since the 1950s, but the number of mass shootings has definitely gone up since then.
Miss Bianca
I approve this message. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been telling people moaning about how bad things are now to “read some history, dammit, and understand that things have *often* been this bad before, and sometimes even worse!”
(Some of you may remember that I asked for good sources about the 1850s and the run-up to the Civil War, and so I’ve been on a research kick based off some recommendations from the Jackaltariat. Currently reading Christopher Dickey’s Our Man in Charleston, about Robert Bunch, the British consul in South Carolina who provided critical intelligence to the British Foreign Office about the oncoming freight train of secession over slavery. Amazing how much of what Bunch writes about the South and the arrogance and bigotry of its ruling ‘elite’ is still true today. Thank you, Jackal who recommended it, I no longer remember who you are!)
Alison Rose
I mean, I get the economic points about income inequality, but like…most people in my parents’ generation (both born in the 40s) never really had to wonder if they’d ever possibly be able to buy a house. It was sort of seen as just a normal thing you did, not something you had to scrape and pray for. (Granted, for non-white folks, it was never that simple.) You could make a living on minimum wage because the cost of that living was reasonable. Show me where you can rent an apartment, make a car payment, pay utilities, pay for phone and internet, buy groceries, and other necessities on minimum wage now.
On January 1, the minimum wage in CA rose to $16. According to MIT, a living wage in my county for a single adult with no kids is $21.14. And trust me, that would barely be enough. So like…I get her point, but I think people of older generations simply do not understand how financially crushing it is just trying to literally be alive these days.
Hungry Joe
Skewed nostalgia also comes from innumeracy. “In 1966 gas was 30 cents a gallon!” Correct, but: Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $2.40 today. And back then sedans got around 15 mpg; today it’s easy to get a car that gets 30+ mpg … 40-50 mpg if you go all Prius-y. Driving actually costs LESS per mile today than it did in 1966.
Suzanne
Life expectancy in the U.S. had been steadily climbing until the pandemic and then it took a pretty sharp downturn. It still hasn’t recovered. But the general trend line on this measure is still positive.
Timill
@narya: And a fanatical devotion to the Pope? Four things?
narya
@Timill: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Suzanne
@Alison Rose: The historical norm (since the end of WWII) for the ratio of the median household income and the median house in America was between 3-4x. Right now, it’s around 6x. And a record high percentage of renters are rent-burdened. Those are definitely measures moving in the wrong direction. But, as Martin has pointed out, there’s also a record-high percentage of homeowners who own their homes outright, so when that all gets averaged out, it smooths out those highs and lows.
smith
@Suzanne: Actually, US life expectancy had started dropping several years before the pandemic, a phenomenon that has been ascribed to “deaths of despair.” See this article from 2019.
Alison Rose
@Suzanne: People who can afford to own their homes outright shouldn’t really be the metric. Especially since a lot of those people benefited from inherited wealth, and I don’t just mean millionaires, but even more modest inheritances or the homes being left to them by older relatives. People who have to skip meals or meds or bills so they can pay their exorbitant rent and who have to be constantly in fear of losing their income and getting booted out the next month should be. And I know far more people in the latter category than the former.
Hoodie
I wouldn’t get hung up on whether things are better or worse. A lot of things are better, some are worse, usually depending on where you’re sitting. The better point is that we’ve had bad things happen before and we have bad things happening now. We got through those earlier bad things and should have optimism we will get through the current ones. Fascists want you to give up on the future, to feel that everything is already determined.
Suzanne
@smith: Here’s some info from the CDC:
New Deal democrat
@Alison Rose: Both HUD and the National Association of Realtors curate a “National Affordability Index” for housing. It is created by comparing median household income with both the down payments and mortgage payments for the median priced house.
This summer it was the worst it has been in 40 years:
https://www.chartr.co/stories/2023-09-22-2-housing-affordability-index-is-falling
By many measures, Americans have it better than ever economically. Housing isn’t one of them.
