They’re fascists. Literally.

They want to oppress in order to gain total control. Because that’s what fascists do.

So no, the 50s don’t really fit the bill for what they’re being clear they want. In the 50s the middle class was strong because we taxed the everloving fuck out of the wealthy. That’s not what they’re going for here.

No. They absolutely do not want to go back to the 50s. If anything they’re trying to go back to the Gilded Age. They don’t want any part of the 50s.

They’re the Technocracy movement, started in the 1930s and stewing as a behind the scenes backer of conservative movements, such as the heritage foundation

Wikipedia link. If you read through that, you’ll find a lot of the seemingly random shit they say, like taking the Panama canal, Greenland, and Canada, it’s all related. This is the end goal

I think they want to remove Atheism and all associated things with it from society. Trump calls himself christian, and his followers (voter base) are evangelical Christians.

Evangelical Christians …

• believe once Israel builds a temple the judgement day comes
• all people who do not believe in Jesus is the personified God (or something like that) will go to eternal hell
• believe in free market capitalism and hate all kinds of communism and state control in economy (even science)

And these evangelical gospels align well with Trump.

I gave up on trying to understand because its all just racist, sexist, xenophobic bullshit with no substance of thought behind it. It’s all the loudest, dumbest people taking control of the government while ultra-wealthy, straight-up evil oligarchs try to steer the idiots to their benefit. I stopped trying to convince MAGA-folks of anything because they are incapable of listening and thinking for themselves, and instead I’m working on my pistol aim and developing a mutual aide community.

They used to like back in the eighties and nineties but it keeps getting pushed back further. They are targeting the late 1800’s I think about now.

Try 1830s

The want the racist, sexist social aspects of the 50s, but not the economic ones. LBJ’s New Deal allowed a thriving middle class to actually exist at the expense of wealthy people having as much money in their hoard. Can’t have that!

Other people have more detailed and factual answers, but a good heuristic is “there must be outgroups for the law to bind but not protect, and in groups for the law to protect but not bind”. That’s what they want. They want to do what they want while women and queers and non-whites are subjugated. They want to say something inappropriate and touch their women coworkers without consent, and know if she raises her voice she’ll be fired.

They are scum.

More like 1850s laws where they could own people they deemed lesser, with a 1950s Leave it to Beaver Coat of paint slapped on top… Where women couldn’t get divorced without specific cause or have their own bank accounts, and everyone was pretending to be Christian due to the red scare

The voters were probably thinking about the nostalgia they had as a result of the progressive eras, because they’d get all the benefits, while also not having do deal with racism since they’re white.

Very much the opposite. The US in the 1950s was a product of two things: 1) 20 consecutive years of Democratic presidents (Roosevelt from 1932 to 1945, then Truman til 1952), and 2) WW2, which put the whole country to work on war production, including large numbers of women who previously hadn’t been part of the workforce. Eisenhower (Republican) was president from 1952 to 1960 but other than revving up the cold war, he didn’t change stuff so much, it seems to me, though it was before my time.

Roosevelt in turn was sort of an antimatter version of Donald Trump (he clobbered the 1% for the benefit of the 99% instead of the other way around). He’d be considered extreme left by today’s standards. He was re-elected 3 times before dying in office on his way to his 5th, 6th, 7th etc terms. Republicans HATED him. After his death they passed a Constitutional amendment limiting presidents to 2 terms (Dems were ok with the amendment because they feared a similarly popular Republican staying in office forever, as might have happened with Ronald Reagan, and now Trump wants a 3rd term).

Ever since the Eisenhower era but accelerating enormously under Reagan, Republicans have been trying to reverse Roosevelt policies that persisted through the rest of the 20th century and are partly still around despite those efforts.

So I would say they goai is more like the pre-Roosevelt era, like the 1920s. The Great Depression started in 1928 and resulted in near-revolution and Roosevelt getting elected by an overwhelming margin in 1932. But before the depression was the so-called Gilded Age where super rich people could do pretty much whatever they wanted, and that if anything is the current Republican dream.

Roosevelt went by his initials FDR, which was kind of an unusual thing but whatever, people went along with it even if they thought it was a little bit weird. Truman was Roosevelt’s last VP so he became president through FDR’s death rather than campaigning for it directly (he was re-elected in 1948). The next two Dem presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, used their initials (JFK and LBJ) the way FDR did, not because it was anything like a normal thing to do, but because they wanted to remind people of FDR, who was still very popular despite being long dead. There is a good book about post-WW2 US political history called “In The Shadow of FDR” by Walter Leuchtenberg that explains this. I see it’s now been expanded to go through 2010 (Obama) but I had to read it in history class some time before that. Anyway it’s good.

There was once a joke about a family at its breakfast table in the 1930s. Dad asks the 6yo kid what he wants to be when he grows up. The kid answers “I want to be president of the US!”. The dad angrily responds “Why? What’s wrong with Roosevelt?”.

Anyway, returning to an era shaped by Roosevelt is the absolute last thing the GOP wants or ever wanted.

Do you have any examples of what you mean?

Read the Project 2025 (it’s a 900+page brick and expensive, but the PDF is freely downloadable), you will get a better understanding what they may want to achieve.

Saying that as an EU citizen, if this matters.