Campaigning For Mayor of Pleasantville

Jack Shafer looks at the Republican primary candidates:

If the campaign were simply about marketing 1950s nostalgia, Santorum would be leading the polls. More than any other candidate, he yearns for the decade he was barely born into (b. 1958), when the Mass was in Latin, blue laws were the rule and not the exception, and abortion was back-alley or required a plane ride. Alone among the candidates, Santorum would self-deport into the Pleasantville mise-en-scène if the movie’s cinematic magic were real.
Any slots the Republican candidates decline to fill at Dementiaville can be reserved for those Democrats who have their own, separate delusions about the 1950s. Democrats look back fondly to the era, and not just because it marked the peak of union membership. It was also a time when a good Republican (Jacob Javits) was almost indistinguishable from a Democrat. The GOP was so rife with Huntsmen, the real partisan action pitted the South’s Democrats against the rest of the country’s Democrats.
The extraordinary economic growth of the 1950s came after both the Great Depression and the deprivations of World War II, so it’s probably the clang of cash that makes the decade so alluring for everybody. The decade sits in the middle of what some economists call the “Great Compression,” which ran from about 1934 to 1979 and during which economic inequality was historically low.

I've been guilty of wishing for the '50s myself.  It is pretty easy to do, if you are white.  Not so much if you aren't.  Anyway, the key point is that America can't be the America of the '50s, because, England, Germany, France, Russia, China, India and the rest of the world aren't those countries as they were in the '50s.  The quicker we come to that realization the better.  As for income inequality, we can address that without turning back the clock too far.