The MAGA Myth of America's Golden Age

Donald Trump wants you to remember a time that never existed.

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A family in the 1950’s. Lambert/Getty Images

by Rich Herschlag

Wrapped in every Tootsie Pop fable foisted on MAGA suckers by their Dear Leader is the fecal brown notion that there was a so-called American Golden Age and that if we just bring Donald Trump back for chapter two of The Emperor’s New Brain we’ll transport ourselves once again to that era. No one seems to know when that was, what it was, or exactly what the circumstances were that promoted a state of nirvana with every casual three AM trip to the bathroom, but we are surely all going back there one day soon.

Of course, deluded voters—like deluded middle-aged folks at a 30^th high school reunion—both willfully and unwittingly tend to forget the acne, awkwardness, celibacy, dreadful school lunches, and mean girl episodes in favor of that one night the football team made it to the state semifinals. Just as life itself, national histories are complicated and one’s glass ranges from half full to completely empty. It only takes a quick romp through relatively recent American history—we’ll begin arbitrarily in the late 1800s—to demonstrate that any notion of an American Golden Age is pure fantasy.

The Progressive Era—roughly 1890 to 1929—sounds to MAGA ears “disgraceful” for its name alone. The progressivism refers to a series of reforms and legislative actions intended to correct longstanding social ills. Before we touch upon any of them, consider the fact that the average lifespan in the United States in 1900 was 51 years, in which case I would have been too dead to write this article and some of you might have been too dead to read it.

Child labor was an everyday aspect of industrial life in the early 20^th century, and we’re talking 12-year-olds working 50 hours a week in a coal mine, not 16-year-olds working a few hours after school at the drugstore. Yet there were no sweeping child labor reforms at the federal level until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Flash forward to the Arkansas Youth Hiring Act of 2023 and we find Sarah Huckabee Sanders eliminating the requirement for kids under 16 to file for a work permit. Glory days indeed.

The Progressive Era was otherwise home to high rates of deadly dysentery and tuberculosis, the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan, over a hundred young women jumping to their deaths at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York due to the absence of fire safety codes, a war in Europe leading to millions of ghastly deaths in gas-flooded trenches, and a misguided alcohol prohibition that gave birth to American organized crime as we know it. And what would a reprise of early 20^th century atrocities be without mentioning Upton Sinclair’s groundbreaking book The Jungle, an expose of the appalling meatpacking industry? In fact, a real life reprise occurred under the Trump administration in 2019 when the USDA deregulated the swine industry by allowing slaughter lines to run at unlimited speeds.

Eliminating the 1930s from the American Golden Age greatest hits list is easy as graduating from Trump University summa cum laude. Countless fortunes wiped out in an instant, 25 percent unemployment, breadlines, Hoovervilles, the Dust Bowl, millions of broken families and kids begging in the streets. Next.

The 1940s hosted a World War in which almost a half million Americans lost their lives and perhaps a million more were maimed or otherwise injured and emotionally scarred. Rationing back home made a sugar cookie a rare treat to indulge in after receiving a letter from the United States War Department reading, “We regret to inform you. . . . “

Though cultural highlights from the 1950s abounded and that entity known as the middle class was born, post-war America found itself in a nuclear age and a Cold War in which third graders braced for a Soviet air attack and learned to duck and cover beneath their desks. Proxy wars with communist countries got their start with the Korean War and 36,000 American casualties. McCarthyism enabled the persecution of everyone from Lucille Ball to Arthur Miller and jumpstarted the career of attorney Roy Cohn, who decades later would reinvent his own self-aggrandizing cutthroat saga with young real estate tycoon wannabe Donald J. Trump in what can legitimately be called an early version of The Apprentice.

In spite of a smattering of shocking but blissful “free love” here and there, for the United States the 1960s gave rise to the culmination of virtually every social and political ill left conveniently unaddressed during the preceding decades. Unchecked institutional and cultural racism—like the kind where a family real estate business redlines potential tenants who are Black—boiled over in the form of mass protests, race riots, and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Gun culture and conspiracy (the real kind) took the life of the 35th President of the United States in macabre fashion and in full view of the American citizenry. The Cold War and a disingenuous government at home led us down a bloody path in Viet Nam with no redemption in sight and soldiers coming back either in body bags or with heroin addictions. By the summer of ’68 the Summer of Love was long gone and the Summer of Hate was in full bloom at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

By the not-so-golden 70s, any remaining benefits from having won World War II had faded and the Marshall Plan ripened in the form of a Germany and Japan who sold us better and more affordable cars and color TVs than we sold them. U.S. unemployment soared to levels not seen since the Great Depression. The emergence of OPEC and our general dependence on foreign oil led not only to a crippling inflation spike (Ever seen a mortgage interest rate of 16 percent?) but nearly to the relegation of the U.S. to the second tier of world economic power. Watergate, the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, and his subsequent pardon by Gerald Ford gutted what was left of confidence in government after release of the Pentagon Papers a few years earlier.

