Talking About Conservative Propaganda: Explaining Why Trump Is Not Universally Supported
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Why can't people support President Trump the way U.S. Presidents in the 1940's, 50's, and 60's were supported?
My reply:
I wasn’t going to answer this; I have a comedy screenplay to finish and turn in, but since right now I’m stuck trying to add an extra scene the director/producer wants me to add for “dramatic tension,” I will use this rather bizarre and patently insincere question to loosen up my writing muscles and do some mental gymnastics.
I’m sorry to tell you this, dear staunch Trump supporter, but this question is based on a flawed premise: that before the Sixties, Americans of all social strata and political stances supported American Presidents almost universally.
This, my sweet summer child, has never been true in any era of American history. Since 1789, perhaps the only U.S. Chief Executive who enjoyed this kind of support may have been George Washington, and even he once had to put on his old general’s uniform and ride his horse in front of 10 Regular Army troops and 13,000 militiamen to put down a frontier anti-tax rebellion. (See: Whiskey Rebellion - Wikipedia).
Clearly, many Americans who self-identify as conservatives and who support Donald J. Trump spend way too much time listening to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, or they misremember (either out of wishful thinking or deliberate rewriting of history to fit their worldview) the patch of history mentioned in the question.
Let’s take a look at just how much everyone supported Presidents in the three decades mentioned by our friend, the question asker:
- In the 1940s, we only had two Presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman. In the case of FDR, conservatives from both parties considered him a “traitor to his class” for trying to improve poor, elderly, and disabled Americans’ lives by creating safety net programs such as Social Security. They also called him a Communist, a war-monger for daring to prepare the country for a possible war against the Axis, and, after his death, derided the United Nations as a threat to U.S. sovereignty (a stance that many right-wing extremists still embrace). They also accused FDR of “giving Stalin too much at Yalta” and even perpetuated the slanderous story that he “allowed Pearl Harbor to happen.”
- Truman was liked at first for ending the war against Japan quickly by using the A-bombs to convince Tokyo to surrender. However, after 14 years of Democratic Party control of the White House, Truman barely won a term as President in his own right in 1948 and was excoriated by the right for desegregation of the Armed Forces (1947) and for “losing China” to Mao Tse Tsung’s Communists, as if China had ever been ours to lose. The unexpected and unpopular Korean War also made Truman widely unpopular, even though he was staunchly anti-Communist and had successfully forced Stalin to back down in the Berlin Crisis of 1948–1949 by using air power to feed Berlin, which the Soviets had blockaded in displeasure over Western policies in the Allied sectors of occupied Germany.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower was wildly popular in his day and even in the 21st Century, he is one of the most-liked and respected Republican Presidents in modern U.S. history. But not everyone - and this includes ultra-conservatives like members of the John Birch Society, Joe McCarthy supporters (such as Trump mentor Roy Cohn), Southern conservatives in the then-dominant Jim Crow/Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic Party, and blacks who sought civil rights long denied them - liked Ike.
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As I say in my review of William I. Hitchcock’s The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s:
The Fabulous Fifties that many Americans misremember and long for were not so fabulous, and the undercurrents of society seethed and bubbled with social tensions between the two political parties, white America and blacks (then called Negroes), and Cold War “hawks” and “doves.”
For those of us who think that we live in the most bitterly partisan era in American history, Hitchcock’s The Age of Eisenhower is a badly-needed look into a dark age when writers, actors, and ordinary citizens were called to testify before the House Committee for Un-American Activities (HUAC) or lived in fear that a neighbor or friend might be a Communist sympathizer. It was the age of McCarthyism, when a hard-drinking, paranoid, and bombastic Senator from Wisconsin helped to create an atmosphere of fear and hate when he insisted that Soviet spies and agents had infiltrated the government at its highest levels. Joe McCarthy was not necessarily lying; according to Hitchcock, the Soviet Union did penetrate America’s government, the entertainment industry, and other areas of our society from the 1930s on, but never to the extent of the ultra-conservatives’ claims that led to the “Red Scare” and the even more damaging “Lavender Scare” (the fear that homosexuals were deliberately destroying the “American Way of Life” by supporting the civil rights movement and challenging the South’s Jim Crow laws). See: Book Review: 'The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s'
- John F. Kennedy’s Administration, which was, in essence, a continuation of the Eisenhower era even though Ike was Republican and JFK was Democrat, was cut short by an assassin’s bullet on November 22, 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin, was allegedly motivated by his pro-Marxist, pro-Fidel Castro stances and feared Kennedy was seeking to invade Cuba (despite assurances to Soviet leaders to the contrary after the Cuban Missile Crisis of the year before). Oswald was a leftist, but the far right - exemplified by the billionaires in the Texas oil industry and Cuban-Americans in Miami and New Jersey - who accused Kennedy of being soft on Communism and allowing Castro to stay in power in Havana. Eventually, the “left” would have hated JFK had they realized that in his haste to not look like his Administration was not vigorously fighting Commies abroad, it was he who began the escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War.
- Lyndon Baines Johnson was hated by Republicans and conservative Democrats alike. The GOP disliked him because he was creating more social programs (such as Head Start and Medicare) that they did not want. Southern Democrats hated him because they felt that Johnson, a Southerner, had betrayed old-school Democrats in the South by embracing the liberal, “Yankee” wing of JFK and Bobby Kennedy and its pet cause, civil rights. Liberal Democrats, including those he had aligned himself with to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, hated him because of Vietnam, as it was LBJ who doubled down on Kennedy’s Cold War policies and sent combat troops to South Vietnam.
- Richard M. Nixon was loathed by Democrats for various reasons, the biggest one being that he was too slow to end the war in Vietnam. Other reasons included his appeal to white Southerners who had become disenchanted with LBJ and the more liberal Democratic Party over their embrace of civil rights for blacks and other minorities, his heavy-handed and often antagonistic behavior toward his opponents, his ever-more evident paranoia, especially toward the press and the Kennedy family. His need to maintain secrecy and penchant for shadiness was not immediately apparent in the 1960s, but it would eventually blow up in his face as a result of the Watergate scandal.
I am not going to stray farther than the historical period posited in this “question,” so we won’t be reading anything about Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, Obama, or Trump. The only catchall comment I’ll make about these Presidents is that none of them enjoyed the support of most Americans. (The last really popular Republican President with an untarnished reputation is still Eisenhower; Reagan was widely loved and respected in his time, but his Administration was hobbled by the Iran-Contra scandal.)
So, please, dear conservatives: before writing disingenuous and fallacious questions such as this one, stop dreaming about an idyllic past that only exists in Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver and read some real history books.
As to why many Americans refuse to play along with the “Make America Great Again” crowd:
Just check out this:
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