MAGA Knows Best: The Way We Never Were (with Stephanie Coontz)

What if the family values we've been taught to cherish are nothing more than myths and, in fact, are dangerous? In this episode, historian and author of the book The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Coontz, helps us to understand the New Testament's radical interpretation of family,  offering enlightening insights—and challenges the nostalgic allure of "traditional family values" often exploited in contemporary political discourse. We unmask the nostalgic fantasies fueling certain ideologies and question which eras are truly being glorified, exposing the social injustices that these idealized visions conveniently overlook.

We discuss how skewed narratives around gender roles have been manipulated throughout history to justify inequality, examining early societies, where shared responsibilities and egalitarian structures were the norm, contrasting them with the myths used to hinder marginalized communities today. And, we address head-on the danger posed by the MAGA movement, utilizing false nostalgic political rhetoric to lull us into a sense of longing for a bygone era that never existed, and its potential impact on reproductive rights, women's liberty, the trans community, and race policy. There are repercussions to weaponizing "traditional values" in today's debates - and on the future of American democracy.

Nostalgia isn't just a longing for the past—it's a tool that can be, is being, wielded by the Republican Party to maintain power and divert attention from current issues. In the episode, we explore the consequences of romanticizing a “simpler time,” particularly for women and the queer community, while highlighting the regressive agendas at play - the societal norms under threat, the democratic backsliding we face, and the paths forward to foster diverse and inclusive family structures. Stephanie's upcoming book, For Better and Worse, aims to further enlighten listeners about these pressing issues.

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Music:
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Chapters

• 0:00 The Myth of Traditional Family Values
• 9:10 Revisiting Gender and Family Dynamics
• 21:59 The Perils of Nostalgia
• 35:14 Potential Consequences of Anti-Progressive Policies
• 40:27 Challenging Societal Norms and Relationships
• 49:44 Navigating Family Values in Contemporary Politics

Transcript

Stephanie Coontz: 0:00

And one of the things I most enjoy pointing out to people about the New Testament is that Christ really had a concept of family, more like today's chosen family than the nuclear biological things. Remember he tells people you leave your nuclear families to join the wider Christian community, even if you have to hate them in order to forsake them. Don't even stop to bury your own father in order to forsake them. Don't even stop to bury your own father. He refuses to grant members of his own nuclear family the special audience they've requested, saying his real family is a community of believers. And my favorite example is that when he's dying on the cross and sees his mom in the crowd with her sister and brother-in-law, he doesn't commend her to their care. He creates a fictive family before he points to one of his disciples and says you know, behold your son. And to the disciple he says behold your mother. So there's really lots of excuses for lots of different ideologies within Christianity and there are people who have really misused it.

Shawn: 1:10

Welcome to Deep Dive with me, s C Fettig. Nostalgia for a Better Time is a huge part of the MAGA Make America Great Again movement and has infiltrated the entire Republican platform, with figures like JD Vance advocating for policies that force women out of work into the home and producing hordes of MAGA children, and Project 2025 providing an actionable roadmap to that end. This sense of nostalgia is false, but it's fueled the Republican Party's agenda, particularly under the leadership of Donald Trump and with support from the conservative Supreme Court. We're seeing an aggressive push to roll back progress in areas like reproductive health, women's rights, race-related policy and LGBTQ plus rights. For example, the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v Wade has led to near-total abortion bans in several states, severely restricting reproductive freedom and drawing a direct line to preventable deaths. Similarly, republican-backed legislation is attacking LGBTQ plus rights, especially targeting transgender individuals and also communities of color, targeting DEI initiatives.

Shawn: 2:22

This regression goes beyond policy. It's rooted in a longing for a time when the structure of the family and society more broadly was sharply controlled. But what I'd like to know is exactly when? Trump, vance, justices Alito and Thomas the Heritage Foundation? When exactly would you like to return us to? What era? When was America better in your mind. Was it the 1950s, when domestic violence was largely ignored, not just by society but by legal institutions that viewed family matters as private and untouchable, when women in abusive situations often had no recourse because divorce was stigmatized and there were no shelters or protections in place? This was the reality behind the myth of the happy, traditional family. Communities of color faced legalized segregation, disenfranchisement and systemic inequality, with laws like Jim Crow upholding racial discrimination in housing, employment and education, things that people like Donald Trump and his family took advantage of so egregiously that they had to settle with the federal government for discrimination in housing. Lgbtq plus individuals were forced to live in the shadows, facing criminalization, widespread societal rejection and institutionalized discrimination, including laws that classified homosexuality as a mental disorder and criminalized same-sex relationships. Was it the 1960s, with the rise of assassinations, white supremacy movements and the horrors of the Vietnam War? Was it the 1970s, when the war on drugs disproportionately targeted black and brown communities, leading to mass incarceration and further disenfranchisement? Leading to mass incarceration and further disenfranchisement, when tough-on-crime policies exacerbated inequality, creating a cycle of poverty and incarceration that continues to impact communities of color today? Or was it the 1980s, when LGBTQ plus individuals were still fighting for basic rights and facing an AIDS epidemic that hollowed out the community, while the government largely ignored the suffering when single-parent families, especially those led by women AIDS epidemic that hollowed out the community, while the government largely ignored the suffering when single-parent families, especially those led by women, suffered under Reagan's policies as cuts to welfare programs and the reduction of social safety nets disproportionately impacted low-income households, pushing many single parents deeper into poverty and limiting their access to essential resources.