White flight from major U.S. metropolises intensified the economic and social strife of inner cities and helped cause bankruptcy in even the financial capital of the world—New York. In spite of a festive, elongated celebration of the nation’s 200^th birthday in 1976, stagflation continued unabated, and the decade ended with an Iranian hostage crisis that added insult to injury and signified what appeared to be a definitive end to American global hegemony.

Perhaps the 1980s was a pretender to the throne of American Golden Age, but to that we answer five things—AIDS, terrorist attacks, crack, soaring crime rates, and ballooning homelessness. Morning in America may have meant a bull market, tech jobs, a 401(k), and lots of three-piece business suits, but the rising tide wasn’t lifting all boats, and many of those boats were going under. The 1980s also saw the beginning of extreme wealth polarization, Wall Street domination of politics, and the sort of reckless deregulation we are still paying the price for today.

Even with wars in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Middle East; an upturn in domestic terrorism; rapidly increasing personal debt; and myopic deregulation of the banking and communications industries, the 1990s represented a marked uptick in the American fortune. Crime was down, family leave was up, Silicon Valley was booming, the federal budget was balanced for about a minute and a half, and Americans got back to their second favorite pastime—having kids. But any talk of a 1990s American Golden Age would be snuffed out immediately by Trump sycophants with the mention of just three words. Bill. Hillary. Clinton.

Any century that starts with a 9/11 is probably doomed, and the American 21^st century is no exception. More immediately, the decade known loosely as the 2000s spawned George W. Bush, two questionable American wars, the Patriot Act, Abu Ghraib, airport security on steroids, and federal debt that made earlier federal debt look like playtime. The decade also marked the beginning of the end of the modern Republican Party as we knew it. It seems the GOP was having a harder and harder time selling free trade agreements to folks working at Walmart for seven dollars an hour, or peddling Middle East nation building to families driving their war veteran paraplegic sons and daughters to physical rehab twice a week.

The decade ended and the next one began with an articulate Black president who pushed through a healthcare plan that was beneficial if not universal and who shepherded the country through a mortgage crisis and Great Recession spawned by his predecessors. Crime continued to decline and minorities gained on whites in income and overall wealth. Was this, the early 2010s, the American Golden Age? Probably not, but because Barack Obama was target number one of birtherism and its sorry excuse for a flag bearer, the point is entirely moot.

The American Golden Age of Trump 45 began with the low unemployment and respectable 2 to 3 percent yearly economic growth bequeathed to Donald Trump by his predecessor and ended with massive unemployment and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary COVID deaths. Is it this Golden Age the current Trump enthusiasts want to return to? Or is it one of the other decades recounted herein? Or is it some nebulous combination of eras stitched together through selective memory and amnesia? Moreover, is this selectivity the product of sadomasochistic white nostalgia, whereby even though the country might have been in the toilet, the white race sat on the toilet rather than in it?

These are profound questions we conscientious students of American history may or may not be able to answer. But more importantly they are questions MAGA has neither the ability nor the desire to answer. MAGA lives and breathes inside a myth created for it by Donald J. Trump, Steve Bannon, Roger Ailes, Tucker Carlson, and anyone else who either got in on the ground floor of the New American Authoritarianism or jumped on the bandwagon later because they couldn’t find a real job. The myth, of course, has a place but no exact time and no well defined conditions. It binds those who are not otherwise bound by facts, history, or discernment. The myth is flimsy but nonetheless feels like home. The myth is especially powerful for those who have the memory of a goldfish or who, worse still, never possessed any such knowledge to begin with.

The myth is the central reason Donald J. Trump will either return to the White House or come damn near close. Not only would this cataclysmic turn of events fail to make America great again—it would fail to make America great for the first time.

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