Somehow we nurtured a whole generation of conservatives who are too young to have suffered the depredations of the Great Depression, have never heard Glenn Miller play, have no clue whether “LaSalle” is a university or an out-of-production poor man’s Cadillac, and who think Herbert Hoover’s policies should be replicated even though they are have no idea what those policies were and why they failed.

“Boy, the way Glenn Miller played. Songs that made the Hit Parade. Guys like us, we had it made. Those were the days!
Didn’t need no welfare state. Everybody pulled his weight. Gee, our old LaSalle ran great. Those were the days!
And you knew where you were then! Girls were girls and men were men. Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.
People seemed to be content. Fifty dollars paid the rent. Freaks were in a circus tent. Those were the days!
Take a little Sunday spin, go to watch the Dodgers win. Have yourself a dandy day that cost you under a fin. Hair was short and skirts were long. Kate Smith really sold a song. I don’t know just what went wrong! Those Were the Days!”

One of the beauties of the All in the Family theme song is that it predates the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Because of this, it can perfectly capture the vapid nostalgia for a bygone era that never was without being challenged by any attempt to revive that era. The lyrics I supplied are more expansive that what you heard while watching the show, but the full version only serves to amplify the point.

The song is obviously a reaction to the turmoil of the sixties, touching on everything from the loss of the Brooklyn Dodgers, to the new style of music, to the pain of inflation, to the changing styles of hair and dress.

But what’s really going on is a sentimentality for simpler times. Anyone driving a LaSalle in the 1930’s was doing pretty well. They probably belonged to a social caste that was able to pull its weight even during the height of the Depression. Maybe they even had the cash to go see Glenn Miller’s band play in person. If they did, they should have counted themselves as fortunate. Glenn Miller’s plane went down over the English Channel in 1944 as he was traveling to France to entertain our troops. That kind of tragedy is whitewashed out of Archie and Edith Bunker’s patchwork remembrances.

Today, conservatives don’t long for Herbert Hoover and the good times they had in the 1930’s while the world was sliding into Hell. They long for Ronald Reagan. But they don’t long for the real Ronald Reagan. They wouldn’t even recognize the real Ronald Reagan, who raised taxes repeatedly when his fondest hopes for his ideology proved to be hopelessly wrong.

Everyone remembers Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts. His admirers are less likely to tout the tax hikes he accepted as the 1981 recession and his own tax cuts began to unravel his long-term fiscal picture–a large tax increase on business in 1982, higher payroll taxes enacted in 1983 and higher energy taxes in 1984. A decade later, when a serious recession and higher spending began to upend the fiscal outlook again, the first President Bush similarly raised taxes on higher-income people in 1991; Bill Clinton doubled down and raised them again in 1993.

Ronald Reagan who…

…called for the abolishment of “all nuclear weapons,” which he considered to be “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization.”

That last snippet is from a column written in 2007 for the Wall Street Journal by George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn. But today’s conservatives have no use for George Shultz and Henry Kissinger.

There’s a lot of debate going on about why the Democrats are not more effective in sticking together and why they are not as ruthless as the Republicans. I am no longer terribly interested in that question, which seems to be a fact of life. What I want to know is how this new breed of conservative was created and what we can do about making sure that the cycle is not repeated.

Because, every time this cycle goes around it gets more dangerous. Archie Bunker was quaint, anachronistic, and therefore somewhat amusing. In these times, he’d be serving in Congress.