The Republican Obsession With ‘Restoring’ America
.. conservatives love the word “restore.” In 2007, when he was planning his own presidential bid,
- Mike Huckabee wrote a book subtitled 12 Steps to Restoring America’s Greatness. (It’s available for one cent on Amazon.)
- In 2010, Glenn Beck organized a rally on the National Mall entitled “Restoring Honor.”
- In 2012, Mitt Romney’s supporters established a Super PAC called, paradoxically, “Restore Our Future.”
- Later that year, the Republican platform promised the “Restoring of the American Dream” and the “Restoration of Constitutional Government.”
- This June, Ted Cruz pledged to “Restore the Great Confident Roar of America.”
When President Obama invokes America’s past, for instance, he’s less apt to celebrate previous eras than to celebrate the people in those eras who struggled to overcome its injustices. That’s why he talks so much about the civil-rights, women’s-rights, and labor movements. Conservatives, by contrast, want to conserve. Their problem is that they can’t call for conserving things as they are, since that would mean expressing satisfaction with Obama’s America. So they call for restoring the virtues that existed in some prelapsarian America: before the Progressive Era, before the New Deal, before the 1960s, or at least before Obama.
.. Pledging to “restore” America appeals to many older, straight, Anglo, white, and male voters, because it’s a subtle way of saying Republicans will bring back the good old days. The GOP’s problem is that to win back the White House, it must make inroads among Americans who know the good old days weren’t all that good.