The Honeymooners: The Imaginary Greatness That MAGA Wants to Return To

Ever see The Honeymooners? Unless you’re at least as old as I am, it’s unlikely you ever saw the TV show when it was first broadcast in the mid-50s. It starred Jackie Gleason and, in lesser but crucial roles, Art Carney, Audrey Meadows, and Joyce Randolph. I was young, and today can barely recall seeing it on our TV set at the time; it wasn’t a parental favourite like some other shows, but I have since seen many episodes, most lately through the DVD set of the series. I watched several of them recently because I wanted to look back to that so-called ‘great’ time every conservative seems to want to return to. The easiest way was via the archives of TV shows, because it’s as much a fantasy as any TV sitcom ever was.

For all its later relevance, The Honeymooners ran for a single season of 39 episodes in the fall-spring of 1955-56. Perhaps you’ve caught episodes on YouTube or some streaming service (if not, please look for some to understand the context here). For something as short-lived as it was, The Honeymooners had a large impact on the public zeitgeist, one still felt today, albeit in an unexpected place: the MAGAverse.*

That, of course, includes the Maple MAGA: the followers of the puerile rage farming Trump mimic Pierre PoiLIEvre: his extremist, anti-Canadian, pro-Putin followers. They, too, want to return to that imaginary patriarchy. Misogyny runs as deep in the CPC ideology as it does in the Repugnicans’. And in Canada, that’s not merely unfortunate: it’s scary and tragic. We used to think Canadians were better and smarter than that.

Trump himself laid out when he wanted to take America back to in his political time machine: back before WWI, back to the age of the before civil rights, before women had the vote, before environmental protections, before vaccines and antibiotics, before DEI and equality legislation, back to an age of unfettered monopoly capitalists and oligarchs when “millions of laborers [were] working for 1 to 2 dollars per 14-16 hour day” and the USA was on the gold standard —the same precious metal that Trump has smeared all over the Oval Office and his own apartment in the most tacky, tasteless displays of taste ever seen.**

In a newspaper interview before the 2016 election, he said,

“If you look back, it really was, there was a period of time when we were developing at the turn of the century which was a pretty wild time for this country and pretty wild in terms of building that machine, that machine was really based on entrepreneurship,” Trump told the paper.
“And then I would say, yeah, prior to, I would say during the 1940s and the late ’40s and ’50s we started getting, we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war, we were pretty much doing what we had to do, yeah around that period,” he added.
Perhaps by sheer coincidence (though likely not), this happens to be the era before extensive civil rights legislation was passed by Congress.

The dictator Trump’s “golden age” fantasy isn’t new; it’s been the talking point and wishful thinking of rightwing politicians for decades, revived every time someone else gets rights, equality, or legislative protection. The only difference is in how far back their time machine goes.

Readers might recall the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign of the mid-1960s, and if you were alive then, may also recall the folk group, The Chad Mitchell Trio, singing their 1964 satirical song, Barry’s Boys. In it there are the lines, “We’re the bright young men who want to go back to 1910/We’re Barry’s boys…” As Musicianwages.com notes:

The lyrics of the song highlight the desire of these young men to go back to a time they perceive as simpler and more secure. They long for a return to the values and principles of the past, where the distinction between the rich and the poor was more pronounced. The song implies that these young men are nostalgic for a time when economic disparities were clear-cut and social hierarchies were accepted.
The chorus of “Barry’s Boys” mocks the blind loyalty and lack of critical thinking among these young supporters. It features lines like, “We’re the kids with a cause, yes, a government like grandmama’s” and “We’re the new kind of youth at your alma mater, back to silver standard and solid Goldwater.” These lines suggest that these young men espouse conservative ideologies without fully understanding their implications or consequences.

MAGA cultists generally don’t want to go as far back as Trump does: they’re too attached to their creature comforts. They don’t see much on TV that encourages nostalgia for a time before Walmart, refrigeration, telephones, TV, radio, airplanes, or even electricity. They, instead, generally look back little more than half a century to those early days of postwar TV: to the 1950s and the decade around The Honeymooners; the era of McCarthy, the John Birch Society, and the KKK. And, of course, the patriarchy.

