I’m actually rather surprised by all of the negative responses to this post. Having lived through part of this period of time (gen-x), I can attest to the accuracy of this. This standard of living or quality of life, or whatever you want to callout absolutely was achievable for most. No, it was not perfect by any means - people did struggle, yes, racial discrimination was worse. Poverty was still there, but none of it was on the scale that we see today. People were NOT beat down and discouraged. Young people got out of high school, found jobs and could rent an apartment on their own. Small towns did not have people sleeping in the woods. Cities had homeless people but it was nowhere near the level we see today. Seriously, not even close. Medical care was much more affordable. If you had insurance, they just paid your doctor’s bills without engaging in a protracted fight over copays, out-of-pocket nonsense or other methods of exploiting the fine print of your policy. You just didn’t hear about people losing their homes over medical costs.
For a good portion of my childhood, I was raised by a single mom who was able to make rent on a 2 bedroom apartment working a job waiting tables. She was able to later buy a house on a non-union factory job and make payments on a car. One income, one person. We were very much on the lower end of the scale.
I think many of you have been gaslit by the current state of affairs. Everything sucks and seems to actively be getting worse. I really feel bad for the millennial generation and those that followed because the system is rigged, inequality is off the charts and basic living as we knew it is not achievable for a much larger portion of society. It’s difficult to overestimate how far we’ve fallen over the past 40 years.
As an “elder millennial”, I too, saw this happen. I grew up in a very middle class home. About the only thing we didn’t regularly do from the list in the OP, was modest vacations.
My dad was a teacher.
We didn’t have anything overly special, but we had what we needed and we were not struggling. I have two siblings, and the entire family was a family of five. My mother did not have a job throughout my childhood and well after my teenage years, and I’m the youngest.
Now, I can’t fathom having a kid. I can barely pay to keep myself alive.
I’m a middle-aged american.
When I was a kid, my high school educated dad worked in a machine shop and I had a stay at home mom. There were 3 of us kids. Back in the late 80s my parents bought the 4-bedroom home with a 2-car garage on 1+ acre of land that they still live in today. The size is still great for hosting holiday gatherings and with the extra bedrooms they can have play rooms for the grand kids and an empty bed for when my brother visits from out of town.
Once I was in high school and could be home alone, I remember my mom getting a job for a few years.
Today, I have a small family and my wife is a stay at home mom and helps at our son’s elementary school and stuff. But there are some differences!
My family is smaller, 1 kid vs 3.
My education and field of work are much higher up the percentiles. I have three university degrees from big schools and work in tech. He was a high school educated machinist that eventually worked his way up into management when I was older.
My house is smaller. I own a small single-floor home with no basement or garage, a standard 1/4 acre lot, and I live in a blue collar neighborhood that’s sprinkled with elderly folks and young families.
We have two cars and they are both basic non-luxury brands and they are both over 10 years old.
I was intentionally being pretty conservative with my finances, and to be fair we were in a pretty good situation with an emergency fund and no non-mortgage debt and all that. But then in the past several years I’ve had three different financially cataclysmic events where any one of them would have obliterated the safety buffer. Two of them were thanks to covid.
Today I am in the same house and in much better health and mental state, and I even have a much better job, but our finances are a fucking nightmare.
Looks to have been brigaded by some fasc types with next to no post history tbh
Which is also why there’s suddenly a lot of deleted comments, they were patently obvious and the mods deleted that shit
You can blame Reagan for a large part of this, among many other issues.
Where’s that unlabeled graph of a line going steadily up and then at a point marked “Reagan” everything falls off a cliff?
The layup for Reagan effectively began the moment WW2 ended and it’s important to acknowledge that so we understand the villainy runs so much deeper than just him. Reagan was just the one in power when the time came to land the dunk with the help of the Chicago boys and a weakening socialist presence. Neoliberal economics would see many western nations begin to sell off their assets and begin an era of hyperindividualism completely alien to humans.
Some countries caught on to the damage earlier than others and have been struggling against the neoliberal world order being held up by the IMF, World Bank, World Economic Forum, etc… The anglosphere however is subject to America’s cultural exports as well and that has left us particularly weak.