Suzanne
@Alison Rose: I keep pointing out that, until the 2008 recession, we mostly did a pretty good job with housing starts, in terms of keeping pace with population growth. (I should note that that is for the country overall, and some places were too short on housing then and still are.) Housing starts rebounded in 2023 to where they were back in 2006-7-ish… but that means we underbuilt by a lot for 15 years and we haven’t made up that lost ground.
John Revolta
Well, but remind me again; who used to own all our major media? And we still managed to get more differing viewpoints than we’re getting now.
By way of saying: yeah lots of things are better now, but the degree to which the rich have this country, and public opinion, firmly in their grasp is, if not quite unprecedented, very scary and concerning.
WaterGirl
@John Revolta:
Totally agree.
Rusty
Things aren’t as good as they used to be, and they never really were.
Miss Bianca
@Suzanne: I had reason just recently to cite your point to one of my editors at Ark Valley Voice about the lag in housing starts since 2008 and how it, along with COVID, has contributed to the intensification of the affordable housing crisis here in mountain Colorado, and got to preen myself on feeing Real Sooper Smart. :)
Happy Birthday, btw!
kindness
Everything better? I’m going with the Republican Party has become increasingly cultish ever since Newtie.
lowtechcyclist
Climate change. I guess my parents had to worry about whether there’d be a nuclear war during their children’s (or their own) lifetimes, but there wasn’t any inevitability to it. My son has a very good chance of living to the year 2100 if the world continues to be a hospitable place to life. If it doesn’t, well, who knows? And it’s really hard to tell whether we’ll do enough, soon enough, to limit global warming to manageable levels.
JaySinWA
This line struck me as hard to believe, and if you follow the link it doesn’t accurately describe what has happened and is happening. Bottom line from the link:
Income inequality growth has slowed or receded slightly, but much of it was from measures that have recently expired. It’s not as bad as it was before 2007, but it’s not clear from this article that it will continue to decline.
Chief Oshkosh
My perspective is that, though things may have been worse in the past, prior to the election of Reagan, we all at least pretended to be working towards a more perfect union. Becoming better at EVERYTHING was more or less a stated goal, somewhat aided by the vestiges of “we’re all in this together” left over from WWII.
Reagan and Gingrich made it fashionable, permissible, to be an utter, complete asshole. Greed is good. IGMFY. Etc.
So, yeah, the past was worst, but I know there was a time when it wasn’t considered naive or impractical or silly to believe in ourselves as individuals and as a nation to work towards a common goal of, simply, being better tomorrow than we were today.
Torrey
The article is interesting, but I could have done without the long-winded detailed description of how tough things were for the young Tom Nichols and how he and a select few of his friends have now done very well for themselves, so there. A bit too reminiscent of J.D. Vance’s arguments. However, I think his final paragraph is important:
A friend who spent his career working as a political aide told me, many years ago when I was bellyaching about how awful the opposing party was and wondering why we would consider working with them, that in his view politics is the peaceful replacement for punching the other person in the nose. You have to compromise; you have to consider that the other person has, from their own perspective a logical argument, figure out what that is, and see what you can work out between the two of you. (And try not to punch the other person in the nose.)
Chief Oshkosh
@kindness: Agreed! Newt really mainstreamed the idea that Democrats are actual enemies, as in, existential threats to the country.
The GOP was rotten for a long time prior to Newt, but he weaponized the rot.
dnfree
@pthomas745: My JCPenney credit card is still in my husband’s name because it’s the only credit card we have that goes back to the 1960s. Clerks don’t believe that when I tell them. As soon as married women could get credit cards in their own names, I did—as was the recommendation so we could establish an independent credit rating.
When my husband was in grad school and I was the person employed, the utilities were still in his name as the “responsible party”.
Martin
So, the brush painting much of modern culture is focused on how to process the world as we are now able to see it. Basically, the past was objectively worse, but we were mostly ignorant of that fact. Sure, we could read about the war, but the horrors of it were unavailable to anyone not there. Our ability and willingness to hear first hand accounts were extremely limited. We knew facts but not felt experiences. We could know that a policy would affect someone, but collectively we never got to hear from them, not really. The reason that Emmett Till is so widely known is because of his mom’s act of forcing us to see. But that was very much the exception. TV forced us to contend somewhat more with the Vietnam war and the Civil Rights movement, but even those were highly filters around specific narratives, which were easy to somewhat diminish because of how they were curated. We had these events, but we were ignorant of most. Even with 24 hour news, you mostly got a handful of things on repeat throughout the day. We have more than one mass shooting per day, but only some are deserving of reporting, and which ones are selected says something. It’s not random. It’s very deliberate in terms of which victims are worth reporting on, which perpetrators, which narratives the event fits into.