The inherent misogyny in this and other contemporary series appeals to MAGA; “To the moon, Alice! To the moon!” Ralph threatens his wife when she disagrees with or corrects him. That Ralph never actually hits Alice is irrelevant to the MAGA view of the patriarchal past: they want to return to the “greatness” when women are subservient, men made all the rules, and the racial segregation of the era returns.

However, MAGA don’t idolize the working class people in the show; they don’t envy their paycheque-to-paycheque lives; they don’t aspire to work as bus drivers or sewer workers or live in barren two-room apartments in dingy walkups. Nope: MAGA wants Fox Newz, the internet, Trump’s UnTruth Social, Xitter, QAnon, and other rightwing social media echo chambers and conspiracy-spewing, disinformation machines.

It’s only just a part of that cultural vision of those bygone days the MAGAverse wants to “make great again.” It is, more educated people know, a pale figment of a fevered rightwing imagination. None of it is real outside their heads. The world was never like TV showed it, and never is. TV is entertainment, and sometimes art, but never reality. But for the men and women with low self-esteem, the MAGA cultists, the incels, and the Talibangelists, what those old shows display is the promised land.

The Honeymooners was only one of several similar TV shows that projected an image of a patriarchal world where men worked and women stayed home to clean and manage the household. Leave It To Beaver, I Love Lucy, Father Knows Best, The Andy Griffith Show, Hazel, The Donna Reed Show, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Dennis The Menace, The Danny Thomas Show, The Jetsons, On the Buses, and others. The many western, detective and police shows of the era all had women in subservient roles. So did most of the movies. And, of course, all the major characters in them were white. People of colour were often servants, janitors, sidekicks, or comic relief.***

As one site noted,

Was the honeymooner abusive?
How often has Alice been frustrated, angry, in tears, or wanted to run away from her apartment? We didn’t see physical abuse, but there was a lot of physical violence. Ralph’s mother-in-law is always reminding him of his weight and that he’s a bad provider. Alice studied to be a secretary before marrying Ralph. She had 12 siblings and a father who never worked. These two characters have lost their dreams.

And, as The Artifice notes (emphasis added),

For those Americans who sought reassurance of the role of the family in the Cold War era, television showed them exactly that.“…Television projected a vision of American life into the home that could easily be emulated, in part at least, in those places in society that already resembled the ideal…” (Gilbert 141). Though millions of Americans did not have the lifestyle depicted on the small screen, television show families from the 1950s reflected idealized gender roles of the time period, which set an aspirational norm, even if it did not reflect reality.
Recent scholarship in gender and psychology has addressed strict gender roles, and concluded that they influence the future behavior of children. During the 1950’s, it was of the utmost importance to socialize boys strictly as boys. Through these television shows, boys were shown how “real men” were supposed to act. These shows display clear differences between men and women, with women as subordinate. For boys in the 1950s, “being a man” and never doing anything that anyone could consider feminine was a lesson taught to them by their fathers and by the popular culture of the time.****

These weren’t necessarily bad shows; like their contemporaries, they were mostly meant for light entertainment; for fun, not propaganda, not ideology, not for a culture war. They generally reflected the cultural ideals and aspirations of many people at the time, albeit in a sanitized way that seldom portrayed reality. It wasn’t until the mid-late 1960s that shows with women started to appear as the central figures, as the stars, as independent and, importantly, childless (The Mary Tyler Moore Show broke the patriarchal mould in 1970). And at the same time, people of colour and indigenous people started appearing in roles equal to their white counterparts.

And to be fair, The Honeymooners depicted married life as “non-idyllic and gritty” and “highlighting the plight of working-class married couples” that ran counter to the “married bliss” shown in most other contemporary shows. It was also usually funny, especially when Ralph (Gleason) got payback for his frequent schemes and attempted cons. And the frequently excellent acting of the four major characters and their interactions tended to blur the political and cultural backdrop.

