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The opposition party’s responses to presidential State of the Union addresses tend not to go well. Some of the speeches have gone so horribly, there’s been talk of a “curse.”
Last night’s Republican response from Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds wasn’t nearly that dramatic, though part of the GOP governor’s message stood out as notable.
"Like you, I just watched the president’s address. I listened as the governor of our state, as a mom and grandmother of 11, who’s worried our country is on the wrong track. We’re now one year into his presidency, and instead of moving America forward, it feels like President Biden and his party have sent us back in time — to the late 70s and early 80s.”
Such rhetoric hardly came as a surprise. Americans were worried about inflation in the 1970s, just like now. The public had reason to fear expansionist aggression from the USSR in the 1980s, and similar fears related to Russia have re-emerged of late.
The comparisons are not, however, altogether credible. For example, inflation in 2022 isn’t nearly as bad as it was in the 1970s. For that matter, unlike the fears from the Cold War, the Soviet Union collapsed decades ago.
But even more important is the underlying irony of the Republican response to Biden’s address — because there is an agenda that would send the United States “back in time,” but it’s not the White House’s.
On reproductive rights, one of the Republican Party’s principal goals is to turn back the clock to before 1973.
On voting rights, GOP officials have invested unnerving energy to impose the kind of voting restrictions unseen in the United States since the Jim Crow era.
Looking over Sen. Rick Scott’s agenda, a picture emerges of a party that celebrates a bygone era in which officials didn’t much care about the climate crisis, saw no need for affirmative action, and largely failed to acknowledge the existence of transgender people.
Even the idea of an “America First” agenda, embraced by too much of the contemporary GOP, has antecedents in 1941, not 2021.
If taking the country “back in time” is a goal worth avoiding, the Iowa governor and her party have some explaining to do.