Shawn: 4:44

The rhetoric of Make America Great Again suggests a return to an undefined but better past. But even if they could tell us when my guest today highlights that a return to an earlier era is actually a return to oppression and violence against huge swaths of the community? Stephanie Co is a renowned historian and author known for her groundbreaking work on the history of family life, gender roles and social policy, and author of the influential book the Way we Never Were that challenges idealized notions of the American family in offering a critical look at the myths surrounding the past and their impact on contemporary politics and society. The vagueness of this nostalgic mega-vision isn't just misleading, it's dangerous. It allows for selective interpretations of history that justify oppressive policies today, and it's deeply rooted in Republican politics and they're chillingly close to making it a full reality.

Shawn: 5:44

All right, if you liked this episode, or any episode, please give it a like, share and follow on your favorite podcast platform and or subscribe to the podcast on YouTube. And, as always, if you have any thoughts, questions or comments, feel free to email me at deepdivewithshawn at gmailcom. Let's do a deep dive, emailcom.

Shawn: 6:05

Let's do a deep dive. Stephanie, thanks for being here. How are you?

Stephanie Coontz: 6:11

Oh, I'm fine. Thanks, it's a pleasure to talk with you.

Shawn: 6:20

So I'm glad to, I'm excited to have this conversation with you because you've studied and you've written about the concept of traditional family, traditional values.

Shawn: 6:24

Studied and you've written about the concept of traditional family, traditional values, how they've been mythologized and mischaracterized, and while I think this has been part of our contemporary politics for a while, with conservatives especially grieving some kind of a history that doesn't really appeal to the majority of the population, but it does lean into a history that seems to have been rewritten, and I think that to some degree, it was easy-ish to kind of dismiss it as wishful thinking, because it was a bit nebulous or just seemed like a nod to a bygone era.

Shawn: 6:54

But I think more recently, with things like the end of Roe this election year and the proposals coming from Donald Trump and JD Vance and Project 2025, we're actually getting a real concrete glimpse at what this looks like in action or in policy. You know they're putting some artwork on these walls and that makes it, I think, more real and more scary in a way that we probably couldn't conceptualize in the past. So thank you for taking the time to chat with me and help me understand where this comes from, why it looks this way and what it might mean if this kind of altered version of history were to become a new law of the land. I appreciate it.

Stephanie Coontz: 7:27

Oh, no problem.

Shawn: 7:28

So let's start with this, though. You've spent some time in your work debunking a lot of myths about what the traditional family is and what traditional values are, and I'm not sure that, to most of us that don't study this, it's entirely clear that these are myths. So could you help me understand what some of these myths are and how they have gotten so embedded in our culture?

Stephanie Coontz: 7:50

Well, let's start with what they are. There are a whole bunch of them. I suppose the biggest one is the idea that the male breadwinner family was traditional. In fact, through most of history, women were full co-providers for their husbands. They weren't equal with their husbands, but they were absolutely. The men knew that they depended on their wives. They were often called yoke mates.

Stephanie Coontz: 8:13

The word breadwinner wasn't used until the 1820s come into existence, until the 1920s. At that time was the first time that a bare majority of children were raised in homes where the mother wasn't helping out in a business or farm and the man was doing wages and the kids weren't in school. That faded in the 1930s and 40s and rode back in the 50s and 60s, and now it's gone for good. So that's one of them. And then there are so many others that we could explore the idea that marriage evolved originally so men could feed and protect women, the idea that marriage was always one man, one woman, that people were more sexually virtuous in the past, and now a new myth that's just been written into law by a supposedly educated Supreme Court justice that abortion was always a crime. So we got a lot of those and we can talk about them.

Stephanie Coontz: 9:10

But, you know, it's worth noting that some of the a lot of people believe these myths, but their biggest promoters, I think, don't really necessarily believe them. I think they're using these myths to exploit people's anxieties about changes in gender and sexuality and intimate relationships, legitimate anxieties for a very different agenda, One aimed at reversing the New Deal and Great Society programs that, for a while, protected working people's rights, recognized that the people who gain the most riches from the roads and technology and other public-funded infrastructure ought to pay more taxes, you know. So I think that there's a lot of cynicism in the people who promote this, and they're abusing anxieties that we could assuage in other ways.

Shawn: 9:59

So I actually want to dig into that in a little bit that latter kind of part of your response.

Shawn: 10:05

But before we get there, I want to.

Shawn: 10:07

I find it fascinating when we talk about actual history as opposed to how we conceptualize it or how it's sold to us today, and especially as it relates to the concept of equality and it feels like to some degree there was more and I want to be careful how I use this.

Shawn: 10:22

It feels like there was maybe more kind of shared responsibility in not just in traditional family, but within societies and within communities. That gets lost in how we talk about them today, but at the same time, I feel like there was also, and always has been, a schism that is almost gender related, but we can also extend this to traditionally underrepresented people. And so I guess, can you help me understand, when we talk about the role of in heteronormative society, the roles of women and men historically as being perhaps more equal, how the conceptualization of dominance or control may or may not still have played into the relationship. I'm really interested in responsibilities within the family, or responsibilities as it relates to providing for a family or for a household. We can talk about that as being equal, but there's another form of equality, which is, you know how folks are situated within the social or hierarchical structure of their family, and I wonder if that has always had an element of dominance and control.

