Totally fair, and yet, the incidental fruits of WW2 such as radar, powerful long-range aircraft, all kinds of advances in electronics, radio communications, atomic energy etc. led to 60 years of incredible subsequent technological progress and economic development that without any question raised enormous numbers of people out of starvation, abject poverty and misery.
A lot of that is from world governments adopting centrally planned economic and scientific goals. We could do this whenever. We don't need a war for it. Its just our leaders favor things like rugged individualism and privatizing what should be public works instead today, probably because that leads to outsized benefits to certain connected individuals.
Sure, we could adopt centrally planned goals and the will to carry them out (the goals are much easier than the carrying them out), but war, cold or hot seems to be just about the only means to generate that will.
In some sense that's okay. We shouldn't bypass democratic means easily. It's similar to how democratic societies have "state of emergency" powers and just as dangerous, and also why armed pacifism should be a good default for democratic society. You should not cause war, but if someone brings war to your door, you have a duty to your people to protect them and prevent occupation.
Important in this ideology is that flying a boeing into a building and killing 3000 people is not bringing war to your doorstep.
The thing that is bad about democracy as we experience it today, is that while in theory you get an equal choice at the ballot between different options, the sources of information you have to rely on to form an opinion to vote a certain way are not providing information on options at equivocal levels, or in an unbiased manner. It begs the question, is this really your vote, or did someone successfully convince you to vote in their interests thinking they are your own? Considering the massive incentives behind the ability to control voting in a democratic country, it should be expected various interests are working tirelessly to influence your voting behavior. It makes you wonder if the end product would be very different whether we bothered with the performance of elections or not. Certainly at least people believe they chose this government having cast the vote, so maybe that's the benefit of maintaining the system for elites: not to have the public shape government, but to have the public believe they have shaped government, and don't need to try and shape it through other means that might disrupt the order of things.
I recommend checking out the fantastic, "The Rise and Fall of American Growth". The book provides very strong evidence that the era of American growth which produced our modern standard of living starts in 1870 and actually ends in 1940, though there was also an era of less important but still strong growth from 1940-1970.
Furthermore, this is a bit of a counterfactual as we don't actually know the trajectory of technology without the war. Some thing we know for certain though, mass electrification and public health were well underway before the war and continued through it. These being probably the two most important developments that improved productivity and the quality of life for most people.
Its crazy how little this country has really changed since 1970, when you remove the superficial fluff like iphones or flat screen tv. Take a neighborhood in socal. It might be full of dingbat apartments. 50 years ago in 1973 it probably looked exactly the same since thats when those apartments where built. Go back another 50 years though, and you have a former spanish ranchero with cattle, oil derricks, or fruit orchards depending on what block of southern californian suburbia you are considering. The world was growing and changing rapidly then basically stalled out. much more restrictive zoning separating degrees of use (e.g. apartment versus a home) versus type of use (residential vs industrial) came in to replace redlining in effort to limit movement of the working poor into certain neighborhoods so as not to affect real estate valuations, and now we have our world today, full of 50+ year old apartments and 70+ year old single story "starter" californian homes going for over $1000 a square foot thanks to our inability to add more housing to an in demand area.
Yeah. I think that a lot of these changes after 1940 are much more to do with socio/political factors than growth. By 1940 you have the GDP to support a middle class. It's the collective experience of the Great Depression, WWII and the rheotric of the New Deal that produce a populace that just wouldn't put up with significant imbalance in the riches of society.
People who fought in and justified WWII contrasted it with WWI. The claim being that WWI was a war fought on behalf of the old world system. And WWII was a true war for Democracy. I think it would've been very hard after that kind of mobilization, sacrifice and rhetoric to re-instute the Gilded Age ethos of a system which the rules of the game were sacred about the outcomes.
In this way American Democracy is born of the FDR era. I don't mean this in the narrow sense of the size of the electorate though that is important. At every level, America's systems Democratized. From the way the Supreme Court interpreted the law, to the choices of industry in what to produce, to how the rewards of production were distributed. There was a broad transition from the notion that institutions existed to maintain rules towards a notion that these institutions in their largest sense needed to serve the people.
I think a lot of what has happened since 1970 is a transition back to a way of looking at the world through the pre-democratic lense. The biggest difference being that now there is a plurality which is the upper half of the middle class who have some similar interests to the wealthy in protecting their wealth.
>I think a lot of what has happened since 1970 is a transition back to a way of looking at the world through the pre-democratic lense. The biggest difference being that now there is a plurality which is the upper half of the middle class who have some similar interests to the wealthy in protecting their wealth.
I agree although I believe that the upper middle class and the capital class still don't actually have similar interests if you think about things that are actually in the upper middle class's best interest. In the context of a propaganda model (1), most people just aren't exposed to opinions that even align with their true economic interests. They are often exposed to opinions that actually kowtow the economic status quo that benefits the existing elite establishment more than anything. Mass media has been able to stratify labor: it has divided the working poor among right and left on cultural considerations versus unifying it through economic arguments, and made the white collar class which still has to sell their labor for wages believe they are no longer of the working class, and have little need to organize themselves. Labor as a unified movement has been divided and effectively conquered. A sad state of affairs.
I think its even more insidious than that. The political party machine on both the GOP and Dem side control what candidates are even put in front of us. Populist antiestablishmentism doesn't get you far because both the media and the political party itself are working against you. So you will still see younger politicians who hold these opinions in positions of power, because these are the opinions of the elite more than anything generational, and these are the candidates who receive the most support and most air time in front of voters.
Yes. I got very involved in my local district party a few years back. Probably the most powerful and effective organ of this party was its endorsements committee. I found it staggeringly depressing that round after round of endorsements went to exactly the same kinds of people: small business owners, cops, nurses, teachers and prosecutors. Basically, if you were for the system, you got in. Almost always the endorsement went to small business owners. Those endorsed almost always won the primary because they were immediately supported by party affiliated groups. The endoresment committee passed up social workers, corrections officers and public defenders. I remember one lady who worked in the sheriffs office for like 10 years came to talk about how things actually worked and what needed to change. She spoke clearly about the issue in the office, not polemical at all. Committee was a hard NO on her.
