FIFTIES NOSTALGIA.  Michael Barone sees it in contemporary economic liberals.

Still, liberals pine for what I call America’s Midcentury Moment. It was the product of World War II, lasting from 1940 until the mid-1960s when the wartime experience wore off and the emerging baby boomers led culture and politics in another direction. For those of us who grew up in those years, the Midcentury Moment seemed the norm in American experience. But in fact it was the result of a unique time in U.S. history, when a united nation was mobilized for total war and Americans were, literally or figuratively, put into uniform.

And, having won that war, without serious damage to the physical capital of the country, in a position where monopoly industries could make a lot of money to buy labor peace with the unions without fear that consumers could find cheaper, and sometimes better, products from overseas.

This massive mobilization reshaped our national mores for a generation in ways that we find hard to comprehend. At one time or another 16 million Americans served in the military. The equivalent proportion of today’s population would be 38 million Americans serving in the military over the next three and a half years—something none of us can imagine. Nor can we envision ourselves paying taxes at World War II rates, accepting rationing of butter and meat and rubber, doing without new cars, or putting most of our wage and salary increases into low-interest government bonds.

In that last sentence is the germ of a new Victory Program, by the way. It's called Defund the Chinese.  Instead of spending $100 on a new gadget that will fall apart within a year, buy a Series EE bond.

Victory in World War II conferred enormous prestige on the leaders of the big units—big government, big business, big labor—who had led the war effort at home. No wonder that levels of confidence in the big units and their leaders remained high for a generation—higher, I suspect, than they had ever been before the Midcentury Moment and higher, certainly, than they have been since.

No wonder, also, that Americans in the Midcentury Moment were unusually conformist, content to be very small cogs in very large machines: They married and bore children at record rates for an advanced society; they worked as organization men and flocked to mass-produced suburbs; they worshipped in seemingly interchangeable churches. This was an America that celebrated the average, the normal, the regular.

The liberals who long to return to the Midcentury Moment seem to forget that it was a time of enormous cultural uniformity that stigmatized being unmarried or unchurched or gay. The huge menu of lifestyle choices from which we can choose today was a very short menu with very few choices then.

Now imagine the economic liberals making common cause with the Moral Majority ...