The Behind the Bastards episodes with Raygunz are my favorite.
Now its your fault you can’t make ends meet if you don’t even have a “side hustle.”
Living in cars is now such an accepted lifestyle, that I recently read about a college that was building a multi-level parking lot for students who live in their cars. They could build an affordable living facility, but it’s better to normalize living in your car when they are young. And in college. That way, when that college degree that you went $60K in debt for doesn’t turn into a real job, and you are working a minimum wage retail job, and door dashing, living in your car will feel perfectly normal.
I saw another post by guy discussing his strategy of living in his car for a few years, so he can save up the money for a house. We used to do stuff like that, too, except we wouldn’t live in our car, we’d just get a roommate.
I have no doubt that soon we’ll be seeing YouTube videos about couples living in cars, and even raising families in cars. Look how resourceful they are!
And kids today think that’s normal.
And to make that happen:
- The gilded age made some robber barons insanely rich (though not as rich as the current American oligarchs)
- There was a huge economic crash, called the Great Depression, during which the excesses of the rich were incredibly unpopular and the rich felt in real danger
- To get out of the Great Depression, the US Government created all kinds of “socialist” programs to help people get back on their feet, strengthen unions, regulate business, make massive investments in US infrastructure, etc.
- Right as the Great Depression was ending, WWII began
- For a while the US was “neutral”, and was manufacturing war materiel for the various countries at war, though mostly for the Allied side. This involved huge amounts of government spending.
- Then, a few years after WWII began, the US entered the war, and spending ramped up even more.
- Virtually every other modern economy in the world had its infrastructure destroyed during the war. Britain was bombed relentlessly, Germany was flattened, Japan was nuked, France was turned into Rubble, the USSR’s factories were destroyed as Germany advanced and partially rebuilt in the middle of nowhere.
- The war ended and while every other country was rebuilding their shattered infrastructure, the US infrastructure was running hot and able to supply the world’s needs
- American workers were massively in demand because it was almost the only remaining industrialized country with intact factories
- American workers still retained the massive worker benefits and union membership that was the result of the New Deal economy
So, take that sequence, and for a brief moment a white, male worker in the US could support a family on a blue-collar salary in a way they hadn’t ever done before that. Once other countries rebuilt their infrastructure, the US lost that edge. Once American businesses pushed for the roll-back of worker protections, blue-collar workers lost that benefit. Bit, by bit, the world returned to the way it has normally been, where the lowest class barely survives and both parents work hard, while the rich benefit.
Nice breakdown.
Don’t leave out the part that after this American renaissance, where those returning soldiers became workers who reaped the rewards of that one in a million economic boon, their children started fabricating narratives about ‘hard work’ and ‘grit’ being the reason their inherited wealth was justified.
Then they shoved that narrative down the next three generations’ throats while exclaiming “kids these days are lazy” and “I worked a summer job to pay for college, why can’t you?”. All the while pulling up every ladder that had been constructed to put them in that position.
True enough. The men who had great jobs in the 50s had frequently been soldiers in the 40s. They’d been raised in the 30s during the great depression. They’d been through hardships. It was their kids who grew up in relative luxury. I’m sure some of it was pulling the ladder up after themselves. But, in addition they hadn’t had to fight to establish their union, it was just there when they joined the job. Because of that, they didn’t know how important it was, and so they didn’t know they should be fighting to keep it strong.
Yeah they just saw money coming out of their check for union dues and propaganda about how union reps were corrupt
And, to be fair, there was some corruption in unions. But, they could have rooted out that corruption and had a union that represented them. Instead they abandoned unions and embraced “rugged individualism”.
there was some corruption in unions.
There’s corruption almost everywhere. The unions only survive because there’s corruption in the companies, so the union corruption is usually a lesser evil.
For what good the market is, as long as unions aren’t illegal, they should always balance out the corporate greed.
Sure, there’s some corruption everywhere. But, for example, the teamsters union was massively infiltrated by organized crime. Unions are good, but like companies they need oversight.
Unions are good, but like companies they need oversight.
