1950s

The 1950s is presented as a symbolic past toward which conservative politics seeks to pull the United States. In the book’s argument, Donald Trump and his conservative supporters want to take America back not only to the 1950s but even to the nineteenth century, making the decade part of a wider fantasy of restoration rather than a narrowly defined historical setting.

A Conservative Destination

The decade appears as an emblem of the past imagined by conservatives as safer, more orderly, and preferable to the present. The text treats this backward orientation as central to conservatism: conservatives support old beliefs because those beliefs feel secure and familiar, while intelligent people are characterized as moving forward and attempting to build a better tomorrow. The 1950s therefore represents a desired return, not a neutral chronological reference.

Relation to the Confederacy and the Right Wing

The book connects this restorationist desire to its broader claim that contemporary right-wing politics revives the Confederacy’s social and economic philosophy. The Trump insurgency is described as a sequel to the Confederacy, grounded in racism, white supremacy, and plutocracy, while modern right-wing opposition to government is compared with the Confederate defense of slavery as private property. Within that framework, the imagined return to the 1950s participates in a larger movement toward inherited hierarchy, minimal state intervention, maximum profit, and diminished collective rights.

Conflict with Historical Change

The 1950s is opposed to the book’s preferred model of political transformation. Abraham Lincoln is presented as the president most closely identified with positive liberty because he accepted decisive state action against slavery and pursued the defeat of the Confederacy. The text calls for a comparable defeat of right-wing ideology as a mental and cultural Confederacy. The decade’s symbolic pull thus becomes an obstacle to that project: it represents the attempt to let an earlier order dictate the present and future.

The Past as Political Power

The book’s discussion of inheritance extends the meaning of the 1950s beyond nostalgia. It argues that conservatives want the dead and the past to rule the living, preserve the same elite in power, and maintain the Old World Order. The 1950s consequently operates as one temporal face of the hereditary principle: a remembered or imagined period used to legitimize continuity in wealth, authority, and social arrangement rather than to examine how those arrangements should change.

Place in the Book’s Historical Mythology

The decade belongs to a chain of charged historical analogies that includes the Confederacy, the French Revolution, the Jacobins, and Lincoln’s Civil War. The book uses these episodes and periods as political resources, turning chronology into moral allegory. The 1950s marks the regressive pole of that allegory, whereas the desired future is associated with a new Enlightenment and a worldwide revolution. Its significance lies less in detailed historical description than in the contrast it creates between restoration and emancipation, inherited rule and deliberate social reconstruction.