Stephanie Coontz: 11:30

Well, there's debates about how much dominance and control there was in our Stone Age ancestors, but I think pretty much everybody agrees that it was far less than arose with the rise of class societies and patriarchal structures. When you go back into the early Paleolithic families and you look, for example, at how what we know of, at how anthropologists think that they developed and archaeologists, it looks as though these families were not primarily responsible for the feeding and the resources. This was these hunting and gathering societies. For example, we used to think that marriage was invented to provide women with meat, women and children so the men could feed them. But it turns out that women in such foraging societies provide 60 to 70 percent of the calories through their gathering and small hunting activities and that they don't have to be married in order to have access to the big game meat, because the custom in these societies is that when there is a big game killed that is shared with everyone, everyone has a call on it and, in fact, the men it's usually men who do the hunting of big game animals that need to be pursued, mostly because women can't drop their nursing in order to do that, although women sometimes do participate in the hunt. The man who kills the animal does not get to distribute it to his family, he doesn't even get first call on it.

Stephanie Coontz: 13:02

So for hundreds of thousands of years there was a deep equality in family life and in community life.

Stephanie Coontz: 13:11

That began to change with the rise of class societies, and one of the most interesting things about that is that marriage became reversed almost in the way that it was in early societies, where it was a way of gaining in-laws, making connections, extending your obligations beyond the family. What happens with the rise of private property and class society and warfare is that you get marriage becoming a way of denying obligations to others. You want to only get married to people who have the same resources that you do, or hire, and you refuse to let your kids marry people who otherwise they might fall in love with. So for thousands of years then, marriage was a fairly egalitarian not always, but a fairly egalitarian relationship and societies were fairly egalitarian. When that changed, you get a situation where, for another sets of thousands of years, women work was absolutely essential to family life. That's why they were called yokemates. That's one of the reasons that they were subordinated, but they were not given equal say in how that family life developed.

Shawn: 14:32

You mentioned something earlier that I don't have a really strongly formulated thought about, but I kind of want to dig into it, and that is that you know, you have this belief that contemporary bad actors deliberately exploit and leverage mischaracterizations and misconceptualizations of the past and what traditional families looked like and how people behaved, etc.

Shawn: 14:50

And I think I have the same feeling. I think I have for a while, and let me put this in some context that makes sense to me, and that is I have close ties and I'm engaged with the queer community and I've done a lot of research in that area, and it does seem to me, and it's always seemed to me, that some of the language or the policy goals employed in pursuit of marginalizing the queer community or otherwise stopping any progression in that area has always felt to me emotionally driven and driven more from hatred, but is couched in terms of Christianity or traditional values, and it's always rung a little untrue to me and I feel like today we're starting to see, in the way that the rhetoric is focused on things like reproductive rights and the trans community, that the rhetoric is actually providing a glimpse that exposes that in a way that it hasn't in past. Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Coontz: 15:51

I think we're talking about two different groups here. I think that many people do get anxious about gender and sexuality and family changes. That has been for so long implanted in our identity. People don't know how to react to someone who is of a different gender. Many people don't. They have studies of to show people pictures of a baby crying and you don't tell them what the baby is. If you tell them it's a boy, they say he's crying out of anger. If you tell them it's a girl, they think he's crying out of fear. And if you don't tell them, they get angry because they don't know how to interpret the behavior.

Stephanie Coontz: 16:40

And some people have read a lot more of the Old Testament, I think, than the New Testament and that becomes their excuse for this whole set of fears and hatreds that you're talking about. But then there are the other people who use these. But let me just respond briefly to this idea that it's inherent in Christianity. You know the New Testament actually has some very different family values than those that are put forward by conservative evangelicals today. You know I mean when Jesus said, suffer the little children to come to me, he didn't mean let the children suffer. He insists over and over again on the moral obligation to feed and clothe the poor. He comes out against divorce, but marriage is definitely not idealized. It took till the 12th century that it became a sacrament.

Stephanie Coontz: 17:28

And one of the things I most enjoy pointing out to people about the New Testament is that Christ really had a concept of family, more like today's chosen family than the nuclear biological things. Remember. He tells people you leave your nuclear families to join the wider Christian community, even if you have to hate them in order to forsake them. Don't even stop to bury your own father. He refuses to grant members of his own nuclear family the special audience they've requested, saying his real family is a community of believers. And my favorite example is that when he's dying on the cross and sees his mom in the crowd with her sister and brother-in-law, he doesn't commend her to their care. He creates a fictive family. Before he points to one of his disciples and says you know, behold your son. And to the disciple he says behold your mother. So there's really lots of excuses for lots of different ideologies within Christianity and there are people who have really misused it and tried to bend it for their agenda and tried to fuse it with people's anxieties about the issues we've been discussing.

Shawn: 18:41

I guess I don't want to be too harsh about this, but I have this sense that this is being completely untethered to a real understanding of religious, but particularly Christian, history. So take it in that vein. But I have a sense that contemporary Christianity, particularly evangelicalism in the United States, is so bastardized from its roots that it's hard to even see it as truly Christianity. That's influencing not just society but our politics in the United States and in that sense it makes me wonder if it's simply Christianity and this is me really oversimplifying but Christianity has simply become a tool to a very specific end that is exploited by a very specific movement in the United States, and I wonder if you've given any thought to this.