What we need then is a union union, which negotiates with the union to make sure they do their job and keep fees nominal, and if they refuse, it holds their dues. Of course, we can’t have that for free, so … unions all the way down?
And since then, productivity exploded. Machines and automation everywhere. We are in the age of overconsumption. And value is created at an always acceleratind pace.
But then things started to slow down. But wealth growth can’t slow down! It has to grow, always, and always faster. So when “produce more” stopped working, they turned to “produce for cheap”.
They started cutting spendings and benefits. But it wasn’t enough. And they told western workers that they were no longer competitive. Yes, that plant they’re shutting down was making money. But it would make MORE money in China and other third world countries.
And while plants were going away, salaries got stagnant. Wealth was growing again!
But then the growth slowed down again. So they bought governments to get huge subsidies they could funnel in their wealth growth again.
And now plants are “optimal”. Wages are low. Govs hand out money. Why is it not working?
Because they impoverished so much the working class that there is no one left to buy the goods they produce.
The problem is obvious to anyone looking: money is needed for the economy to run. If it’s all locked up by oligarchs, then it serves no purpose and the economy suffocates. And there is no remote way a handful of people can manage the world’s economy. “Trickle down economy” has failed everywhere and everytime it was attempted. So they’re terrified. Terrified of the working class, terrified of common good, terrified of common sense.
So to make sure they can keep hoarding whatever is left to get, they turned to fascists and propped them across the world, by controlling medias and flooding social networks.
And here we are: in the age of overproduction and mass poverty combined, with a class of scared oligarchs ready to take the world down with them as long as no one stops their wealth hoarding.
It’s interesting watching how China has reacted to having the same problem. By helping build infrastructure in other nations they help create the economic conditions required for permanent job creation. More jobs leads to more pay, more pay leads to more purchasing power, and more purchasing power leads to more imports.
China is creating consumers rather than juicing them. Not that their ideas are innocent, but they are more coherent and beneficial.
You’d think that productivity would explode, but the productivity paradox says that it really has stalled out. It stalled in the 70s to the 80s, and then stalled again around 2000 and hasn’t really grown since.
Wealth has continued to grow unchecked, but for some reason even though computers are getting more and more powerful, workers aren’t getting more done. AI is only making this worse.
No paradox. The wealthy didn’t want plenty; they wanted control.
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Yeah the position of privilege that America occupied globally for the last 75 years minus the last ten or twenty years is not something that’s talked about enough in “they” took the American dream from us
And what that position of privilege cost the rest of the world. For example, Eisenhower was president from '53-'61, is often seen as a great president by Americans, and that decade is seen as a golden age by plenty of Americans (especially boomers).
Outside the US, Eisenhower had Lumumba assassinated in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The replacement they helped install, Mobutu, basically continued the brutal rule and many of the atrocities that had occured in the Congo Free State (death toll as high as 10 million), so that minerals could continue to be extracted. Ultimately this would lead to the first and second congo war and an additional 5 million deaths. Fun fact: a few years ago Tesla/Musk signed a large contract with a company which was formed from a merger of companies including the successor of Compagnie du Katanga. The latter was a concession company that operated in the Congo Free State and is responsible for plenty of the worst atrocities committed during that time. Just in case anyone here thinks colonialism was a long time ago. There’s also stuff like the Guatamalan genocide which was a result of the CIA instigated coup of 1954, the 1953 Iranian coup which would ultimately result in Iran becoming an Islamic theocracy, and his signing a deal with Franco which arguably prolonged his rule.
Fantastic post, well done, sir.
So the take away from what you’re saying is, we need to fast track WWIII, and sit out of it. Let the world nuke each other while we sit back and eat popcorn while we sell them even MORE bombs to blow each other up!
…oh my god. I was being dramatic, but that sounds exactly like Bidens plan with Ukraine. Sell them weapons, but not enough to end the war. Just prolong it. I am baffled that trump hasn’t gone the opposite route and sold russia nukes. I was fully expecting that.
we’ll try anything but another New Deal, eh?
If there is a WWIII, the US will be at the center of it.
