Continuing the discussion from "The past was much more glorious" in fiction. What is this called?:
Out of deference to our respected mod, I will reply as a linked topic.
MMAGA (Make the Middle Ages Great Again)
It really seems like a good description of the current Republican party.
And, oops, I didn’t really think where I was posting. But now that we are in the pit, MAGA is the current term for “The past was much more glorious” in fiction.” Because nearly all they spew is fiction and they yearn for days when things were glorious.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr certainly wants to take us back to the days before antibiotics, vaccines, and public health surveillance. Make Infectious Disease Great Again (MIDGA)?
Stranger
More Epidemics for the Glory of America (MEGA)
Briefly, the aftermath of WWII saw the rest of the industrialized countries in ruins compared to the US. America had a big leg up at that point, and for a lot of reasons (mostly Keynesian - an economic philosopher ironically despised by the right), didn’t suffer the usual downturn common after most wars. The Baby Boomers grew up in this largess, and are blind to the evolving conditions that dictate that it can’t last forever. Reagnomics and similar measures have put it on artificial life support, and currently with MAGA it’s gone fully into cloud cuckoo land.
I have often felt that we here in America have had it too good for too long.
“History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, ‘Can’t you remember anything I told you?’ and lets fly with a club.”
― John W. Campbell Jr.
History will manage to correct our good fortune I fear.
They want to go back to the “Golden Age” where women were slaves they could rape and beat whenever they wanted, gays either stayed invisible or were killed, and non-whites “knew their place” and could be beaten or killed at will. A Golden Age of tyranny, cruelty and murder - the only things they really care about.
And they’ll gladly burn the whole world as long as they can make sure it hurts.
Yep. They’re basically looking at the 1945-1975 era as their “new normal”, instead of a “30 year historical aberration”, and demanding the country return to that era.
It’s unrealistic first of all, and second, when you dig in a little, it wasn’t that great except in sitcoms and movies anyway. There was rampant sexism, racism, etc… and a lot of the stuff they pine for were two-edged swords as well. Having lifetime employment and pensions came with being locked into that employer.
The funny thing is that people from that era were nearly uniformly pro vaccination. I have yet to meet someone my parents’ age (~70-85) who was an anti-vaxxer. They all got vaccinated against everything they could, because when they and more importantly, their parents were growing up, stuff like measles, whooping cough, polio, and the like were still endemic and still killed people. I’d bet most people that age knew someone of their parents generation who was gimped up by polio. Medical science was viewed as largely a good, progressive thing- stuff like antiseptics, antibiotics, vaccinations, and public health (clean water, etc…) made huge improvements in people’s health right around then. We take all that for granted, and it’s the height of privilege to think you know better and repudiate it.
When I was 4 or 5, one of our neighbours (someone my parents’ age) had leg braces from polio.
I’ve heard references to our current time as waiting to burn our hands on the stove of stupidity.
One kid in my Cub Scout den was a polio survivor (he came to meetings on canes; not in an iron lung).
Yeah it’s a very specific version of it where not only was there a golden age where everything was great and men were men: strong, moral, brave and hardworking. But then everything was corrupted by lesser races infiltrating the once pure society of the golden age, corrupting it (“poisoning the blood of the country”), leeching off the pure blooded inhabitants and polluting their morals.
It’s a very very dark version of the myth that, needless to say, ends badly 
I have this theory that people will remember the time in their lives when they were in their prime as when the nation was best. It’s often when they were in their teens and 20s, but not always (30s was my personal best decade). So for my father, who actually bought a GTO brand new when he was 25 and fresh out of the Navy, it’s the 60s. My father is very anti-MAGA, so don’t read into that.
As evidence I present my MAGA brother, who thinks the 90s (and Bill Clinton!) were when things were best. He was just out of school, getting married, etc. Contrast him with so many of the Boomer MAGAs who seem to think it was the 50s. FWIW, my father is not a Boomer, he’s silent generation.
The 90’s was when China opened up to global trade, operating with its labor market as a loss-leader. Some members American middle class who enjoyed this “come and get it” economy assumed that was the natural order of things (encouraged by Gulf War One and the Prosperity Gospel), and when things soured they looked for external scapegoats.
My wife’s grandfather had an arm that was disabled due to polio. So I guess even Gen-X people might have experienced knowing people with problems due to diseases that you can be vaccinated against, although I personally have never known anyone with polio disabilities.
I remember as a kid, vaccinations were sort of part of the package deal of new scientific living that came with space-age advancements. Not quite “Better Living Through Chemistry” but still there was a sort of pride in the idea that we could overcome infectious diseases through vaccination and public health efforts. Nobody actually thought vaccinations were bad in any way; you’d have been thought to be a right kook if you spoke out against them.
All of them are looking at point-in-time “bubbles” (for lack of a better term) where economic conditions were unusually rosy for a shortish period. But they weren’t realistic or sustainable. The internet bubble from about 1994-2002 was fueled by rampant and idiotic speculation and fell apart hard in 2002. It wasn’t any sort of golden age that was messed up by politicians, it was the invisible hand of the market that corrected things. Just like in the 1950s, it was a short-term, unsustainable thing created by the post-war dearth of manufacturing capability and ready capital in the rest of the world. Once they got their acts together in the 1970s, it ceased to be, just like you’d expect once US manufacturers had to experience competition.
Eh, given that MAGA is literally the fifth-level of hierarchy in the Church of Satan, I’m fine calling them satanic.
My dad was claiming that in the fifties. I think that when your frontal lobes come completely online, you look around and see the difference between the way you were taught that things were and the way things actually were (are). Then you can either notice that your thinking has changed, or you can decide that someone stole the way things used to be.
I’m currently reading “Hellhound on His Trail” by Hampton Sides. It’s primarily about the hunt for MLK’s murderer. But he also profiles the prime players of the time, one of whom was George Wallace. It’s chilling to read about his run for the White House. I’m pretty sure one could substitute “Trump” almost anywhere it says “Wallace” and it would be as accurate. That same sense of evil and malice pervaded everything he touched, and the same sorts of lunatics and bottom feeders swarmed to his cause.
The Latin feminine form of magus, pronounced Ma Goose. Clever wordplay on your part.
Republicans want to take America’s civil righs back to the 1940s (some want to go even further back, before women could vote) and they want to take us economically back to the 19th century.
They want to roll back civil rights to the 1840s is more like it. At best. Go back to the old slavery-and-genocide way of running the nation.