Stephanie Coontz: 19:32

Well, for some people that's certainly true. There are others. I mean, if somebody actually wears a bracelet that said what would Jesus do you have to remember? He fed the poor. He said don't throw stones at people. You know, I have to respect that kind of Christianity very much, but you're absolutely right that there's been a perversion of what the early evangelicals stood for. They would happily, by the way, have held signs saying Black Lives Matter. Some of those early Christian evangelicals, white as well as Black, were among the most dedicated abolitionists, and so it's just stunning to see where some of these people who preach the prosperity gospel and the exclusionary gospel, how they have deformed that heritage.

Shawn: 20:20

We've spent a little bit of time talking about this overlaps, but it also is its own distinct concept, something else that you study which is nostalgia, and I gave you a little bit of time talking about this overlaps, but it also is its own distinct concept, something else that you study which is nostalgia, and you know I gave you a little bit of a primer on this before, but my thinking on this, but I kind of understand how nostalgia can be both somewhat, I think, beneficial, but can be really harmful, or can be weaponized in a way that, if you're not astute or particularly aware of what's happening, could happen.

Shawn: 20:48

So I, you know, I think about, not necessarily politically, but I think about myself and I'm in my forties now and I sometimes, when I hear a certain song or I smell something or, you know, I see a certain type of a landscape.

Shawn: 21:00

It really does draw me back in a very positive, warm way to periods of time in my life that I would never want to relive. But I still feel warm and I could imagine, you know I think back to the 80s, which you could even say generally the 80s were not necessarily a particularly great time for a huge swath of population, right, but I think we definitely look back and kind of lionize it. So I understand how that can be politicized and weaponized in a way to draw people into a space that they might remember or they might not even remember. Right, that's what maybe the old Westerns did is created or mythologized and created a sense of nostalgia about American past that never actually existed, that sometimes people imagine wanting to go back and relive as a better time. So I'm wondering if you could help me understand what nostalgia is and how it's influencing the lens through which we remember or envision past eras, including our own.

Stephanie Coontz: 21:59

Well, you know, I got my start doing public history by writing a book called, whose subtitle was the Nostalgia Trap. My thinking on that has evolved since then because I have come to realize what you said, that personal nostalgia. You use the word warm because research shows that when people engage in the kind of personal nostalgia that involves remembering good experiences with close friends or family members, it literally makes them feel warmer and it also tends to make them act more warmly to people. So I've learned to distinguish between two types of nostalgia. One is personal nostalgia. That's what happens when you recall specific experiences with close friends or family members. It's a half poignant, you know, half pleasurable yearning to recapture a feeling, and that's a very healthy one. It amplifies good memories about events, minimizes bad ones. It makes you think that you have the possibility to recreate those with other people.

Stephanie Coontz: 23:07

But then there's this other kind of nostalgia, what I call social or political nostalgia, and that's when you tell people that we should be nostalgic for a whole period and set of social structures. So when people begin to think nostalgically about their experience as members of a group or an era rather than as distinct individuals, in particular relationships, they begin to identify more intensely with their in-group or their age group and they should judge members of other groups more negatively. They become less optimistic about their ability to forge connections with others, more hostile to strangers. So social and political nostalgia is very dangerous. It's often triggered by discontent with certain current experiences or trends and it's often taken advantage of by people who try to channel that discontent into ways that are frankly less threatening to their interests and more diversionary in a very real sense to that a little bit and I want to also use this maybe as a pivot to your book the Way we Never Were.

Shawn: 24:26

But before we go there, I do want to talk a little bit about the weaponization of nostalgia and what that looks like and the dangers that it could pose in shaping public policy. And I know that might seem pretty obvious to people right that if we believe that there was a certain era or period of time that was just somehow better or easier or simpler than the period of time that we're living in now, then it's easy to craft a narrative around some idea of institutionalizing policies that would somehow reimagine that right. But what are some of the dangers beyond? I suppose that, or maybe you could put some meat on that of nostalgia and how it can be used to shape public policy or has been maybe?

Stephanie Coontz: 25:03

Well, you know, one of the things that I really feel after watching the last 10 years, both here and around the world, is that the only thing more dangerous than indulging that nostalgia is ignoring the real anxieties, the legitimate anxieties. That makes people susceptible to the demagogues and the interest groups that direct their attention away from the real current problems, but that's exactly the danger. I mean. Look at this Make America Great thing. There are big elements of truth in that. There have been a real decline in the kinds of programs that were put together by the New Deal and the Great Society to protect workers' rights, to limit the, you know, the prerogatives of big business and financial interests, and there's been a real decline in the real wages, especially of male workers without a college education, and there's been real backward slipping in terms of how much a family can count on being able to build a better future for their kids, and so what happens, though, is that we have been directed to think that what went wrong is exactly the opposite of what went wrong.

Stephanie Coontz: 26:24

When people talk about making America great again, they start saying things like we've got to lower taxes, we have to have more free enterprise, but if you go back to the 50s and 60s, taxes on the rich were much, much higher. Then there were more regulations against stock buybacks and financial manipulations that have hurt people. So they're being used quite consciously by a group of people who wants to continue to destroy the gains of the New Deal and the Great Society and who is blaming those things that we gained in that period for the things we have not gained and, of course, for some of the losses. So it's been. You know, it is so infuriating how completely they have distorted the history, while pretending that they're in favor of and advocates for the people who have been hurt by the left out by the technological and economic changes.