The internet changes that not because it’s a medium with broader reach than TV – it is a little bit, but because it removes the permission system. Now a mom from Gaza can relay her experiences directly, without some old white male executive determining whether or not that would be interesting to the audience. We’re not limited to what that (very undiverse) group of people think matters. And it’s not just the exposure to a much wider set of events, often that TV will never cover – Reddit brought me video of a cyclist hit by a car just 3 blocks from my house that I was otherwise unaware of (on a night when we were talking about the dangers of cycling here). It’s also commentary beyond the usual filtered news ‘can nothing be done about this’ that you usually get from people who don’t have political careers they are trying to protect who can offer up ideas that are really quite straightforward, but are politically radical. These seeds get planted in us in a way that they weren’t able to before. Sure, there were always occasions to interact with these ideas, but they were very limited, and now everyone can interact with them constantly on any manner of topics. The dark side of this is radicalization pipelines, the light side of this is ‘wokeness’.
So while the world might objectively be better in a wide number of ways, we’re vastly more aware of the ways that the world is not good. And we have to carry that knowledge and the consequences of our choices in ways that didn’t exist 20 years ago. Ignorance made life simpler. But the world is also objectively worse in the sense that the societal debt that was piling up over that period is starting to come due. Climate change isn’t a new phenomenon, it’s only the consequences that are new – the problem is a century old now, and we spent decades being in denial or ignorance of it because, again, it wasn’t an interesting thing to inform the public about – it didn’t sell Alka Seltzer. And that’s one reason why the current moment feels bad – we are trying to contend with this crushing debt. And it’s not just climate change, it’s also the unwillingness to engage directly with Covid any longer, it’s the expression that the current gun violence crisis can’t be solved because we sold too many guns over the last century – another debt, and so on.
I don’t think there’s a benefit to telling people things used to be worse, because in a very subjective way, they weren’t. Emotionally they weren’t. And how we moved through the world they weren’t. And in terms of the future consequences that are already baked in, they weren’t.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
Built upon by a vast right wing conspiracy of faux outrage. “How dare these people I name my enemy suggest I am acting in anything other than the most pristine of good faith?”
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: Kay says they want things to be how they were when they were 20. I think that’s not far off. I also think things are better now for more people than at any other time in our history. Conservative white people want to go back to when they think things were comfortable for them, thus the nostalgia for the 1950’s. I’ve been hearing it my whole life.
catclub
Could you ever do all that on minimum wage? without working three jobs? Is is a big jump from ‘Families with one breadwinner could buy a house and have a car’, to that.
catclub
My amusing story about JCPenney Credit cards is my Dad not having his JCPenney card with him but using his Sears card instead. I still don’t know how that got worked out. Maybe late 60’s?
Anne Laurie
In fact, a lot of the nostalgia for the 1950s is from people born too late to actually *remember* that far back — late boomers & GenXers who are nostalgic for 1970s tv shows about the 1950s (Happy Days, reruns of Dick van Dyke & Leave It to Beaver, et al). Even Mad Men, IMO, was a success because, while it didn’t intend to ‘romanticize’ the 1950s, casual watchers were enchanted by the ‘style’ of all those sharp outfits, mid-century modern settings, and snappy dialogue.
I remember the original Mad Men writer saying that one key to the show’s success was that ‘every man thinks the most stylish female fashion was what his mother was wearing when he was five, so the 1950s appealed to middle-aged producers in the 1990s who remembered their moms in red lipstick & constricting girdles’ (my paraphrase).
Chief Oshkosh
@catclub: Somehow reminiscent of missing an American Airlines (I think) connection and having the very nice AA gate person bodger a seat for me on a TWA flight leaving just 20 mins later – that turned out to be in first class!