However, as Religionnews notes,

In the 1950s, television largely mirrored the prevalent concept of the American family. Popular shows like “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” depicted the family as a heterosexual, patriarchal, churchgoing unit with chaste children. But in the 1960s, family depictions began to change. And so did America’s thinking.

Included among the proto-feminist shows of the 1960s — not actually challenging the status quo, but offering sometimes subtle or even sly alternative visions — were, according to ThoughtCo,  The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966), The Lucy Show (1962–1968), Bewitched (1964–1972), That Girl (1966–1971), Julia (1968–1971), as well as The Addams Family and The Munsters (and, let’s not forget the groundbreaking Star Trek…). But MAGA wants nothing to do with them, nor the sexual revolution, the wave of secularism, and the political resistance that accompanied the 1960s.

MAGA — and PoiLIEvre’s Maple MAGA — want to live in an isolated fantasy world where white men are in control, white people have the best jobs, white families practice a banal pseudo-Christian faith (that ignores the words of Jesus) by attending church every Sunday, only conservatives ever form a government, children are quiet and obedient except when their hijinks are needed for comic relief, and women, like people of colour, know their place as subservient homemakers and baby factories. They want a world where outsiders, let alone immigrants, don’t appear near the white-picket homes to make problems or challenge the status quo; where drunks are funny and harmless; where police don’t shoot or taser people because crime is minimal, or non-existent.

It’s a fantasy, but not a benign one, not one rich in compassion or empathy. Not one we want to relive. And it is not the “great” America anyone imagines it was. Intelligent Canadians should not fall for the imaginary, misogynist MAGA future.

Notes:

* The single year of the series — 1955-56 — was the culmination of more than 100 previous skits that Gleason began as early as 1950 and was broadcast on different shows until it became the dedicated TV show in ’55. 107 of these “lost” episodes have been released on DVD and many of them can also be found on streaming services or YouTube. Contemporary with The Honeymooners were The $64,000 Question, Toast of the Town, Disneyland, Colgate Variety Hour, I Love Lucy, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Jack Benny Show, General Electric Theatre, I’ve Got a Secret, You Bet Your Life, Dragnet, The Millionaire, The Perry Como Show, Gunsmoke, and others. The Honeymooners ran every Saturday at 8:30 p.m.

** In 2023, Time magazine published a piece titled, “Another Trump Presidency Would Be Even Worse Than You Think.” The writer warned, “‘Trump 2.0’ won’t be as bad as many think. It will be worse.” And he was almost right: it is worse than even the writer imagined. America is now a pro-Putin dictatorship. But this is what MAGA voted for, knowing Trump would bring it about. This is their “great” America.

*** On The Buses was a British sitcom about working-class bus drivers that ran for 74 episodes through seven seasons, from 1969 to 1973. It was modestly sexist and full of stereotypes, albeit not as much as the Carry On films, although some writers claim they were not merely “slap and tickle seaside humour” but “definitely feminist.”

*** The article also notes:

Boys during the 1950s were surrounded by this rigidity of manhood. This hyper-masculine mold that they were supposed to fit into consequently meant devaluing the role of women. It is possible that such television expectations contributed to the development of violent tendencies, because these boys growing up watching the men of the 1950s were not raised to value women, but rather to devalue them to make themselves seem more masculine. The repetitive exposure to these television shows, alongside with the patriarchal society that was solidified even more during the post-WWII years, created a highly constructed identity for men in America.

The television shows of the 1950s may have encouraged such violent outcomes. There was a lot of pressure on the boys to grow up as men, being ridiculed for any behavior that was not masculine and knowing that they would one day be the primary breadwinner for their family. There was also a clear gender difference growing up as boys in the 1950s, and since they were raised in a way to devalue “women’s work” they did not see girls and women as important parts of society. The television shows of the 1950s may not have shown violence to boys but it shows that subordination of women and hyper-masculinity are normal, which is the exact mindset that can lead to violent tendencies.

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