The institutions and trust that generations of Americans carefully built has been gleefully torched by cruel incompetents in the space of a handful years. The damage, physical and social, is incalculable. The unpunished crimes, endless.

The reconstruction, if it happens at all, will take decades. It was all so unnecessary, so foolish.

The retrogression perception is correct; but the specific timeframe is so incorrect that the back of my head blew out like a pinata.

The goal is - and I am not picking on the reactionary wing alone, this impulse has broad support across our ideologies - de-industrialization. The complexity of post-Enlightenment civilization is being rejected, in favor of some hypothetical state. This puts the past timeframe as far back as the 17th century.

But not a "real" past. No one can recreate the past. Only their idea of the past.

And of course, when you "create" anything, too much and too quickly, you risk systemic collapse. Not a problem if you imagine you will be Immortan Joeing around in your Death Wagon, but odds are, I'm sorry to say, against it.

The fifties are when a lot of this infrastructure got its start.

They want the 1850s.

"And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now."

You could rewrite this the other way for the prior administration, simply replace the word "include" with preclude.

The US in 1950s was very big on science. Nuclear, space, biology, etc, etc. Science seemed to have an answer to everything. I frankly don't remember a time when science was in such a low regard among the US public; maybe in the Deep South in 18th century.

In the 1950s the US had lots of foreign scientists.

In fact if the US hadn't had its huge influx of foreign scientists fleeing the Nazis, who knows where we'd even be today.

Back to the 1930s.

People in the 1950s were convinced that the nuclear family was a disaster and the leading cause of divorce/poverty.

The institutions that built US science dominance were built in the 1950s. A fraction of Americans voted to bring America back to a cartoonish pastiche of images of the olden times (from 1950s, 1920s and 1800s) that they didn't know never existed and they didn't know that partly 'cause of education cuts starting in the 1970s-1980s.

They don’t want the 1950s. We were pretty science forward then. The problem is they don’t really want to live in a world driven by facts because it eats into their privilege and they would rather have that.

Even the 1950s allowed for Operation Paperclip. This time is different.