The 1940s were a time of great change for America and the world at large. On the economic side, we saw the establishment of strong unions as the federal government took a more active role in the private market. Every artistic medium seemed to be undergoing revolutionary change as Jackson Pollock took on painting, Arnold Schoenberg remade music and Tennessee Williams defined American drama. Popular culture also reached a high point as television (along with TV dinners) became commonplace and America developed a fascination with its celebrities. Our grandparents may not have had “Brangelina”, but they most certainly had Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogders. Towards the end of the decade, the scandalous and sexual Marilyn Monroe would take celebrity culture to the next level and dominate both the silver screen and the gossip columns.

I bring all of this up in response to a column written by my friend and fellow columnist Jonathan Bruno. I normally refrain from using this space to respond to others, but I think that Bruno’s column is representative of something that extends beyond the pages of The Oberlin Review. One of the favorite rhetorical tricks of the Republican party is the promise to take us back to simpler times; or they claim to be, as Bruno did last week, “traditionalists.” But do the Republicans really want to take us back to the 1940s?

The picture I painted above would suggest that there’s as much for the right wing moralists to hate about our grandparents’ generation as there is for them to love about it. Much like any other time period (including the one we live in), there were selfish people, shallow people and people doing (gasp) drugs. Celebrities had scandals (to use a comparison from Bruno’s article, I’m quite confident that Jay-Z lives a far more responsible life than Frank Sinatra). There were self-righteous moral values types and I’m sure there were people wishing we could go back to the better, more moral times of the turn of the century. People in the 1940s would probably find the heavy, anti-government mentality of the modern Republican party pretty disgusting, as the memory of the Great Depression would be fresh in their minds.

The question then becomes, if Bruno and the Republicans have no inherent ideological claim on the 1940s, why has the return to the golden era become a rallying cry for conservatives everywhere? I would argue that this obsession with the past can be traced to a lack of ideas for the future. There’s an old anecdote about Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” campaign. The Reagan administration had achieved its entire legislative agenda in its first four years.  Having “fired all of their bullets,” the Reagan team then had to decide how to sell themselves to the American people. In the end they decided to shoot a bunch of commercials that, while lacking in grand vision or policy proposals, evoked a feeling of nostalgia. Shots of people getting married, shots of a country ranch and other stock footage littered the “Morning in America” commercials. Reagan won in 1984 by a landslide.

Now Republicans find themselves in a similar, if not more dire, situation. The American people have delivered a referendum on the Republican’s vision of the future. Some conservative initiatives failed (the Iraq war), while others were so crazy that they never got a chance (Social Security privatization). The Republicans’ vision of the present and the future is out of touch with that of the American people, so they turn to the only thing they have left: a past that no one can remember that well. They picked a prosperous time in our country’s history that was long enough ago to be reduced to broad generalities (going so far as to suggest that it was characterized by morals and “a country ranch with a loving family”) without anyone batting an eye. We can be sure to see more of this as the 2008 campaign heats up.

So, Bruno, I would gladly build you a time machine but I worry that once you traveled back in time, you wouldn’t like what you saw. In fact, I think you were born in the right generation. You live in a time when the idea of the good life can be pulled from any other period in the past and used for political purposes, when our generation can be dismissed for the same celebrity culture that our grandparents created, when the first full decade of expanding New Deal institutions can be talked about as an era of conservatism. In 2007, you can talk about 1940 as you want it to be and still have the option of listening to “Big Pimpin’” when no one’s looking.