Shawn: 27:27

I actually think this is a perfect segue into talking a little bit about the way we never were, or at least components of it, because I think the important part of the phrase make America great again is the again part. It really depends on when that period of time is, and there seems to be this idea, or at least this is what I hear often is this idea that the 1950s were a wonderful time and if only we could freeze that decade and live in that decade in perpetuity, then that would be the great America. But it strikes me that there are perhaps elements of the 1950s, just like there were elements of the 1940s and the 1930s and and 1920s that were great and there were elements that were not so great. And then, when you overlay that traditionally underrepresented groups or marginalized groups, the 1950s were pretty horrific.

Stephanie Coontz: 28:15

Well, just from the point of view of families. Yes, Sorry, I interrupted. You Go ahead.

Shawn: 28:19

I think you're kind of picking up on where I'm going with this is what is it about the 1950s that is so important to certain groups and I'm talking, I suppose, about conservatives when it comes to making America great again?

Stephanie Coontz: 28:33

Well, I think that part of it has to do with very socially conservative ideas about race and gender, but another part of it has to do with the losses that I've talked about, the declines in real wages, and those two things have been conflated in ways that really deform our understanding of what was going on in the 50s. The 50s was a very interesting period. That was a period when real wages were rising every year, that the average young man were rising every year, that the average young man 25 to 30, could buy a house, a mortgage, on 15% of his monthly income. There were a lot of things like this going on. But there were also all sorts of other things, both in family and racial and, of course, with sexuality, and the tremendous discrimination against gay and lesbian and trans were just ignored. And, of course, the racism. But just even look at the marriage, the 1950s and 60s.

Stephanie Coontz: 29:34

It was not possible to rape your wife legally. Rape was forcible intercourse with someone other than your wife, forcible intercourse with someone other than your wife. Domestic violence was completely downplayed. There was studies, psychiatrists actually we have several studies in which they found out, they took case studies of domestic violence that usually started and they were right in this part of it that when a child the abuse had gone on for years, a child tried to intervene a young boy to protect his mother. And the psychiatrist then analyzed this. They said that actually the intervention disrupted a marital equilibrium, that the women involved were aggressive, they were frigid and the beating, the occasional beatings, restored the marital equilibrium. And the beating, the occasional beatings, restored the marital equilibrium. They allowed him to get his self-respect back as a man and they allowed her to stop feeling guilty for violating her gender roles. I mean, that's the kind of thing that was going on there. Sexual assault was not more rare. We have pretty clear that if we look at victim surveys that it has been going down steadily since the diversity of the family over the 1980s and 1990s.

Stephanie Coontz: 30:51

One of the things that cracks me up is the idea that this was a period that if only we could go back to those period we wouldn't have violence and stuff.

Stephanie Coontz: 31:00

Turns out that children raised in the seemingly more stable era of the 50s to the 70s actually had higher homicide rates in young adulthood than people born in the 1980s and 1990s. So all of these things have been used to actually destroy and distort what was good and bad about the 1950s. The other thing, of course, is the racism. It was terrible racism, but the idea that white people would be better off if we went back to that racism is completely wrong, because it was the racism that allowed them to end the Great Society programs and move down South and destroy the unions. That's why working class industrial jobs have moved down South, because you couldn't get unions formed there because of the racism. So all these myths about the 1950s start with a real sense and a legitimate sense of loss of people who feel like the progress that was going on right after World War II has not continued, it has not been delivered for us and they completely deform why that progress hasn't been going.

Shawn: 32:17

There's something else that I struggle with. I can imagine, and I would count myself among them. I could imagine and understand why people might look back at something like the 1950s and we can just bookend that. I can understand why people would look back on the 1950s and think that that is something we would like to emulate or return to because it's so mythologized as these you know, cookie cutter houses in these beautiful, safe neighborhoods, with kids riding their bikes and people baking for each other and going to church, and all these community groups.

Stephanie Coontz: 32:48

And greater exceptions of child abuse and incest, today. But yeah, go on.

Shawn: 32:55

That's where I'm going with.

Shawn: 32:55

This, though, is so that's the story, that we're sold right, and so, on one hand, if we think about returning to a simpler time in the 1950s, I can understand why people might picture I Love Lucy Right, although I Love Lucy is pretty cringy now.

Shawn: 33:11

But there's this other side of it, which is starting to become more clear, which is not just the things that you're mentioning, which are some of the abuse, and perhaps the homicide rates, et cetera, perhaps the homicide rates, etc. But also the policies that were deliberately instituted to not just maintain inequality but also to allow for dominant society to inflict very real harm on non-dominant society. So you have this one idealized version of what the 50s could look like, and I could see why people would want to return to that, but there's this other, more insidious version that's closer to reality, and I always thought people maybe just didn't understand what that real version was, but I'm starting to wonder if that's actually the goal is to return not just to the idealized version, but also to the policies that made it quite a dangerous time for certain people.

