Social safety nets were stronger and income inequality was lower, largely thanks to the post-war economy retaining a lot of its state planning towards full employment, and largely due to the expansion in safety nets under FDR as a response to the Soviet Union’s massive improvement in safety nets. Time was good, if you were a hetero white man. The US was also emerging as the clear imperial hegemon.

Reactionary rhetoric tries to turn the clock backwards, to when the contradictions of society weren’t as sharpened. It’s usually a petite bourgeois conception, but can also be a part of other classes. It’s the opposite of progressive movement, trying to move the clock forward into the next mode of production, socialism in the case of the US.

Because I could by my amphetamines legally and the doctor would give me a steady supply of heroin if I paid him under the counter

/s

Idk why people want to go back to the 1950s they sucked.

I kind of think of the 50s as kind of a major turning point for the US. There were a lot of seeds of greatness then that weren’t properly nurtured in the following decades so that they could grow.

While just about every other country in the world was trying to put themselves back together from WWII, we had emerged not only unscathed, but in almost every measure better than we were before. We had military might, we had a booming economy, manufacturing, science, technology, arts, entertainment, cars, appliances, TV, electricity all on a scale previous generations could only dream about.

Even if you were part of a marginalized group- black, LGBTQ, female, etc. there were some glimmers of hope that looked like things might get better soon- the civil rights movement was picking up steam, there were some early LGBTQ rights movements and demonstrations taking shape, women entered the workforce in a big way during the war, and after the war mostly returned to the home afterwards but those seeds were planted, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that little girls growing up in the 40s watching the women in their lives being the Rosie the Riveter would become the ones who embraced 2nd wave feminism 20 or so years later.

And of course we had high corporate taxes helping to fund it all.

It wasn’t all sunshine and roses of course, and you will certainly find no shortage of people here on Lemmy who will happily spell out all of the many reasons the 1950s sucked, and I don’t disagree with them, but that’s not what you asked, so I’m not going to go into that.

The 50s were a major leap forward in the quality of life for many people in america, and while far from perfect, there is definitely an angle you can look at it from where things looked like they were more-or-less on the right track.

It was before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, before women could open their own bank accounts, and before no fault divorce was legalized. In other words, white men had almost all of the power, both politically and socially.

People who pine for the fifties are mostly white men, and it just means they are racist and/or sexist. That’s not the only reason, but it’s a big one.

Other than that, they just want things to go back to the way they never were.

I have a feeling it has to do with a lot of the things that you and I would consider societal progress.

(If you are a USian) your conservative dad should probably know that corporate tax rates in the US were as high as 52% in the 1950s. Imagine the social programs that could be paid for which such things.

Most of the people who say they want to go back to the 1950s for political reasons don’t mean it. They just want to cherrypick certain things and claim everything used to be better. As with anything, there’s a lot of extra details, but I’d be willing to bet that a lot of these folks want the casual racism but not the taxes.

Most people have an idyllic view of certain childhood years, usually around the ages 5 to 10 or so. It’s before you start to understand just how broken the world is, and your worldview gets more complex and nuanced.

Many people wrongly assume that the world really was simpler when they were that age. The truth is, the world was just as messed up–they were just blissfully unaware.

Next time your dad complains, remind him that we still have milkshakes and racism.

Well, having sat with people of that age bracket when they were sick or dying, when most people drop pretence, I have a different opinion than those already presented.

It isn’t necessarily about “simpler times”, though some folks that age use the term. And it isn’t about racism or sexism either, because it isn’t just white folks or men that express the idea.

There is a big dose of nostalgia involved, but you don’t see the desire to return to the era of childhood or teen years as much in older or younger generations.

The common thread that makes 50 kids yearn for the era is largely that they lost a sense of their place in the world. The 50 were before vietnam made the big schism it did, before men and women needed to examine their own expectations for themselves, and before the post war wave of optimism faded.

You gotta know, the kids and teens in the fifties, despite the cold war and nuclear bomb drills, had an optimistic world around them. Well, in the “western” world mostly. The good guys won the war, and regardless of what anyone else thinks now, that’s what the perception was. To someone growing up then, the prospect of being able to have a career, family, and eventually retirement with relative ease was real.

Again, this isn’t just for white men. Black people have expressed to me that despite the awareness there was going to be a fight for equality, the hope of success was strong. Little girls had moms that had worked during the war, and gained the prestige that comes with it, but came back to being moms and wives because they didn’t need to work (again this was perception, and that matters more than current ideas about that for this purpose).

That post war generation, the literal boomers, had hope, even the ones that were dirt poor, even some of the black people, and most of the women. By the time the sixties came around, that hope was changing. They were reaching young adulthood among the earliest boomers, and they started to see that the world wasn’t what they thought it was.

Sexual revolutions, the pill, the civil rights struggle, vietnam, things were no longer as rosy as they were promised, though many of them were finding freedoms as much as they were finding struggles. They just couldn’t look at the world with those rosy, optimistic glasses any more. Shit got complicated and confusing and it was the boomers and the younger segment of the preceding generation that drove some of the positive changes at the same time they were being chewed up by the meat grinder of capitalism and war.

