And who would question the special leader that was Abraham Lincoln, a man who pursued the seemingly inconsistent goals of ending slavery AND keeping the US united. He prioritized these goals above the rule of law and even over his own life. We lost hundreds of thousands of Americans, brothers fighting brothers, but Lincoln elevated the nation's survival and soul over the lives and souls of Americans themselves. That has been judged the correct decision by most, but it was certainly a courageous and rare type of leadership. He was not defending a throne. Telling people to arm themselves to defend their sovereign was nothing new. He was defending a collective and that community's shared (if contentious) ideas of elected government. The result was a bruised but living United States with an end to slavery. But it would be another century before real progress was made for the descendants of those slaves to approach real equality.
And women were not "given" the right to vote until the 20th century. (Rights exist, they are not "given." In effect, the government stopped denying women the right to vote.) But the struggle for women to obtain equality has continued as well.
And in more recent decades, the fight for equality for LGBTQ Americans has marched forward as well.
Women and minorities always struggle to obtain and maintain equal status. The open society we live in allows those struggles to continue, to grow, and to gain ground. This is why we are special relative to other countries. But we are far from perfect.
In the last hundred years of our country, we have seen women get the right to vote, laws passed to protect people from lynchings and other forms of persecution for their race, laws passed to protect women from violence, divorce become obtainable to anyone, electricity in every home, indoor plumbing in every home, cars in every drive-way (mostly), air conditioning for those who want it, air planes for average people to travel by, interstate highways connecting the country, the Internet connecting the world, cable TV (causing us to waste hours of our lives), a ruling that same-sex marriages cannot be treated as a lower class of family, vaccines for previously deadly and debilitating illnesses, and thousands of other advancements to improve the quality and length of life. So with all this progress, WHY IN THE HOT HOLY HELL WOULD SOMEONE THINK THIS?
What's so great about Polio? Why would you long for segregation and lynchings? Who wants to live without electricity, indoor plumbing, air conditioning, and the Internet? Who could possible be nostalgic for outhouses, prohibition, and food poisoning from crappy refrigeration?
Ignorant people, that's who! It's people who cannot stand to see "others" getting an equal footing: African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ individuals are growing in numbers and in stature, and that makes some white men (and some white women) very nervous. Maybe it's the same reason a dirty cop never wants to go to prison. People who abuse power, then lose it, are reasonably fearful that the new people in power will enforce retribution. We'll see.
There will always be nostalgia for olden times, but America has never been a country that looks back; it has always faced the future and moved into it with grit and determination even if not always undaunted. These folks need to get Above Their Raisin' and stop dwelling in the fantasy past that they imagine existed. The past sucked. It sucked more for women and minorities, but it sucked for white men too. No one in this country, least of all that white dude on the tractor, has any reason to lament the future. You can still get your farm subsidy while decrying "welfare queens" and go home to your air conditioned home with your big-screen and watch satellite TV while simultaneously playing with your iPad using your WiFi Internet service. The big, scary Black man in the White House isn't going to take any of that away from you.