Stephanie Coontz: 34:00

Well, first of all, we should be very clear that those policies didn't start in the 1950s. You know, I mean, if you go back to the early 20th century and the tremendous violence of the Ku Klux Klan and the riots, it was a much more violent, repressive time toward African Americans also Jews and even Catholics at times and immigrants. You know, you know, 100 years before Donald Trump was calling them rapists, that's what both political parties were doing and deporting people. So there's wasn't. It's not as though the 50s initiated these things but the 50s continued them. And I think what you've got is you've got people who say the reason that things are bad now is because we started to change the things that were really bad about the first half of the 20th century. A lot of these people began this campaign in reaction to the New Deal and then later extended it in reaction to the Great Society.

Stephanie Coontz: 35:06

For the last, who's the woman who does the dark money investigation?

Stephanie Coontz: 35:14

There's been a whole group of people since the 1930s and since the Depression forced Roosevelt into making some real reforms about working through people's rights who have wanted to undo that, and they have combined themselves and aligned themselves with people who also just have this racist hatreds and these sexist ideas and these anti-gay and lesbian ideas, and the two of them have made common cause.

Stephanie Coontz: 35:46

And one of the things that I think is really scary today is that most of the right-wing economic agendas and even the anti-gay and lesbian agendas and the anti-female and the anti-abortion agendas do not represent real public sentiment, which is more pro-abortion than ever and more opposed to exclusionary policies than it used to be. So at this point I think we have a case where the economic and social agenda of the organized right-wing groups has become more and more dependent on a hardcore of pretty fanatical opponents of women's rights and gay rights and abortion and birth control, and they can't repudiate that constituency without well, they can't repudiate these legislative initiatives without losing that constituency. Without losing that constituency and you can see in the twisting and turning they're trying to do right now on abortion rights that you've almost got a case of the tail wagging the dog. They mobilize these nuts and racists for their own purposes and now sometimes they can't even get through what they want would prefer to focus on, because these people are their strongest supporters and many Americans are moving away from those ideas.

Shawn: 37:09

There's another component of this that I want to pick your brain a little bit about, and that is as we're starting to see what these policies could actually look like, as opposed to just kind of a general sense of returning to a simpler time. So when we see, you know, the fall of Roe, and when we see things like the IVF decision that came out of Alabama and the discussion now about potentially banning contraception, etc. We can imagine then what that world looks like. But then, when we put that in the context of the past and this is irrespective of the fact that homosexuality has always existed, abortion has always existed right, despite the arguments coming from the right.

Shawn: 37:49

So, irrespective of that, to return to a 1950s or to return to a simpler time pick your time would mean that in order to achieve that, we would have to actually take rights away, we would have to actually ignore innovation and technological advancement, social advancement. So that would be, in a sense, taking something away from people that maybe in the 1950s didn't even exist. So it wasn't a matter of taking something away at that time, whereas now it really is. So returning to that lifestyle today would be denying people rights and access to innovations that exist and that would continue to exist. Right, so to say that we're going to deny people access to contraception? Well, contraception is going to advance and change over time, and so not only are we taking it away, we're removing people from an advancing society, right? In that sense, then, a return to an earlier, a simpler time is very different than being in a simpler time, and it seems very dystopian to me in a way that I don't think that we're really talking about.

Stephanie Coontz: 38:50

Well, yes, I agree completely, and that's why they have to get so horribly vivid about all of the racism and the anti-immigration and the lies and the lies and the lies, because most people don't want to lose those gains, even people who are nervous about transsexuals, who are still prejudiced in important ways. They don't want to lose most of the gains. And so, if you're going to get them to go along with losing most of the gains, and so if you're going to get them to go along with losing most of the gains, you have to conduct a really big disinformation campaign and panic campaign.

Shawn: 39:29

What do you think? So imagine this. I don't want to say a return to a simpler time, because we're just never going to return to whatever that is. It wasn't innovations, etc. I'm wondering what that looks like. Have you given any thought to the consequences of what that could look like for women, for the queer community? In today's world? It's not as simple as picking us up and plopping us into a quote-unquote simpler time.

Stephanie Coontz: 40:07

Well, it would take massive repression and that is what, of course, is actually. When you look at the 2025 project and you look at the Supreme Court ruling that Trump has the presidents have immunity for even illegal acts. That's what's being set up. You know, I was an activist in the 60s and I used to get annoyed when fellow activists would accuse America of being a fascist society. You know, this was not a fascist society. It was an unjust society. Often, you know very unjust in terms of, for example, the way the police treated black people, but they didn't have to have a policeman on every corner, they didn't have concentration camps that we have a real fascist threat because they've gotten to the point where you could not take away the things you these kinds of things.

Shawn: 41:30

One of the things that I've heard is that there's this hysterical reaction to what is just commonplace politics or maybe not even commonplace politics, but just politics right that this is truly just a cyclical. This is maybe just a cyclical pattern repeating itself, right that there have been boom periods of democracy and there have been unfortunate periods of democratic backsliding and erosion or outright authoritarianism, not just in the United States but globally, and this is just cyclical. And I guess, in the context of the work that you do and kind of your understanding of history in this area, do you see these as cyclical patterns or do you see these as potential game changers and real threats?