Who wouldn’t look back at a period of optimism as a better time? If the eighties had been as promising as the fifties, I’d be looking back on it as a golden era too.

But hey, us Xers and millennials, we will look back on the nineties as a better time most likely. We saw a lot of good happen. It’s largely being undone now, but damn it was nice while it lasted seeing the expansion of acceptance of gay people, reduced barriers between black and white people in specific (less so with other “races”) as the freedom to marry and blend together worked its chemistry. Even some of the racists backed off once their grandbabies were mixed.

Yeah, like the fifties, that optimism covered an ugly reality, but it was still better than the seventies had been, and we thought that the worst aspects of the Reagan era were going to eventually get fixed.

Now, OP, I can’t speak for your dad. The above definitely didn’t apply to everyone I’ve ever known from that generation. Some of them were racist assholes even then. Some of them still think women are only good for one thing (and some of those are women). And you’re definitely right that living queer back then would be horrible even in more accepting cities. To gain access to all those things people were optimistic about, you’d have to be closeted and very very careful.

But it isn’t as simple as folks tend to think. Your dad’s generation wasn’t a monolith, and even the more progressive among that peer group often look back on the fifties as a great era to be born into. I can’t even entirely disagree tbh. Looking back on it from now, the thirty years after 1950 were amazing in the amount of progress made socially, technologically, and economically for a lot of people. It’s easy to ignore the bad parts when we’re/they’re sitting here with these magic devices in our hands.

Conservatives are more prone to wanting to return everything to the way life was then, but plenty of us liberals, progressives, general liberals, and even full on leftists can see that we lost some of the good stuff when we had to root out the bad (despite failing to do so)

I think people who think the past was better are all white men, and it’s because they didn’t have to think about other people. They want to go back to ignorance.

He literally says that to you? The 1950s? Have you asked him specifically why? My mom had a great time in the 1950s and no way would she ever have wanted the world to go backwards to that time. She recognized, as she became older, how bad things were for her mom, for black kids (her school was segregated), for so many people.

The only reason I can imagine wanting to go to the past, is to try to make this future better, but I know better than to fuck with the timeline and can’t imagine I’d be able to do anything about it anyway.

A little later, maybe, but much the same… on the upside:

• we were optimistic.
• we were going to conquer space, and it was going to be real live humans, not semi-autonomous robots
• society (in the US and W. Europe) was (very) slowly getting more progressive.
• Hitler had been killed, and fascism defeated forever. Never again would we have another dictator; never again would we watch a country commit genocide against a people.
• life was slower. TV was the bad influence rotting kids brains. We didn’t have an entire industry focused on commoditizing us.
• computers were fucking incredible. The future we imagined coming from computers was very, very different than what we ended up with. For one thing, we didn’t imagine a single-minded focus of all software and computing power on commercializing every aspect of our life.
• no Facebook, no Twitter, no TikTok
• Income disparity was far less extreme, and class mobility was a realistic dream. You could imagine buying a nice house and raising a family on a single income. If you worked hard and had a little luck you could pass on some reasonable wealth to your kids.
• shit really was - in the aggregate - getting better all around. Technology was advancing and bringing amazing products; science was being discovered that you could basically wrap your head around. Lives (in the Western world) were improving (relatively, compared to previous decades) for most people, and all this happened at a pace that didn’t up-end your world every day, 365 days a year.
• you could get all the news you needed for a fairly rounded world view in a single newspaper, much of which you could read over breakfast. There was no information overload.

On the downsides,

• dad beat us with a belt as punishment
• we were having wars that were disrupting society. The draft was a real worry.
• we were constantly afraid that nuclear war could happen at any time
• commies were hiding under our beds
• minorities of all kinds were fighting for their rights, and fighting to get them enforced. It sucked to be gay, or black, or a woman (but it was getting better, slowly)
• most people didn’t have access to a computer, much less a PC until well into the 80’s, so you had to infiltrate University computer labs.

It was a slower world, with fewer consumer goods, fewer conveniences, and worse medical care. Everybody smoked, all the time. But slower was good, and - best of all - we didn’t realize yet that we were killing the planet; the world wasn’t ending.

I think it’s pretty common when you reach a certain age to want to go back to a more nostalgic time for you personally. There’s a certain level of bias and rose tinted glasses to it, no doubt.

For instance, I myself would kill for it to be 1992 again.

This is a very surface level observation. For your father there might be more nuance to the sentiment.

You could beat your wife, she couldn’t really divorce you, and couldn’t open a bank account. That’s usually why they love the 50s.

Have your asked your dad? What does he say? Did you tell him that you think it would be harder for you and ask what his opinion is?

Not saying you have to, just curious if you did how it went. I’m in a similar boat.

Because they were young then.

They like Jello as much as they love Jim crow