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that brought about some of the changes you're describing. First, World War II made the U.S. one nation in a way it had never been before. Regional politics (particularly the old wounds of the Civil War) and the urban/rural divide were healed to a significant extent. Young men of all social classes and all levels of education (it is difficult to comprehend how many perfectly intelligent people were illiterate back then) from all states of the nation came together and fought as buddies in the big war. Korea, in the 50s, took this one step farther by integrating the military racially.
The other thing was an unprecedented and unreplicable economic boom. The United States was the only significant industrial nation (there was also Canada) that hadn't been bombed to a cinder in the war. Our infrastructure and production capacity was undiminished. Consequently, everything from steel to radios were made in America. We had virtually no competition. The beginning of the end of this boom was when Germany started competing in automobiles and Japan in electronics. But it was a time when the only check on production and profit was the supply of labor, and so working people were in the driver's seat for once.
Now, the first condition (nationwide integration) is still happening in many sectors of society. Television and the public schools, to name two, bring people of different backgrounds together. Notice the moves to destroy the public schools (vouchers, "choice") and to splinter television into a million niche audiences. The second condition is in full retrograde. Globalization is making labor largely powerless. And the hell of that is that globalization is not dependent on NAFTA and other such laws - it is a private-sector movement that is not dependent on specific agreements. To get rid of globalization, you'd practically have to outlaw multinational corporations (or corporations altogether). And globalization has some good effects, such as giving the Third World a leg up and keeping wars small and infrequent (I'm not kidding myself that the effects of globalization on the Third World have all been positive).
Still, do you really believe that there has been nothing good about this country, compared to the rest of the world, that dates back farther than the 50s? Also, do you really believe that the progress of the 40s-70s can really entirely be taken back? Do you believe that legal resegregation could ever happen? That religion could ever again have such an iron grip on schools and other social institutions as it used to have? That working conditions will ever truly revert to the days of the Industrial Revolution (cf Dickens, Sinclair, Riis)?
I'm not saying that we don't need to turn the tide back to progress in this country. But we're a long way from the Bad Old Days.
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