Trump's War against the Values of the 1950s

Before this year, liberals commonly accused conservatives of wanting to take the nation’s culture back to the values of the 1950s. And some conservatives in fact proudly championed the values of the 1950s, saying that the United States was better off in that decade than it is today.

In 2022, for instance, a PRRI poll asked respondents whether they agreed with the statement, “Since the 1950s, American culture and way of life has mostly changed for the worse.” Sixty-six percent of Republicans (and 71 percent of white evangelicals) said they agreed with that assessment.

It may seem surprising, therefore, that this year, Donald Trump seems to be making a concerted attack on many of the values of the 1950s – and Republicans are going along with it.

What do I mean by this?

In the 1950s, Americans overwhelmingly supported international alliances and America’s Cold War mission in the world. NATO, in particular, enjoyed widespread bipartisan approval. In April 1948, a Gallup poll showed that 65 percent of Americans supported a “permanent military alliance” with Western Europe; only 21 percent of Americans opposed it. And in 1952, the Supreme Commander of NATO, Dwight Eisenhower, won the presidency in a landslide on a campaign platform that committed the United States to a strong international role.

In the 1950s, the American government promoted free trade because of its belief that this was essential for the preservation of a peaceful, interconnected world, as well as the prosperity of all nations.

In the 1950s, Americans strongly believed in medical science. The discovery of an effective polio vaccine in 1954 nearly eradicated polio in the United States. By the beginning of the 1960s, more than 90 percent of children ages 5-14 had been vaccinated against polio.

In the 1950s, Americans also believed in college education and in a strong partnership between universities and the federal government. The college tuition benefits promised in the GI Bill, which had led to surging college enrollments in the late 1940s, continued to bring new students to college campuses in the 1950s. Similarly, as a result of the Cold War, the federal government began investing in K-12 math and science education in the 1950s through the National Defense Education Act of 1958.

In the 1950s, the federal government also took steps toward enforcement of civil rights and racial integration in education, first with the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board (1954) and then with President Eisenhower’s decision to send federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to enforce court-ordered racial integration of a public high school – which was the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops had been used to enforce racial integration. By the standards of the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government’s enforcement of civil rights in the 1950s was limited and overly cautious, but by the standards of previous decades in the twentieth century, it marked a pronounced shift toward a federal commitment to attacking white supremacy.

But today all of these principles are under assault in the Trump administration. The administration doesn’t value NATO or America’s traditional alliances. The administration wants to replace free trade with tariffs. The administration has made cuts to research grants and has threatened further reductions in university funding. The administration is hostile to DEI initiatives. And the administration has expressed far more skepticism about both vaccines and the science of climate change than previous presidential administrations did.

But perhaps the Trump administration’s greatest break with the values of the 1950s is the abandonment of the sense of the nation’s democratic mission to the world.

As Dwight Eisenhower told Americans in his inaugural address in 1953, “We are called as a people to give testimony in the sight of the world to our faith that the future shall belong to the free. . . . The faith we hold belongs not to us alone but to the free of all the world. This common bond binds the grower of rice in Burma and the planter of wheat in Iowa, the shepherd in southern Italy and the mountaineer in the Andes. It confers a common dignity upon the French soldier who dies in Indo-China, the British soldier killed in Malaya, the American life given in Korea.”

Like most other politicians of the era, Eisenhower believed that America’s Cold War international mission required a commitment to free trade. “No free people can for long cling to any privilege or enjoy any safety in economic solitude,” Eisenhower declared. “For all our own material might, even we need markets in the world for the surpluses of our farms and our factories. Equally, we need for these same farms and factories vital materials and products of distant lands. This basic law of interdependence, so manifest in the commerce of peace, applies with thousand-fold intensity in the event of war. So we are persuaded by necessity and by belief that the strength of all free peoples lies in unity; their danger, in discord.”

The preservation of this system, Eisenhower knew, required American leadership. “To produce this unity, to meet the challenge of our time, destiny has laid upon our country the responsibility of the free world's leadership,” he said. “So it is proper that we assure our friends once again that, in the discharge of this responsibility, we Americans know and we observe the difference between world leadership and imperialism; between firmness and truculence; between a thoughtfully calculated goal and spasmodic reaction to the stimulus of emergencies.”

But today the Trump administration has settled for imperialism and truculence instead of world leadership. The reason, I think, is that he and his supporters have replaced the nation’s historic faith in international democracy and human rights with cynicism.

Americans of the 1950s believed in their nation’s democratic ideals. They believed that the American way was superior to Communism – and that this was just as true for people in other countries as it was for people in the United States. They believed in the possibility of education and scientific research to create a higher standard for living for themselves and their children. They believed that faith in God was perfectly compatible with modern science. And they believed that the people in power in Washington were promoting the cause of freedom and human rights, regardless of party. Seventy-five percent of Americans in 1958 said that they trusted the government to do the right thing “almost always” or “most of the time.”

But today we’re far more cynical. Last year, only 22 percent of Americans said that they trusted the government to do the right thing “almost always” or “most of the time.” While most Americans say they still trust scientists, public confidence in scientists to “act in the best interest of the public” has dropped by 10 percentage points in the last five years. And fewer Americans now think that college is worthwhile. As a nation, we are losing faith in our institutions – especially the institution of government, but also scientific and educational institutions as well.

But it is the loss of faith in the nation’s ideals that is especially alarming. If we are cynical about our national values and think that America’s historic promotion of international democracy was merely a quixotic quest or, even worse, a selfish power play, we’ll be equally cynical about our foreign policy institutions. If we think that NATO was just a smokescreen for American imperialism or that it’s really just a protection racket for which other countries need to start footing the bill, we’ll likely be willing to accept a more blatant form of imperialism and extortion from our erstwhile allies.

On the other hand, if we rediscover the idealism of the 1950s, we’ll recognize that there are timeless values worth promoting. We’ll lament the moments in the past when the nation did not live up to its democratic promises, but at the same time, we’ll hold onto the faith that calls the nation to a higher standard in the future.

Until recently, conservatives insisted on these idealistic promises – which was one of the reasons why I think they were attracted to the values of the 1950s. Now that these values are under assault by a Republican administration, perhaps it’s time for both conservatives and liberals to insist that there is something worth preserving from the postwar era and to remind the nation once again of what will be lost if we abandon these ideals.