Remember how idyllic life seemed to be back in the Leave It To Beaver days? Good old dad, Ward Cleaver, was the family’s sole breadwinner who never failed to get home in time for dinner. His wife, June, was a happy stay-at-home mom, constantly smiling, even while vacuuming the living room in a dress, high heels and a strand of pearls. Their sons, the Beaver and Wally, partook only in wholesome antics and said “golly gee” a lot. The Vietnam War was percolating. College kids were dropping acid. Racial tensions were imploding all over the place. But none of that ugliness ever entered the Cleaver household, or their lily white neighborhood.
This 1960s sitcom represents the imagery of the second A in MAGA. Donald Trump’s promise to his base is to return the country to the fictional greatness of Leave It To Beaver. A more straightforward pitch would have been “Bring Back The Sanctity Of White Privilege And The Subjugation Of Women”. “Make America Great Again” fits better on a cap.
MAGA is all about the Cleaver family and an unambiguous emotional ecosystem in which everyone knew their place. Marriage was between a man and a woman. Husbands were in charge and wives were their obedient servants. Minority group members, the oppressed few among the dominating white majority, were seen but not heard. In the six-year run of LITB, there was only one appearance by a black actor. She played a maid in a single episode.
Much to the consternation of the MAGA crowd, the Cleaver days are now long gone, even though they were never anything more than the imaginary figment of a wistful writing staff. America is rapidly changing. Same sex marriage is the law of the land. Not only are rigid gender roles loosening, the concept of gender itself is now seen as amorphous. According to Axios, by the time today’s teenagers enter their 30s, there will be more minorities than whites, more old people than children and more folks practicing Islam than Judaism. Not exactly Ward and June Cleaver’s America.
So along comes Trump and his MAGA time machine to take us back to the good old days. The president has been amazingly effective in leading this backward journey. Sadly, the old days being recaptured look nothing like a Leave It To Beaver rerun.
Take abortion for example. Back in the early 1960s, aborting a fetus was a felony in 49 states – and a “high misdemeanor” in New Jersey. Countless women, mostly poor, died or were badly injured in black market abortions performed by sketchy characters under incredibly unhygienic conditions. Since 1973, however, women have had a Supreme Court affirmed right to choose a safe and legal abortion. Trump, in turning back time, has proudly engineered a court majority he hopes will reverse that 46-year-old decision by denying women the right to control their own bodies. A number of state legislatures this week adopted draconian abortion bans, reminiscent of the 1950s, all aimed at providing the court with a vehicle to overturn Roe v Wade. Under a new Alabama law, a physician performing an abortion on a rape victim would serve a longer prison sentence than the man who raped her.
If there is anything resembling a coherent theme of governance in Trump World, it’s this reactionary retreat into the dark corners of our past. Numerous studies have documented substantial increases in hate crimes since he took office. No, Trump didn’t invent racism. He just made it look acceptable, allowing closeted bigots to climb out from under their rocks and go after people who don’t look like them. The Anti-Defamation League has documented thousands of racial assaults, intimidation and vandalism in which the perpetrators referenced the president in carrying out their attacks.
Rarely a day passes without Trump finding some way to turn back the cultural clock on human rights. Earlier this week he scuttled plans put in motion years ago to replace slaveholder Andrew Jackson’s picture on the twenty dollar bill with that of anti-slavery icon Harriet Tubman. The very next day he announced that his administration would make it easier for adoption agencies to reject same-sex couples and transgender people. Previously, he rolled back LGBTQ protections in numerous areas, including health care, employment discrimination and military service.
A number of commentators, including the Washington Post’s David Maraniss, have described the Trumpian zeitgeist of fear, demonization and attacks on free speech as eerily reminiscent of the red scare and McCarthyism days of the 1950s. Back then, wrote Maraniss, “communists and their sympathizers were called un-American traitors. Now Muslims are disparaged as terrorists and Hispanics as ‘illegal’ and worse.”
In yet another instance of this MAGA retreat to an anything-but-great past, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta recently suggested that Trump’s position that he is immune to Congressional inquiry harkens back to 1859. In the White House then was James Buchanan, widely acclaimed by most historians as the country’s worst president, at least until Trump was elected. Buchanan was being investigated by a House committee for possible illegal activity. He unsuccessfully argued at the time that Congress was simply a band of “parasites and informers” who had no business poking its nose into the business of the executive branch. “Some 160 years later,” wrote Judge Mehta, “President Donald J. Trump has taken up the fight of his predecessor.” In upholding the House’s right to subpoena Trump’s financial records, the judge said Congress has “sweeping authority” to investigate illegal conduct of a president before and after taking office. He ended his decision with this line: “This court is not prepared to roll back the tide of history.”
Unfortunately, this president is not only prepared to roll back that tide, he is obsessed with doing so. It’s the ultimate con by one of the most adept flimflam artists this country has ever known. True greatness has never been achieved by turning our backs on the present and retreating into selective memories of the past. Greatness comes only by looking ahead, not back, and always with an eye toward building a better future for all of us. Leave It To Beaver wasn’t real, and neither is Trump’s promise to create grandeur by going backwards.