NotMax
@Soprano2
All we need do to replicate the so-called Golden Age ascendancy of America in the 1950s is again reduce Europe and Japan to rubble. Easy peasy.
//
SpaceUnit
Nostalgia was definitely better back in the day, but I don’t really find myself longing for the past. Mostly I’m just kind of disappointed in how the future turned out (insert Yogi Berra quote here). Feel like somewhere around 2016, we took the wrong exit and ended up lost in a really bad neighborhood. Sure, the Bush years were bad, but the Obama years were better. Now the country is a goddamn looney bin.
Maybe we can turn things around in 2024. Let’s remain hopeful.
NotMax
@Anne Laurie
Slight quibble regarding 1950s pedigree. The Dick van Dyke Show ran from 1961 to 1966.
For the 50s, fare such as Father Knows Best (1954 to 1960), The Life of Riley (1948 to 1950, revived from 1953 to 1958), The Goldbergs (1949 to 1957), The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet (1952 to – believe it or not – 1966) and The Donna Reed Show (1958 – 1966) were cultural touchstones.
Quadrillipede
Maybe it’s just a hunch, but I feel like when I was a kid, we had much better nostalgia than we do these days.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I see a bunch of snow is predicted in Iowa for Tuesday. Up to a foot in some places. That will impact caucus.
Alison Rose
@catclub: As I said, when my parents were young, yes they could. I mean, they weren’t living in the lap of luxury, but you could pay rent, pay bills, buy food, etc, on a full-time minimum wage job.
Odie Hugh Manatee
I like to read stuff at a forum called The Ford Barn because I like old car stuff. The ‘age limit’ for cars is 1965 and earlier. The old fucks there rain Hell down on anyone who posts any text or image that has any newer vehicle(s) or part(s) in it, or the horrors of a rat rod in it. The admins will rush in and delete the offensive content and admonish the poster that that shit is not welcome there. Unfortunately too often the content was posted by someone who was new to the site, often a young person. Their response is to usually leave the site and never return.
What makes this funny is that these old fucks are living in an idealized version of their dream years of hot rodding which often incorporates newer parts into their vehicles to make them safer or better for the roads of today. Things like five speed transmissions, engines later than 1965, disc brakes, air conditioning, shoddy work and so on. The same shit they jumped the new guy about…lol! I’m not even going in to their opinions of the ‘kids’ of today.
What’s hilarious is that they lament what they see as the lack of interest in hot rodding by the younger generations at the same time that they are driving them away from their site. Fucking idiots.
Chetan Murthy
@Alison Rose: And there were lots of jobs that allowed people just out of high school (or even dropouts) to have decent lives. When I graduated HS in 1981, in East Incest TX, the butchery outside of town paid $12/hr, and the only qualification was being able-bodied and 18yr old. $12/hr back then is about $50k/yr today. And in a small town in Texas, that went (and still goes) a long way.
Today? All the people working at that butchery are gonna be undocumented immigrants, and not makin’ anywhere near that.
Suzanne
@Miss Bianca: Awww thank you!
Yeah, it blows my mind to think that, for fifteen years or so…. we just didn’t even keep pace with population growth for something as first-rung-of-Maslow’s-hierarchy as places to live. And there’s lots of complicating factors, of course. Most houses aren’t movable, so even if we have plenty in one place, we can’t move them. We also have no good data on how many houses we’ve lost…..either to combination of units, or demolition, or replacement.
And, I have to say, there’s an idea that I see expressed — even here — that people got by with less space in the past and today’s people have higher expectations. I mean, to an extent that is true. But we wouldn’t expect people to try to use computers or cell phones from 1980. Yet many Americans live in houses considerably older than that. And a house needs to support a modern lifestyle. There’s nothing sacred or precious about it. It’s a machine for living in, to quote Corbu, and if we need to replace houses because people use more electricity, and they work from home more, and they’re physically larger, and they have a disabled person living there, etc etc etc…. then we’ve got to figure out a good way to make our housing infrastructure keep up.
