The Nostalgia Trap

Fifty-eight percent of college-educated whites this year say that America has gotten better since 1950, while 57 percent of non-college-educated whites say that it’s gotten worse. When President Trump says “Make America great again,” the again is instructive. He’s capitalizing on the nostalgia that non-college-educated white voters have for America’s past. “That harkening back to a supposed golden age where things were better has a really, really strong appeal for whites without a college degree,” Jones said.

That nostalgia, however, is for a time when black Americans and other minority groups had significantly fewer civil rights. And a Republican rhetoric that centers a longing for an era of white prosperity, rife with racist violence against black people, is why it’s impossible to understand the diploma divide without accounting for racial resentment. Needless to say, black Americans and other minority groups aren’t as keen on returning to the past.
Adam Harris. "America Is Divided by Education" The Atlantic. Wednesday, 7 November, 2018.

There is a question here, and it's one that I'm surprised isn't really spoken of. Was the lack of civil rights, racist violence and racial resentment that characterized the the time around 1950 a cause of this supposed golden age for less-educated Whites, or was it merely an unfortunate side effect of an overall lower level of enlightenment?

Or, perhaps more simply, can you have one without the other? I suspect that many non-White people in America believe that the two go hand in hand. There were many well-paying low or unskilled labor positions for White Americans because other people were locked out of them; and the resulting labor shortage, artificial though it may have been allowed White workers to command higher wages. And the truly dirty, low-paying jobs fell to the people who were locked out of the more lucrative sectors of the economy. While people who evince the nostalgia Mr. Harris chronicles, on the other hand, tend to be convinced that the new version of the past will lack all of the bad features of the original, and that there will be more than enough blue-collar jobs to go around, so that everyone who wants to work will be able to find a family-wage job will nothing more than a high-school education. Or at least the ones that I have spoken to seem to think so.

To a certain degree, it's an academic debate. The chances of the American economy going back to the state it was in 70 years ago in within, well, the next 70 years, seems slim. The world is a different, and smaller, place now. While it's possible that the poorer nations of the world who have been using newfound positions in global supply chains to better their standard of living could be forced back into abject poverty while their first and second-world counterparts reclaim those jobs (and pay higher price for goods and services in the bargain), it's unlikely that they would go without a fight. And it's equally unlikely that the rest of the developed world would decide that paying the higher wages of American workers for goods that they could buy more cheaply from poorer nations would be a good idea, blunting the impact of American economic isolationism and protecting the markets of poorer nations.

At the same time, closer to home, it's unlikely that without some sort of concrete evidence that a return to the economy of the pre-civil rights era wouldn't bring Jim Crow employment policies back with it, that many Americans would go along with the scheme. People would be unlikely to simply take it on faith that they'd be allowed a greater share of the prosperity in a scheme that strikes many as a reaction to the idea that they're now doing better than they were before.

To make the point that the economy of 1950 is a better choice for all and sundry than that of 2020 requires an understanding that everyone is worse off now than they were then, regardless of race, creed or ethnicity. And while that may seem self-evidently true to a "White working-class" that thinks back on a time when a high-school education meant a solidly middle-class life with a house, a family, a dog and a white picket fence, for many other people what happened was, at worst, a transfer of wealth and income to a broader swath of the public than had been allowed to hold it before.

The world of 1950 is before my time. Even my parents would only have been young children. But my father used to deploy tales of his childhood in the decade that followed as cautionary tales for me; stories of hardship and deprivation to illustrate what might await me if I didn't do well in school. He wouldn't have been convinced that he, and people like him, would have been better off returning to that time. I don't think that many other people would be any easier to sway.