What Was the Time That "America Was Great" That We're Trying to Get Back To?
October 10, 2017
Alex Henderson, Periodista and Technical Writer
The United States was never perfect by any means. The 1940s and 1950s were not a lot of fun if you were black and lived in Mississippi, where you were subjected to Jim Crow apartheid laws and terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan (funny how neocons believe that only Muslims can be terrorists). That said, the American middle class was the envy of the world after World War II. Jobs that paid well, both white-collar and blue-collar, were plentiful. The programs of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal (social security, pro-union/labor, a minimum wage, home ownership aggressively promoted, heavier taxes for the 1%) were a raging success. Whether you went to college or trade school, there were more paths to getting ahead financially in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
But thanks to trickle-down economics, neoliberalism, Reaganomics, outsourcing, downsizing, corporatism, union busting, etc., the U.S. has been declaring war on its middle class since the 1980s. The more the U.S. has undermined the New Deal and pandered to the 1%, the worse conditions have become for big chunks of the U.S. population. In terms of upward mobility, countries like Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland and Norway are way ahead of the U.S. at this point.
Some argue that modern-day Republicans want to return to the ‘50s. And my response is that it isn’t the 1950s they want to return to; it’s the 1850s. Modern-day Republicans and the Tea Party would not like Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s America, where big chunks of the population were union members, the super-rich paid much higher tax rates, and banks were more strictly regulated. In some respects, the U.S. was much more socialistic in the 1950s than it is now. Eisenhower, like FDR, was smart enough to realize that free-market capitalism fares much better when you have a strong middle class that can afford to buy the products.
If you really want to “make America great again,” vote for people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alan Grayson.
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