What’s happening in Ukraine is most likely going to prevent a wider war. If Russia were to win easily, there’s a good chance the lesson they’d learn from that is that nobody will stop them if they invade a weaker neighbour. Eventually that might lead to WWIII. The war being prolonged and limited to just one country is a way to drain Russia of fighting age men and war materiel without the war spreading. Even the war ending too quickly might mean Russia is able to regroup and launch another attack on a neighbour.
Biden’s plan was one that was extremely unlikely to lead to a wider war. Besides, Biden was giving them weapons, not selling them. If anything it was a give-away to the defence companies on behalf of the US tax payers. But, maybe that’s OK if it keeps US soldiers out of the war and prevents Americans from getting killed.
And what’s wrong with letting Ukrainians use those weapons to end the war quickly be defeating russia?
Huh?
Neat history that mostly erases billionaire actions.
You’re really great at underhanded billionaire propaganda. How much do they pay you?
Are you Malcolm gladwell?
You need to touch some grass
at high velocity
Sorry, which bit in that erased the actions of capitalists?
What’s not on there.
Once American businesses pushed for the roll-back of worker protections, blue-collar workers lost that benefit. Bit, by bit, the world returned to the way it has normally been, where the lowest class barely survives and both parents work hard, while the rich benefit.
There’s a lot missing. From the bad, I mean.
Roseanne was a show in the 80s about a hard-working blue-collar family that was often struggling to get by.
They had a house with a detached garage and 3 kids.
Another example is Al Bundy in Married With Children. He was a shoe salesman with a stay at home wife and two kids but managed to own a nice home.
But they joked about money all the time! The struggle!
Oddly enough, they don’t joke about that in shows as much anymore. Wonder why?
Malcolm in the Middle
Massive by today’s standards, though I think it was fairly typical house in the 2000s at the time
Both parents in that show worked (though if I recall correctly Hal sometimes had trouble with employment) and the joke was the two of them were simply dysfunctional as hell. There is an episode where they stop having sex for a while and they fix everything up.
Side note but the scene where Hal goes to change a light bulb is one of my favourite ways to illustrate what ADHD can look like for people: not laziness so much as misdirected energy.
It’s an interstate show that takes place in the middle of the transition to more modern situations.
Lois specifically works at a terrible job part-time. I remember her going on a rant mentioning that she works 39 hours a week, which is them saying the store works the staff as hard as possible while denying them full-time benefits. But they also manage to pay for boarding school for Francis for a few years of essentially 1.5 incomes.
But even after Francis has moved out on his own, Malcolm and and Reese have to eventually get jobs to help support the family.
That sounds right. Honestly it has been a long time since I watched it. It felt pretty real at the time though, being house poor ourselves.
The answer to why resides in the way wealth is allocated in society. If you look at the graph of the wealth of the 0.1%, the median income and the economical growth, those three numbers were growing at a steady pace up until the 70~80s. Now our economies are growing at a similar rate but median income plateaued/is decreasing while the wealth of people at the top has skyrocketed.
It’s not hard to figure out where all that growth went.
We could still afford such a lifestyle. Or we could learn to share more and end poverty and respect the Earth. But instead we’re allowing a small village of cunts to each have more money and power than entire countries.
The Rand Corp issued a report in 2019 on income inequality, and the situation is far worse than most people think. The median salary of $43K in 1975 had increased to only $50K in 2019, while they would have been making $92K if the tax code hadn’t been steadily re-written to enrich the wealthy at the cost of the middle class and poor.
In that same time period, the mean income for the top 1% went from $289K to $1.384 million, while they would have been making $630K under the old tax codes.
Thats a 17.4% increase in the lower median, and an increase of 321.6% in the 1% median. Clearly there has been an upwards distribution of wealth at the expense of the middle class since the tax codes started to be re-written in 1974 to favor the top economic tier. The Trickle Down Economics that everyone thought was Ronald Reagan’s great idea, was baked into the tax code in 1974.
In addition, the Federal minimum wage was last increased to $7.25 in 2009. Previous to that, it was raised to $5.15 in 1997. The Federal minimum wage was only increased twice in the last 28 years, for a total of a measly $2.10. And yet corporations and their owners SCREAM like their nuts are being carved out by a red hot, dull, rusty spoon at even the mention of a raise in the minimum wage.
