I didn’t live through the 50s but it’s a thoroughly recorded and re-mediated time in America. It is the fantasy of Baby Boomer conservatives: family, God, anti-Communism, free markets, and the economic prosperity that followed WWII made America great, and then liberals and hippies and counter-culturalists and atheists and Commies and free love and abortion and taxes and regulation and racial politics ruined it all.

They tried to get the 50s back in the 80s, in another version of the fantasy: Ronald Reagan cut taxes, won the Cold War, and made everybody feel better about being a family-oriented, religious, free-market patriot, but then welfare and crack and racial politics and abortion and women and gay people and liberals and the savings-and-loan crisis ruined it all.

And now, here we are. The conservative agenda is coming fast. It’s laid out in the new Mandate for Leadership (Project 2025) with excruciating enthusiasm for ending abortion, removing all federal regulation of business and energy interests, undoing government acknowledgement and support of LGBTQIA people, retrenching Christian religion in public life, and rejecting environmentalism.

I don’t know exactly what to do. Multiple worst-case scenarios exist for my family and me in those P2025 goals, along with oppression and chaos for people and parts of society that I cherish. Obscenity trials are coming back, folks, along with gay-bashing, dirty water, and probably measles. It’s time to make a plan. I wish I had better ideas about how to resist the nostalgic reactionaries.