Well, I try to be specific about saying “some aspects”.

I don’t have the best gifts of language. Sometimes what I say doesn’t match what I mean to say. My pardon if I sounded like I was denying that parts of the 1950s were problematic. It just seems to me there’s a trap there – by making the 1950s all or nothing, then either you’re with the Progressives, or you’re for the old-time racists.

It seems to me that the only way conservatives can avoid this trap is to recognize both conservativism and progressivism as being more about how and why and when to go about changing and less than we think about what to change, specifically. There’s a popular myth of “progress” that says that one generation’s progressive ideas are some future generation’s conservative ideas – which is in a sense true (compare JFK’s platform with Ronald Reagan’s) but this “narrative frame” draws attention to every position conservatives ever got wrong, while obscuring the recognition that progressives get things wrong, too. This sleight of hand is directly linked to how progressives have succeeded so well at caricaturing conservatives.

I don’t actually disagree with you, Blake—it was the description of the social order of the 1950s “where women were confined into the kitchen and racial segregation was the law” as what “most conservatives” value. People, and history, are more complicated than that.

I don’t know why you say the 1950s were the “bad old days”. While it’s true that there were some bad things about the 1950s, it’s also true that in some ways things have gotten much worse.

Maybe you need to stop seeing life in terms of simplified stereotypes.

I have just been trying to knock down a simplified stereotype—the claim that “most conservatives” long for the bad old days of the 1950s. That jarred because it did not ring true with the conservatives I know well. It struck me as the same old, same old stuff that David Mills was describing. There were people who believed that “most Italians” were sneaking, cowardly bandits and assassins. Not only that, most Italians were filthy. Well, that kind of creature deserves to be lynched.

However, I guess I should admit that I live in a mid-century modern house and have some Herman Miller and Eames furniture. I could be said to “long for” a 1950s surfboard coffee table. My neighborhood is famously liberal, so it occurs to me that one could argue that many liberals—if not most—hanker for the 1950s, too. That would be silly, though.

I romanticize certain aspects of the 1950s, and I do so without shame or apology.

I have no doubt that nostalgia exists because it serves a purpose: it prompts us to look backward at what we are in the process of losing, so that we can salvage and save that which has value before it’s irretrievably gone beyond “the edge of history”.

Come again? Please read these things that *other people* have written as justification for my belief about *you?*

This is the second time in three days I have seen someone from a leftward position make this kind of “someone else did this therefore I am justified in my beliefs about you” argument. Does it not even strike you as a rather hollow form of reasoning?

It always astonishes me that left wingers get life and Wikipedia backwards.

Encyclopedias are what ought to be perfect before being experienced. Life is what you are supposed to expect to be imperfect, to be corrected and improved as you go along.

I remember many things about my childhood that were better than the way things are now. Do you therefore assert that I want my the old postmaster – the one who got busted for sexual harassment – to be postmaster again?

Do I have to reject my smartphone before I am allowed to feel regret that we no longer feature pay phones on every street corner?

It does not follow (in the minds of people who reason correctly) that if a conservative admires the many good things about society in the 1950s, that therefore the conservative is automatically required logically to also embrace the flaws.

Obviously, the society – for all its intact families, neighborly communities, and functioning institutions – had problems in that too many people were excluded, who shouldn’t have been.

But to try to link the two – as if being a conservative automatically must mean rejecting all progress – is as illogical as if I were arguing that because you are a “progressive”, you must be in favor of all potential changes – even the ones that are obviously bad. You must want a matriarchy, where feminists lynch men. You must be glad every time left wing “unintended consequences” pervert yet another social project into a parody of what it was supposed to be.

Of course that is nonsense: to the extent that you advocate obviously flawed projects, you do so out of ignorance, not malice. And you wouldn’t like it if that were misrepresented, so I must ask you to stop doing unto conservatives what I doubt you’d like done to you.

Besides, conservative critics were right in a lot of their criticism: it seems to me a no-brainer that the less help any given ethnic group got from the Left, the better off it ended up. Today the Irish and the Italians are assimilated, while the victim groups the Left has taken as what Thomas Sowell calls “mascots” are more entrenched in social misery, dependency, and blecch-factor, than ever.

Read the comments and articles in firstthings, or any other conservative or conservative leanning publication and please tell me is not true you romanticize the 50´s.”

OK. It is not true that I romanticize the 50′s. It’s truly a bizarrely specific bit of pigeonholing.

1. Conservatives think that the 50′s were a superior time in many respects, yet claim to decry racism and sexism. Therefore, conservatives are either lying about not liking racism and sexism, or deluding themselves (your option.)

2. Conservatives think that the 50′s were superior time in many respects, yet claim to decry racism and sexism. This is because there are other no longer extant qualities of the 50′s that they appreciate and despite not believing that the decade was free from negativity in every respect.

Do you have a reason other than counter-historical (as Jack Perry points out) prejudice to opt for #1 over #2?