When there are threats to raise it every 15 years or so, there are always two responses, as if they are the ONLY possible options - prices will have to go up, or jobs will have to be cut. There is never a mention of the third possible option - that corporations and their owners might have to make a slightly smaller profit. That option is absolutely unthinkable. Unmentionable.
“But less profit means the stock market would be impacted!” is the standard cry. Yes it would, but so what? The stock market hit its recent low in March of 2008, soon after Obama took over the presidency in the midst of a free fall caused by the Bush Economic Crash - about 7500. Today it is over 40,000. Corporations are clearly benefiting in today’s economy, even during a global pandemic when millions of American families were facing homelessness and food shortages through no fault of their own. They were the helpless victims of government edicts which forcibly and ruthlessly shut down their only ways to make a living, while doing NOTHING to help them survive because a few rich Republicans are upset that poor people might get more money than they deserve. So they fought to a stalemate over $400 or $600 per week, while their Sociopathic Oligarch slavemasters chuckled smugly while metaphorically lighting their cigars with $100 bills and demanding more corporate welfare.
So what if smaller profits (because workers got paid their value) meant the stock market was only at 20,000, or even 15,000? Those corporations and their stockholders would still be wealthy, but there would be enough money in the treasury to pay for health care for all, college or trade school for every qualified student, to forgive all student loan shark debts, to cover those whose jobs have been essentially declared illegal because of the pandemic, and more. Sure, corporations would have to live with less profit, but instead of that money being tied up in enormous stock portfolios or in offshore bank accounts, it would be in the hands of people who would buy houses, cars, furniture, vacations, retire to make room for the next generation, etc.
The Trickle Down Economic Theory never worked. As anyone could have predicted (and many did), instead of spending those tax profits on new factories or new opportunities or higher pay scales like we were promised, the Sociopathic Oligarchs only accumulated it at the top. When they did spend it, they spent it on political leverage to get more corporate welfare so they could accumulate even more wealth, at the expense of the working class, creating financial hoards which they sleep on like a Tolkienesque dragon.
Its time to give Trickle Up Economics a try. Make more money available to those at the bottom and middle, and see what happens. Raise wages, forgive student loans, offer free college and trade schools, give every citizen health care, etc. and it will create millions of jobs and stimulate the economy. Sure, the Oligarchs appreciate the efficiency of transferring the money directly from the government to their savings accounts, but the money from the Trickle Up stimulus will eventually reach them anyway, they just have to be a little patient and wait for it to help American families and the American economy first.
If they don’t cooperate in this, then our society will spontaneously pivot to a Robin Hood Economy, and the Sociopathic Oligarchs won’t like that one bit. We’re already seeing the beginnings of it.
Read more about it :
New York Mag: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/09/rand-study-how-high-is-inequality-us.html
Fast Money: https://www.fastcompany.com/90550015/we-were-shocked-rand-study-uncovers-massive-income-shift-to-the-top-1
The graphs on this page are always interesting to look at.
Not to mention how much other stuff was stolen from young people, like how awesome the internet was in the mid-2000’s before it got absolutely destroyed by corporations - game consoles that didn’t require 35 accounts to play a game ONLINE ONLY and a subscription to EVERYTHING in your life. Sure, it’s always been bad (because capitalism) but not THIS bad. And it’ll only get worse as the population becomes less tech literate.
Kids just go with it now, and it’s really sad, they don’t know anything different.
Adjusted for inflation, an NES would cost $600 dollars today. An NES game would cost $150. You had to go to the mall to buy the games.
Thanks to spotify, youtube, and piracy music is now essentially free and available almost everywhere. Adjusted for inflation a CD/tape album you bought in 1985 would cost $30. You would had to travel to the mall, but an entire album just for that one song you liked, and listen to it on repeat for an entire month or stay up late to tape a particular song from the radio.
Don’t glorify the past too much. We have never had such easy and cheap access to such a wide variety of media and games. Napster and early torrenting worked well, but the quality was often shit for plenty of stuff.
