Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., is seen after a meeting of the House Republican Conference at the Capitol Hill Club on July 19, 2022. | Source: Tom Williams / Getty
Every day, white conservatives remind us that what they mean by “make America great again” is they want to return the nation to a time when white men ran society and everyone else knew their place. They also remind us why they believe so wholeheartedly that America was and is “great”—they’re white.
On Thursday, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wisconsin) said the quiet part out loud on the House floor when he called for America to return to the America that existed in the 1960s. Actually, maybe he said the loud part out loud.
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The quiet part would identify 1960s America as a nation of fierce racial oppression where Black people couldn’t look white people in the eye without risking a lynching, and we couldn’t enter most quality establishments through the front door because that was a Caucasian privilege.
For Black people in the ’60s, America was fire hoses, German shepherds, church bombings, cross burnings and assassinations of our leaders. Grothman conveniently failed to mention any of that—he just talked about how women were barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen before “the angry feminist movement” up and “took the purpose out of the man’s life.”
He also specifically condemned civil rights icon Angela Davis, but he managed to do so while keeping the anti-Black “quiet part” relatively quiet.
From the Daily Beast:
In a House floor speech that could have been lifted from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Grothman went after supporters of government-funded childcare programs and said President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty “took the purpose out of the man’s life, because now you have a basket of goodies for the mom.” He added, “They’ve taken away the purpose of the man to be part of a family. And if we want to get America back to, say, 1960, where this was almost unheard of, we have to fundamentally change these programs.”
Grothman said “the breakdown of the family” was caused by the U.S. government in the 1960s and “people like Angela Davis, well-known communist, people like the feminists who were so important in the 1960s.”
“Every year, of course, I am lobbied by people who want the government, therefore, to take an even greater role in their children’s life—be it daycare, be it pre-school, be it after-school programs, whatever. They clearly want the children raised by the government,” Grothman said. “I hope the [White House] press corps picks up on this. And I hope Republican and Democrat leadership put together some sort of plan for January in which we work our way back to where America was in the 1960s.”
Again, Grothman was very careful to ignore segregation, Jim Crow, and everything else that came with the vehement hate Black people experienced in the ’60s, but his rant on the House floor was still a verbal love letter to white and patriarchal oppression. It’s also interesting how Republican legislators constantly bash the government as if they aren’t part of the government. He characterizes the existence of public schools and government-funded daycare programs as children being “raised by the government” as if the people who are actually watching and teaching the children are legislative policymakers and not civilian employees who happen to be working government jobs. In fact, Grothman also praised the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which means he believes the government has no business providing daycare, but it is the government’s business to force women to have babies they don’t want.
At the end of the day, this is the same type of conservative delusion that paved the way for the war against critical race theory, DEI, affirmative action and “wokeness.” It’s the complete omission of historic (and current) systemic racism and pro-white male oppression that made these programs and policies necessary in the first place that allows white people to view America and American history through rose-colored glasses.
When we say “America was never great,” we’re talking about the version of America Glenn Grothman and his MAGA ilk wish to return us to. History is written and told by the victors, and it’s celebrated by the people who benefited from being on the privileged side. Nobody else wants to hop into that time machine.
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