Stephanie Coontz: 42:08

Well, I mean, if you want to talk about cyclical patterns, riding out storms you know there was the Holocaust, stuff like that in the past. So I don't think it makes much sense to say let's just ride it out. There's too much cost to just riding it out. Important to recognize that this is not predetermined, that the very things that are so scary about it are there because most Americans don't agree with what these people really want to do. If you look at the public policies, there's support. There's increased support, more than there ever was for gay, lesbian, trans rights, for abortion rights.

Stephanie Coontz: 42:59

People think that the corporations are taking too much money and that people should have more economic security if you do practical kinds of things.

Stephanie Coontz: 43:03

So that's why they have become so hysterical and so involved in disinformation and all of this sort of thing to distract people from the fact that they want them to vote for stuff that those people will not want to end up having much more conscious about reaching out, not writing people off or saying you're a racist swine or whatever it is, but actually reaching out and addressing their anxieties, showing them that we do have constructive programs.

Stephanie Coontz: 43:46

So you don't write it out, you reach out and you try to figure out how to explain these things to people in ways they can understand. Infusion kind of thing, where, instead of just talking about what's, you know the class issues or the race issues or the gender issues that you talk about how these divisions are being used to divide us and to profit the people who have been the very small number of people and corporations that benefit from these changes. So there's stuff that we can do. You don't want to write it out, you don't want to give up and you don't want to go down fighting. You want to actually win people over, and that's a long, hard process, but I think we can do it.

Shawn: 44:47

I'm excited that you brought up Ian Haney Lopez, and this is a plug because he is in about four episodes of the limited series that I'm doing After America. His work is fascinating and he's very good at deconstructing and explaining some of these concepts. So check out After America. But here's maybe another plug because let me kind of set the stage A lot of the policies that the right, particularly, is pushing right now in pursuit of whatever era they're hoping that we can return to, has to do with the structure of our relationships and particularly family.

Shawn: 45:20

We could mention a whole host of policies, right like book banning. The framing there has to do with, you know, protecting children and families and the rights of families. Talk about women primarily working out of the home, and by working out of the home meaning cooking, cleaning and raising children, the government determining how people can, how and when people can have children, etc. So a lot of this has to do with relationships and families and this is something that you have written about and are writing about. So you have a forthcoming book for Better and Worse. Did you want to tell me a little bit about this and maybe your thoughts as it relates to some of the policies that are being proposed now?

Stephanie Coontz: 45:58

What I'm trying to do with this book is to use some of the history that I know to help people understand why we are facing the kinds of challenges we do when it comes to marriage and personal relationships. You know, on the one hand, you have these social conservatives saying you know you've got to get married or you know civilization is doomed, and on the other hand, you have this heteronormative pessimism about, you know, heterosexual marriage, about heterosexual marriage, and you have deep, deep conflicts between husbands and wives and even same-sex couples over how to get an egalitarian relationship that allows you to combine work and family. And there's this tendency to either give up or to be enraged and to think that we have to just push it home because people just don't understand and they're being resistant. And what I'd like to do with this book, what I'm trying to do, is explain why this is so hard for us, that it's not necessarily that people are bad and that they don't want to do it. It's pretty clear that most Americans want to have egalitarian relationships. They want to be able to support a wide range of families. They're not going to want to get rid of single parent families and same-sex families, but they're looking for ways to build relationships in a social environment that seems to undermine relationships.

Stephanie Coontz: 47:35

So the phrase I use in the book is earworms All these earworms that we inherit that make it so hard to do the things that we need to do in order to get the kind of relationships we want and to make the changes that we need in our society in order to support the changes that we want. So that's what I'm trying to do. It's kind of a big job, but I think that it's so important for us to stop blaming toxic masculinity, nagging women, heteronormative prejudices, and start saying here's what we inherited and here's how it deforms the way we relate to each other, the way we understand our own situation. I'll give you just a very simple personal example. You know, in heterosexual relationships we're often talking about how men have this learned helplessness, you know, and they're not doing their job and they're not listening. But I'm very aware of where that comes from and why they were never trained to hear those kind of things.

Stephanie Coontz: 48:43

And as a woman, for example, I know that I have been trained to have a kind of learned helpfulness that actually may undercut anything I want my husband to do around the house, because I think it has to be done my way, and I don't think he understands my way. We hear different messages because of the way we've been socialized for a couple of hundred years, and it's very hard to hear the others because we don't have institutions that support us in building new ways of thinking and new tunes that we can carry instead of the old ones that are just running in our ears. And so, the more that we understand that and begin to make those changes in a way that says we can do this, we have done it, we have made changes before, it seems to me that that's where we need to be right now. That may be oversimplified, but that's my passion right now about writing this book.

Shawn: 49:44

So let me ask you this, in the context of the political environment that we're in and the potential policy goals or policies that we might be, you know, staring down in the very near future, as it relates to the rights, hopeful outcomes in the realm of family values, family tradition and this might be a question that you've answered either implicitly or explicitly already but what concerns you the most about either these policies and or what it means for the structure of American society?

Stephanie Coontz: 50:15

Well, I think a lot of it is obvious, and we've talked about that. You know all of the potential ways in which this is going. These things will actually damage the family life and the heterosexual marriages even that they claim that they want to protect. I mean, when you, for example, take away women's ability to combine work and family, they increasingly choose work over family. So you're not going to help marriage by driving women out of the workforce and back into the home. So I guess what? So, in addition to what we've already talked about, one of the things that really concerns me is the failure of some of the people that I agree with in terms of what we want to acknowledge, to understand and contextualize the sense of loss that we've been talking about, that many people feel when they look back at the post-war decades and the fear they feel looking into the future, and so that's why I think that we really have to think carefully about how we respond to people, how we talk to them, that we don't just talk to the already committed We've got to.

