Talkin' About Politics: Are Liberals 'Tarnishing' the US Brand?

First of all, I don’t think that any rational person who has a good conscience and loves this country is intentionally trying to tarnish the image of the U.S.

Sure, there are some Americans out there who thrive on creating chaos and want to make the U.S. look like a caricature of a Third World country. Some of them might be extreme leftists or anarchists, while others might be Nazis, white supremacists, and other unsavory individuals who espouse hateful world views.

Overall, however, it simply isn’t true that either conservatives or liberals are intentionally tarnishing the U.S. brand, either domestically or internationally.

That having been said, the folks that are unintentionally tarnishing the U.S. brand are the folks that helped elect Donald J. Trump to be the 45th President of the United States.

Most of these individuals happen to identify as conservatives. Some of them don’t like Trump much but saw in him a means to an end, i.e., to ensure that a Supreme Court vacancy that was deliberately kept vacant in 2016 by the Republican-controlled Congress could be filled by a conservative Associate Justice.

There are also quite a few Trump supporters who admire the man and don’t care, or pretend to not care, that he is hardly the poster boy for conservative values. (Let’s see…a three-times married guy who brags about being able to kiss any woman he wants and - his own words, not mine - grab her by the pussy because he is rich and powerful…a guy who has declared bankruptcy several times and has had to borrow money from Russia because no U.S. bank saw him as a “safe risk” for loans…and a guy who once said that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and he would still get support from his base. On top of that, they love him even though he is abrasive, uncouth, and narcissistic

Most Trump voters seem to be sincere in their desire to Make America Great Again…..

But their vision of what MAGA means is not only unrealistic, it’s also counterproductive.

When Trump supporters say they want to make America great again, what they really mean is this:

• They want a return to the way things were in the immediate post-World War II era…where white males dominated the society and culture
• …women “knew their place” and either stayed home and raised the kids while the husbands worked, or they worked in professions that were geared exclusively for women (teaching, nursing, clerical/secretarial positions
• …minorities (blacks and Hispanics) also “knew their place,” not just in the Jim Crow South but also in segregated major league baseball (till 1947) and the military (also 1947)
• ….gays had no rights to speak of and had to stay “in the closet” or be beaten or even killed
• …America was the world’s biggest manufacturing country and largest exporter of finished goods, especially cars, planes, and consumer goods
• …multiculturalism did not exist

The problem with the MAGA principle is that the idyllic America of the 1950s simply was not as idyllic as they remember. People who wax nostalgic for The Leave it to Beaver/Father Knows Best seem to have forgotten:

• The Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s
• “Tail Gunner” Joe McCarthy and the excesses of the House Committee on Un-American Activities
• The unfairness of racial segregation under the Separate But Equal rule that kept white children and black children apart in public schools, especially in the South
• The “boys will be boys” attitude that allowed men to sexually harass women at the workplace with near impunity. This was such a “norm” in the culture that the trope of the lustful married boss chasing the sexy young secretary around the office was common in vaudeville and in Hollywood movies

In short, conservatives don’t like change. They resist progress, even if it is a futile effort, because they want society to remain static and unchanged. It doesn’t matter to them that the past is filled with ugliness, bigotry, and violence; they want time to stand still and to restore an Utopia that exists only in scripted sitcoms and their nostalgia-tinted memories.