Guys! It’s ok! We can’t buy houses, we no longer own our own computers, and everything we have is rented, not owned…but it’s ok! Because now music is freeeeeeeee!!!
I’m certainly not renting my home computer…
we no longer own our own computers
What are you even on about?
Phones, computers and screens are still very affordable from a historical perspective and compared to the 2000s, you can easily pirate all media and games and own them in perpetuity, and it’s incredibly affordable to buy stuff online direct from the manufacturer. Buying second hand components and stuff has arguably also never been easier. If you’re not an idiot, it’s also still relatively (RIP specialised forums) easy to find the information to repair most things yourself online too. Especially with parts being so readibly available. Freeing yourself of Microsoft has also never been easier.
I went to a shop recently, was quoted 2500 for something. Twenty years ago I would have had no alternative. Now, I simply went on the internet and ordered direct from the manufacturer for 500.
everything we have is rented
I mean, housing is ridiculously expensive, sure. But what are you renting except your home?
a subscription to EVERYTHING in your life
I mean, honestly… You’re quite clearly too young to have been paying bills in the 2000s aren’t you?
Streaming is getting more expensive, but if you adjust for inflation, it’s still cheaper than cable/internet was back in the 2000s. I mean, my mobile plan costs me 5 euros a month for limitless calls, data, and calls. Back in the 2000s I would have been able to send 20 text messages for that amount.
And it’s not as if you need to pay for streaming. You need an internet subscription, a phone plan, and a VPN (which is also incredibly affordable).
Also, a reminder that hetero white male America is not the world. It really wasn’t that great in the 2000s for a lot of us.
Sometimes I feel like the difficulty of access for old video games and music made it even more exciting. When everything is a button click away, it loses some luster.
My kids can watch literally anything on tv. I try to tell them about a time when, sure, there were 30 or 40 channels, but only a handful of them catered to me. Maybe TGIF on ABC, or Sunday nights on Fox, and Nickelodeon was always good. Disney was pay to play. Might get lucky and get something good on TNT. When you flipped to a channel and something good was on, it was awesome. Even when they started putting guides on the channels, or the TV Guide channel, you could get lucky and find something, and that was nice.
Obviously same goes for radio, and not counting the whole station not coming in and the song being half static.
All of this was only true of white families.
I grew up in the 80s. I can’t think of a single minority family that had an income of one and did what was described in the posr. I also grew up in a large city, so this may also be referring to suburbs and more rural areas.
As far as I’ve read, the wealth gap between black and white people in America (I don’t know much about other minorities) has been slowly shrinking since the late 1800’s, where it stagnated following a century of rapid shift after the civil war.
In fact, the gap has grown(a little) in the last 20 years.
The slow progress shows that new deal policies aided black and white people, with the civil rights movement further closing the divide. So yes, this ideal single-income lifestyle applies more to white folks, but both demographics have suffered from the stripping away of those policies, which was already happening before Reagan’s evicerating reforms in the 80’s.
Redlining kept minority families out of the suburbs anyway.
Yes but it wasn’t white supremacy that upheld this standard of living, white supremacy was not the direct(*) reason that lower middle class families were able to live like this, it was the disciplining of capital by elements of a social democratic policies, high taxes and stronger unions.
So, you’re describing correlation, not causation. The nostalgia here is for the disciplining of capital not for toothier white supremacy.
In other words, if you bring back the high tax regime, strong unions, and strong regulations today, there is nothing that will require you to also bring back the strong white supremacist policies.
(*) Indirectly, historically, sure. But for these classes of people during that period, the historic effect compared to disciplining of capital is marginal. We are not talking about rich white landowners, we are talking about people whose parents/grandparents were in deep poverty themselves.
The issue with the post is that it is nostalgic of a time that didn’t exist for non-white families. You talk as if white families didn’t directly benefit from the fact non-white families had less, as if it was only rich capitalists sacrificing so lower class families had more in that era. It is a direct causation.
Nostalgia is a tool of modern white-supremacism, and people should be more aware of that fact.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0896920512448941
Heck, the OOP* is even misogynist here whether they realise it or not. Capitalists realised they could get away with paying workers half as much if women were going to enter the workforce, and families would need two working parents. Recognising and acknowledging that it links back to homemaking labour being treated as without value to society more generally as well.