Shawn: 51:28

You know, we won't be able to win over the hardcore people, but there's a movable middle left in America that we have to learn to reach out to, and that's why I like the work of Ian Haney and Lopez and Heather B difficult time and I imagine a lot of other people do in this era, at this moment in our politics to not see some of these people advocating for some of these policies and holding this vision for America as not just threats but almost enemies. Right, and when you see someone as an enemy, it's very hard to imagine not only engaging with them in a diplomatic and respectful and dignified way, but even wanting to right, and this just makes sense. But what you're arguing is that we have to do that right.

Stephanie Coontz: 52:20

Yeah.

Shawn: 52:22

What does that look like?

Stephanie Coontz: 52:25

Well, there's interesting research that's been done about like slow canvassing, when you go around and you don't tell people what your opinions are but you ask them. And you don't tell people what your opinions are, but you ask them and you share experiences. And instead of saying you know you're wrong immigrants are not like that you tell a story about an immigrant that you know, who has worked hard and what that has meant. They found that this can move elections. Some of the studies show, I believe, 10% increase in more progressive votes or at least in more anti-regressive votes. That makes a huge difference. That makes the difference make or break difference in many elections.

Stephanie Coontz: 53:07

And working on the outside, doing the sort of things that allow you to connect with people even as you try to change things I think that's just. We have to look for more ways to do that and there are ways to do that and we have done that over the years on the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement. We tried to reach out to people with ways that would change them. For example, I was quite an activist in the movement against the war in Vietnam and we would have debates. Some people would say end imperialism, let Vietnam win. And we would say support our boys in Vietnam, bring them home alive, because that's the best way to end the war in Vietnam and get the US out of there. But that was something that people could relate to. So, to the extent that you look for ways that you can relate without compromising your principles, you look for ways to talk to people so that, by the time you get to your disagreements, you've discovered what your agreements are. These are the strategies we need to really focus on right now. I think.

Shawn: 54:16

Okay, final question, really quick what's something interesting you've been reading, watching, listening to or doing lately? And it doesn't have to be related to this topic, but it can be.

Stephanie Coontz: 54:26

Well doing is the big question. We live out in the country and my husband's idea of a farm to feed the family will actually feed a barracks. So this is the time of year when I'm trying to figure out how to process all of this food and having a lot of fun going out foraging for mushrooms and digging geoducks and clams and we have three freezers that we use when we live off the food we grow all year.

Stephanie Coontz: 54:56

We have friends who say that comes the apocalypse, they're headed for our place. So it's very rewarding break from the kind of research that I do writing on my book and I just, I, just I love doing that and I love cooking for people as a way of expressing love for me. So I have a lot of people to dinner and impress our garden produce on them.

Shawn: 55:23

Oh, these are all good things to do. We live in the same part of the country. I did not know that geoduck was a thing here.

Stephanie Coontz: 55:32

Oh, my geoducks. I mean they, they are the most exciting. Well, they're not exciting to dig because they're they're very, very deep, but they are very exciting when you can actually get down far enough to get one wow, I didn't, I didn't know.

Shawn: 55:48

Also, yeah, we're doing the same thing. We're doing a lot of. What do we do with all this stuff? So we've been eating a lot of quick pickles lately.

Stephanie Coontz: 55:54

Pickles. Yeah, we make kimchi and we dry things and we freeze a bunch.

Shawn: 55:59

Oh, I haven't thought of kimchi. That's a good idea. Okay, stephanie, thanks so much for the conversation and I look forward to the new book.

Stephanie Coontz: 56:08

Well, thank you, well, thank you.

Shawn: 56:15

The idealized past that the MAGA movement and much of the Republican Party is trying to reclaim is not just a myth. It's a dangerous myth. The policies and rhetoric they promote harken back to eras defined by inequality, discrimination, oppression and violence, and while they claim to want to return to greatness, what they're actually seeking is a reassertion of control over women, people of color and the LGBTQ plus community. It's critical to recognize that longing for a past that never truly existed doesn't solve today's problems. It actually creates new ones. Regressing to an imagined, idealized past is detrimental, and not just for marginalized communities, but for the country and democracy as a whole. When we attempt to roll back the clock, we reinstate systems of inequality that stifle innovation, limit opportunities and create deep divisions in society. Limit opportunities and create deep divisions in society. Marginalizing groups of people weakens the entire social fabric by perpetuating injustice and inequality, eroding trust in institutions and fueling unrest.

Shawn: 57:24

Democracy thrives on inclusion, progress and the recognition of individual rights. Without these elements, the system falters. Progress allows us to adapt to new challenges, become more resilient as a society and create a country where all citizens have the opportunity to contribute fully. By advancing rights and fostering equity, we strengthen the foundation of democracy, ensuring it reflects the values of justice, freedom and opportunity for everyone. Progress isn't just about fairness. It's about creating a stronger, more cohesive and dynamic society where everyone can thrive. Maga is determined to undo all of that. All right, check back next week for another episode of Deep Dive Chat. Soon, folks. Thank you, thank you.