Sally
I think some people even here are distorting what an equivalent life was like in the fifties compared with now. In the sixties, my parents lived on two salaries. In a small two bedroom house with: one (good for then) car, one TV, one radio, one small fridge, one phone, one small bathroom, shower over the bath, one toilet, no washing machine or dryer, some hand made (ie, cheap) furniture. A single, employed full time, friend of my mother’s lived in a bedsit above a shop, no phone. Another shared a one bedroom apartment with another girl, they had a phone, one had a car.
Two of my sons, on one income each, live in three bedroom, small terraces. two bathrooms, separate showers, two tv’s plus streaming services, large fridge, small fridge, one each excellent < ten year old cars, mobile phones and several computers, washer and dryer. We didn’t think we or our friends were hard up, my sons think they are comfortable (they are). My father was an engineer, and the boys are both scientists. Of course my mother was paid a pittance, being a woman, but her salary allowed us to have holidays every year, and go out to dinner.
The cost of the boys’ housing is many more multiples of their salaries than for my parents, and for me, but they live in frugal comfort, even with their mortgages. They don’t have any other debts, didn’t borrow for cars or anything else. Of course, people on minimum wage can’t do these things, but I would suggest they never could. I think in my parents’ day, single people on minimum wage lived in boarding houses or similar, or shared with others. Also, people had “lodgers” in their homes, which I believe is also starting to happen again.
Life has never been easy for those at the bottom, but I honestly think it is better now for even them than it was sixty years ago. Better health care and education to a point, better sanitary and general living conditions (air, water quality, food monitoring etc). I hope we can keep on improving especially for those at the lowest end. That’s why we vote blue.
Jinchi
@Suzanne: Life expectancy can’t recover quickly after an immediate downturn like the pandemic (even if healthcare outcomes are back to normal), because the covid deaths are still skewing the numbers.
Lyrebird
@Suzanne:
This is probably too late to reach you, but thanks for providing those ratios.
As someone who remembers Reagan, I blame him and his Deregulate Everything fans for some of the housing mess we are in now. I wonder what the typical housing situations were in the 1910s and 1920s, and when people started to figure they would have a house with only one or two generations living in it, not three.
None of this takes away from JRub’s main truth or from the danger of the snake oil sales force.
And Anne Laurie,
thank you for this laugh:
You are a treasure!
Tony G
Most Americans are totally ignorant of history — but, in addition, a lot of Americans have false, rosy memories of their own lives decades ago. I’m a Boomer and my own youth was a time of race riots, the Vietnam War and other hellish events. But a lot of Boomers have gauzy memories of how great things were in those days — in contrast to the way things are now. I guess, to a degree, that’s just human nature. People fondly remember the years of their youth — because they were young then!
Sally
@Sally: I should add that the static and dismal minimum wage in the US and most states is appalling. And it is something that I think is going backwards. We have been “fighting for fifteen” for fifteen years, and now it needs to be much higher still.
I agree that suggesting people should live now like they (we) lived sixty years ago is untenable. Our lives are structured so differently, we could not manage in the modern world without cell phones and internet for example. In some cases I think our expectations are unreasonably high, but others have become necessities that were unheard of in “olden days”.
evodevo
@shrodingers cat…
Yes…this..the “golden age” if you were in a stable home environment was when you were a kid, had no concept of where the rent/mortgage payment was coming from, no idea of the parents’ sleepless nights if there was a looming job layoff, the fights with relatives were downplayed (family gossip was deep-sixed whenever a kid entered the room lol), and your job was to go out and play, and not get into too much trouble at school. No worrying about current events, of which you took no notice…Children in bad environments were much more stressed, and probably aren’t looking back at any golden age, but most middle class middle-aged MAGAts today don’t have a clue (and don’t want one).
Suzanne
@Lyrebird: There’s a lot of blame to go around on the housing front. It’s one of those things that truly is nonpartisan.
wjca
Although a big part, probably the biggest part, of the housing shortage is zoning restrictions. That is, something that DIDN’T get deregulated.
Those restrictions on what kind of housing can be built leads to shortages. Which, inevitably, leads to prices being bid up and up.
