How much unpacking needs to be done about "American golden age" rhetoric?

[Recursion]

I'm still turned off by all of it. Particularly the idea that there was ever a shared prosperity in the US.

Is it something that can be usefully unpacked? Is it better just left abandoned?

[JustAnotherGen]

1. Good question

I think I would like to have it buried in a tar pit thank you very much!

[VulgarPoet]

2. "American Golden Age", "American Exceptionalism"

and everything like it just needs to be drowned, buried in an unmarked grave, and tarmac'd over. I don't believe there's anything of use that would come of unpacking it.

[Number23]

8. I'm to the point that I can tell how privileged, selfish and dumb somebody is solely

by their open "pining" for the "Good Old Days" particularly when they brush aside fact based comments that the "good old days" were only good for white people and majority white men and that was at the expense of everybody else, regardless of how brilliant, talented and hard working they may have been.

Lord knows, there have been OODLES of these kinds of folks posting on DU over the years. Oodles.

[VulgarPoet]

9. Amen.

And over the past few days, I've only been seeing it more and more. And being honest, it only makes it harder and harder to figure out where I belong.

[kwassa]

3. My father used to mock Brokaw's notion of "The Greatest Generation".

As a combat veteran of WWII, my father said there were all kinds of people in the military, good, bad, heroic, cowardly, just like any other generation.

[Chitown Kev]

4. It can but

people would rather believe their mythology and I have gotten to the point of "why bother."

[Starry Messenger]

5. It should be abandoned as an electoral strategy.

Unions do lots of work trying to bring white workers into voting for Democratic candidates, but they have to do it over each election cycle. They talk to a guy they got to vote for Obama in 2012, and now he's for Trump, and they have to start from the ground up. For some reason they won't rejoin the coalition.

I don't say we abandon those voters entirely, but aiming policies right at them also doesn't seem to be picking them up.

Something happened there that isn't going away, and it's to do with race and civil rights.

[Chitown Kev]

6. ....this can be unpacked a bit

thing is I don't think (at least historically) that civil rights have ever advanced much WITHOUT a strong labor movement in the background

[Starry Messenger]

7. Oh, I believe it.

I'm in a union and a labor junkie, so I agree the union support is vital for civil rights and progressive policies.

I was just using that as an example of the kind of intricate organizing work that goes into getting those votes from white workers (the main beneficiaries of the "golden age.&quot I think I remember reading that support for Obama expanded by 10% in red states where unions did GOTV with white workers. It's just then that some of them go right again. It's kind of maddening.

To read then that these voters could be brought back with an economic message that hearkens to their golden age seems like a snark hunt to me.