You talk as if white families didn’t directly benefit from the fact non-white families had less, as if it was only rich capitalists sacrificing so lower class families had more in that era.
No, I do not, you are misunderstanding or misconstruing what I’m saying. I am saying that the bigger factor was the partial disciplining of capital in the post WW2 era. I am talking about relative importance of multiple factors in achieving an outcome. To put it differently: white supremacy in the post-WW2 era was not more aggressive than in the past, so we cannot reasonably claim that the increase in standards of living for the lower middle class is attributable to white supremacy. White supremacy was in fact even more aggressive in gilded age. If white supremacy explains lower middle class prosperity, the gilded age would have been a better time to be lower middle class than the post-WW2 era. It wasn’t, and it doesn’t.
Same applies to the misogyny allegation. Women were even more repressed in the previous eras. Did that mean that a typical lower middle class white dude was better off before? No!
Again, I am being very careful here: I’m not arguing against dismantling off networks of power that intersect with capitalist domination here. I am saying that if you want to talk about economic standards of living, you have to talk about economic policy. Antiracism and antisexism are necessary but they are not sufficient. Without a socialist backbone, we know now empirically that they just get coopted by corporate shills and all you get the kind of “corporate diversity” of the Democrats.
Nostalgia is a tool of modern white-supremacism, and people should be more aware of that fact.
I understand the distrust of nostalgia. But I don’t share it in the general sense. Nostalgia is a form of memory and it helps keep movements alive when they have been defeated hoping they can fight another day. The past is of course a space of struggle. Which is precisely why we should refuse to cede it to the far right. The answer to someone being nostalgic for a better quality of life cannot be to attack them for not mentioning that it was not good for everyone. Without nostalgia for their homes, the Palestinians would have long ago given up the dream of freedom. When they lovingly hold on to their house keys, they don’t miss the imperialist, authoritarian, genocidal Ottoman fucking Empire, they miss not being dispossessed, displaced and oppressed by Zionism. Would it not be counter-productive to get in their faces every time they become nostalgic about the past with “yea but while you were cozy in your houses before the foundation of Israel, the Ottoman system you were part of was genociding Armenians and Greeks”?
Here you have members of the contemporary precariat pining for a time when they didn’t have to work shitty gig jobs. Punching them in the face with the shitty things from the past is entirely counter productive. It in fact strengthens the fascist narrative because it reinforces the lie that in order for a white person to have a good quality of life, white supremacy has to also be in place. It cedes the past to the far right.
===================== EDIT, to synthesize a bit:
Postwar one-income stability was real, but it also wasn’t universal. The engine was political economy: high worker bargaining power (unions), regulation, and a state willing to tax and spend. When those institutions eroded, typical pay stopped tracking productivity. The distribution was racialized and gendered: a huge chunk of “normal” middle-class security was homeownership and cheap credit, and Black veterans and families were systematically blocked from GI Bill and housing pathways in many places.
So the honest slogan is: bring back the disciplining of capital, this time without segregation and patriarchal dependency.
I’m not reading this long of a comment when you’re just trying to justify away racism.
Nostalgia is a tool of modern white-supremacism, and people should be more aware of that fact.
*taps the sign*
Edit: I also NEVER SAID that white supremacy was the reason, as your first comment seemed to posit, so this just all feels like mansplaining. Have a nice day. 🫡
“I didn’t read all that but it’s definitely racist and mansplaining” is a hell of a take. Imagine a world where book reviews were all based on number of pages and a subjective opinion of the author.
I thought the comment was good reading. I’m pretty informed and I learned a few things.
Particularly enjoyed this part:
…It in fact strengthens the fascist narrative because it reinforces the lie that in order for a white person to have a good quality of life, white supremacy has to also be in place. It cedes the past to the far right.
As a feminist, please, for the love of fuck, stop using the term “mansplaining” whenever someone disagrees politely in a debate.
