The current Writers Guild of America strike reminds us of the lasting effects of major political and labor action in the entertainment industry on the kind of material that gets produced. The most dramatic instance of this is, of course, the 1950s McCarthyist red-baiting, which resulted in the Hollywood blacklist. Not only did the anti-communist witch hunts directly alter the course of hundreds of lives, but they also radically impacted film and television as a medium — and, consequently, the whole culture.

The conformity and conservatism of the 1950s were manifest across all mainstream media, but especially in sanitized television shows celebrating the American, white, middle-class nuclear family — think Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. These shows imprinted themselves on the conservative political imagination. When politicians urge us, as Ronald Reagan did when first running for president, to “make America great again,” the ideal in their minds is the one modeled by these fantasy shows.

But contrary to popular understanding, the conservatism of the ’50s isn’t simply “old-fashioned.” It came on the heels of a somewhat more progressive period in film and television, which drew to a close with the intensification of Hollywood red-baiting.