Lyrebird
@Suzanne: &
@wjca: Tnx!
also: Sigh.
Gvg
@wjca: no I think that is wrong. Texas famously doesn’t have zoning restrictions which leads to factories that make explosives right next to schools. That’s dumb and so Texas. Florida needs strict safety building codes because of hurricanes and a history of fly by night builders leaving homeowners with unsalable houses and mortgages. Realtors sometimes want to loosen our rules but since hurricane Andrew, voters have been wiser. Some zone rules may need changing to make things denser, but they better address the damn roads and utilities before they put the people there or it will be a disaster. Here, they haven’t been doing that. Those things cost money and people do like to hear that they need to pay taxes.
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
The “Good Old Days” are nothing more that one’s own youth, properly whitewashed and mis-remembered to be palatable, or bearable. Let’s be honest here.
Timill
@Gvg: people do like to hear that they need to pay taxes.
Somehow I feel there may be a ‘not’ missing somewhere…
wjca
I may be guilty of extrapolating excessively from what we see in California. But I’m fairly sure that I’ve read of similar issues in various other states.
Soprano2
@Alison Rose: We paid our house off in 2009. My husband got a VA loan, which is something he earned through his service. There was no inheritance or other advantage involved. We live in a part of town that most people looking to purchase homes turn their nose up at. Some things are a choice.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: This is true, but then you have to accept that houses will be more expensive because they’re bigger. I think that’s inevitable. It costs more to be considered middle class than it did in the 1970’s when I was in school. You have to have a lot more things that cost money. My parents had one phone. Now a married couple each have a phone. We had regular TV that came over the air free. Now people have cable or streaming that they pay for. And so on
It still mystifies me that a married couple with one child now needs a lot more space than a married couple with two, three, four or more children used to.
Citizen Alan
@evodevo: When I was around 8 or 9, my dad got laid off when the trucking company he worked for went under, and for a year or so, my family survived off my mother’s income. The belief that we were “poor” so traumatized me that I literally never asked for a birthday or Christmas present again. My mother nagged me for decades about what I wanted for Christmas and I would just say “oh, anything is fine.”
I was in my late 20s when I finally grokked the fact that (a) our 3BR house was fully paid off by then, (b) they had accumulated savings in the six-figure range (c) my mother was highly paid in a technical job, and (d) when my father was laid off, he got a severance package because of his union membership that meant he didn’t need to work for those months and was just biding his time until a new trucking job that paid what he was accustomed to came open.
Thirty years later, I’m still a cheap bastard about most things.
Ironcity
@NotMax: You forgot Bonanza (1959 to 1973) And so what if Pa (Loren Green) was Canadian. So is Shatner.
JBWoodford
While it’s true that there are lots of ways things are better now for more people, it’s harder to see that because of the trajectory of the past several decades. I’m pushing retirement age, and by most measures Loving Spouse and I are better off than our parents were–we owned a house when we were younger than our parents were when they bought theirs, we’ve paid off the mortgage, my job pays well (and it’s usually a lot of fun, too!), and Loving Spouse was able to retire early without much of a financial hit.
But.
Despite having decent jobs, neither of our children own their own houses. This is not uncommon among their age cohort (late 20s-early 30s). The fact that objectively I’m better-off than my parents, who were in turn better off than their parents, imposes an expectation of continuous improvement–our kids will do better than we will. When they don’t, it feels like something is wrong with the world.
That doesn’t even get into the price of higher education. College started off expensive and not really necessary when my parents were growing up, to inexpensive and widespread when I was growing up, back to expensive but often necessary when my kids were growing up. The current administration is at least trying to address the student loan debt issue, but for many people–far more than when I was an undergrad–it’s a major drag on their ability to get by.
So that’s what I miss from when I was growing up–the sense that my kids would be better off than I am. I know who to blame for that shift, though, and I can see who’s currently working to get things back on track.
EthylEster
I am hoping this is not a fake account.
Seems like it is not. But it doesn’t hurt to ask.
I generally enjoy Rubin’s anti-Trump columns. But last week she wrote one suggesting what Haley should do to get the GOP nomination. So I wonder if she is on record to vote only for Biden.