This cartoon detail from a 1977 alternative comic book called Young Lust. Art by Paul Navrides published by Last Gasp, Berkeley CA.
Is this the America today’s Republicans want to return to?
If this 1977 cartoon rings eerily familiar to today’s troubled political climate, it should.
Set in the Seventies
This cartoon is from an alternative comic book called Young Lust 1977. Art by Paul Navrides published by Last Gasp, Berkeley CA.
Like today, the country in the 1970’s was running out of promise.
Discontent, frustration, and anger ran deep especially among blue-collar white males. Faced with an unwinnable war, political corruption, and an ailing economy many Americans were feeling like losers.
A once great America was fading. The shiny America of post-war promises and unending progress was now tarnishing.
The American Way Loses its Way
Authority had broken down, skepticism ruled and the slow disappearance of a universally accepted way of life challenged what had long been the consensus.
The marginalized and those without a voice would not be ignored, closeted, condescended to, or discriminated against.
And they weren’t going away.
The “American Way of Life” had shattered into a bewildering array of lifestyles and some felt American values and the nuclear family, were under attack. These underground comic books addressed the values and issues that counterculture was interested in – gender, feminism, anti-war sentiment, and anti-Vietnam war particularly, gay liberation, legalization of drugs, critical neo-Marxist thoughts, on Capitalism, welfare issues, gays, ecological issues, and sexuality. Cartoon Detail “White Patriarchy” Young Lust Comics 1977 Art by Paul Navrides published by Last Gasp, Berkeley CA.
Feminists reveled in the power of sisterhood, gays liberated themselves from the closet, and Blacks were demanding affirmative action. While the forgotten began to have a voice, many in the so-called silent majority felt ignored.
The “American Way of Life” had shattered into a bewildering array of lifestyles. Some felt American values and the nuclear family, the very bedrock of our society, were under attack. By the mid-1970’s Mom and Dad were divorced, the factory where Dad worked had moved to Taiwan, Sis was a corporate vice president, and Junior was out of the closet and gay.
Born-again Christians wanted to restore the nation’s moral compass along more fundamentalist lines.
Middle Americans felt put out, overlooked, and felt they needed to stand up and reclaim the values that once made the country great again.
Sound familiar?
That same sentiment and call to the disenfranchised silent majority is embedded in Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again.”
Those Were the Days
All in the Family’s Archie Bunker (Caroll O’Connor) bemoaned a fading America. This blue-collar worker from Queens grappled with the big issues of the day- affirmative action, gay pride, women’s rights, the sexual revolution, and his railing at elites has become the leitmotif of American politics ever since.
When this cartoon appeared, no one represented the silent majority of fading white male patriarchy than another sexist, racist, xenophobic from Queens, N.Y.
All in The Family’s Archie Bunker, that flag-waving, John Wayne-loving, loveable blue-collar bigot became a powerful spokesman for those President Richard Nixon had termed the Silent Majority.
Resentful, Archie was fed up with intellectuals, women libbers, bleeding heart liberals, outsourced jobs, and other elites intent on messing up a way of life that was working pretty well.
“I’m white, I’m male, I’m protestant,” Archie Bunker once declared. “Where’s there a law to protect me?”
Girls Were Girls and Men Were Men
Trumps tag line “Make America Great Again” Harken back to a time when America was ruled by white men. Cartoon detail from Young Lust comics 1977 “White Patriarchy” Art by Paul Navrides published by Last Gasp, Berkeley CA.
Suddenly white male entitlement was being challenged beginning its slow decline. Like Trump supporters, he missed it and wanted it back. Just as Archie Bunker pined for the good ol’ days, today’s GOP has fetishized the Good Old Days not just in rhetoric or sentiment but in policy that aims to take us back to them.
© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2024. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.