Upon examination, it isn't all that difficult to understand why people from my parents' generation, or more specifically white people from my parents' generation, seem so fascinated by the America of yesteryear. They grew up in a country which was extraordinarily prosperous and powerful, and their demographics ensured them a secure place within it. That power and prosperity, however, was the product of very specific historical circumstances.
After the second World War, almost all of the industrial powers of the time were left in ruins. Germany, France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Japan all had relatively large industrial capacities which were crippled by the war, and while it wasn't an economic power at the time China was devastated on a similar scale. The fact of the matter was that the practicability of large scale manufacturing in those countries was very limited as they demobilized and tried to rebuild their industrial infrastructure.
In short, industrial production was easiest in the United States, which aside from a naval base in Hawaii had been essentially untouched by the war and which had spent six years aggressively building up its industrial capacity to supply the war effort. The only countries at the time that might have competed with the US for that business had been on the front lines in the war.
That unique state of affairs, made possible by the indescribable destruction of World War 2, put the American worker in an unusual position of power. The political response to the Great Depression had recently empowered labor unions, and that power peaked as America became the only feasible place to mass produce. Because companies had limited options with regard to production elsewhere, the workers as a whole were able to bargain for an uncommonly large proportion of the benefits.
It was the prostration of the industrially active world by the war that allowed the American middle classes to become so prosperous, and the consumer driven economy to develop. I should point out here that law, custom, and the internal politics of labor unions all tended to concentrate the benefits in the hands of white people. This is important not just in the interest of historical honesty and acknowledgement of the treatment of nonwhites in this country. It has a significant bearing on the reaction of White America to the decline of the industrial base.
That decline was, after all, inevitable. Considered in the above light, it seems obvious that eventually other countries would rebuild. Their industrial capacity would be restored to an extent that allowed their products to compete for world markets, which put American workers and the companies they worked for in an awkward position.
The workers had bargained for a significant proportion of the surplus they had helped create, but as American companies once more faced serious competition at home and abroad the available surplus diminished. The uncompromising logic of profit and competition dictated that the companies either had to make the American workers settle for less, or use fewer of them. They chose a combination of the two.
In the time it took for that process to play out, an entire - and in fact an enormous - generation of Americans was born and came of age entirely after the war. They had no frame of reference to viscerally understand that the economic circumstances in which they grew up were unusual. The expectation that some education and a little effort were sufficient to secure a comfortable middle-class existence became embedded.
There is an assumption, built into our mythology of the United States, that the free market and elections were all that was necessary to secure both our victory in the war and the subsequent prosperity. There is a startling lack of national self-awareness in our failure to acknowledge that it was the war itself that permitted our living standard to become so broadly based - again, broadly based primarily among a white population.
When that base inevitably diminished the white population in particular, having disproportionately felt the benefit of midcentury prosperity, felt itself to be falling behind. The tendency to blame nonwhite and specifically black populations for "causing trouble" when they campaigned for a more equal society combined with the loss of status from a diminishing middle class to create a powerful feeling of persecution among whites which, while grounded in their economic frustrations, was wholly incongruous with their privileged position in society.
That is why when white people hear things like "Make America Great Again," that pean to the old America evokes both economic and racial resentments. The prosperity and security that they remember was built not only on unique historical circumstances but also on a system of racial inequality which they inherited and from which most of them, like most of us, were content to continue profiting. Not only is it impossible to reconstruct the circumstances that lead to the prosperity in the first place without a catastrophically destructive world war, but the unusually equitable distribution of it among whites was made possible significantly by its restriction to whites.
We should not want to return to that place. It may be more difficult to find our way in the modern world and search for a basis for a more equitable prosperity, but it is simply the right thing to do. "Make America Great Again" is a siren song, offering White America a return to its comfortable, oblivious past. What it will give us instead is a dystopia riven by inequalities and racial tensions. Those tensions cannot be ratcheted up indefinitely for political gain without their being released, probably violently. Only a sound historical understanding of how and why we are where we are can give us the insight to prevent it.
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