Oh I’m sorry, I guess I’m not a feminist? I’ll defer to your authority :)
Maybe just no longer in the mood to be charitable because of all the people in this thread jumping down mine and other’s throats for saying this was only true for white families. Maybe not in the mood for someone splaining to me that nostalgia is good actually and not a well-studied tool of the far right. It’s almost like the fascist in the White House uses "Make America Great Again" as his campaign slogan.
Maybe I’m just sick of this awful platform and it’s “progressive” but actually very neoliberal conservative userbase.
How would you know what the platform is like if you don’t read the comments?
Maybe I’m just sick of this awful platform
Nobody’s forcing you to be here if it’s so awful. You can always try going outside instead or finding an echo chamber somewhere where you can safely ignore the reality of not everyone always agreeing with you.
I’m not reading this long of a comment when you’re just trying to justify away racism.
Oh OK, the comment is long so just accuse me of trying to justify away racism instead. And of mansplaining. Super reasonable.
By the way, the TLDR version of my too-long comment is in the EDIT above. Tweet sized: «The engine was political economy, the distribution was racialized and gendered. Let’s do the former without the latter.»
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Part of mansplaining is inventing a position to argue against so you can 'splain to someone like you know better than them. All I said was that it was only true for white families. Which you’ve admitted was the case. So what else are you doing here trying to explain away what was still a fact due to racism?? Sure, it wasn’t necessarily the driving force, but it was a fact, and it’s weird to be nostalgic for a time that actually sucked for a broad segment of the population. White families had it better than black families, and capitalists wouldn’t have given up all that they did if those benefits had to actually be for everyone.
Not sure how to respond without a long comment, but here goes. Basic idea: we agree on the facts. We disagree on their interpretation and on the usefulness of nostalgia.
That is 100% race reductionist nonsense.
Removed by mod
I’m not racist you piece of shit.
You want to explain to me what you’re talking about?
You removed my comment and called me racist even though I’m not and my comment wasn’t even remotely racist.
If you were white*
Yuuge detail
Even if you weren’t. The economic boom of the 20th century gave birth to lots of prosperous minority communities.
Only problem was that if you ever got too prosperous, neighbors might come by to burn the place down.
But a lot of the so-called economic anxiety kicked off by mass migration to California, Texas, and Florida (and to London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersberg, Beijing, Tokyo, and Mexico City) was the result of war refugees, political dissidents, and victims of a shifting market economy finding real serious economic benefits to relocating inside the fence of one of the world’s premier powers. You didn’t need to be white to achieve a marked improvement in quality of life, you just needed to be within arm’s reach of all the advanced industrial capital and its benefits.
The Two Income Trap that began to rear its head in the 80s/90s was a consequence of housing, higher education debts, and child care costs that prior generations hadn’t historically dealt with. One could plausibly argue that the extended adolescence of college demonstrates an overall improved economy, as people are no longer joining the workforce in their teenage years and trying to outproduce a historically high infant mortality rate.
But the benefits of the economy have gone disproportionately to the leisure and professional managerial classes, while the working classes absorb higher debts/rents and defer accessing the industrial improvements until much later in life. It isn’t that non-white people never see them. It is simply that they are much older when they finally do and enjoy the benefits for less time, due to higher mortality rates.
The two income family came as a direct result of Nixon’s Vietnam spending.
Kennedy’s Vietnam policy was containment; we supplied ‘military advisors’ and propped up the South to appease the French. We were focused on the soviets and Vietnam was a sideshow.
LBJ wanted a massive knock out punch to wipe the Viet Cong out fast. Instead he got a quagmire. Johnson had to print money to pay for the war because he didn’t want to raise taxes. Nixon ran as a ‘peace candidate’ and then doubled down on Johnson’s spending. Remember, we were dropping something like a dozen Hiroshimas a day on jungle.
Inflation is getting bad, and then OPEC hits the US with the Oil Boycott. That devastates the US economy. All those cool loft buildings in places like New York’s TriBeCa and SoHo? Those were originally small factories. They emptied out because the owners couldn’t afford to runt them anymore.
The two income family came as a direct result of Nixon’s Vietnam spending.
That’s more complicated, since the Vietnamese War-Time economy was itself a driver of domestic growth. Stagflation by way of the OPEC crisis didn’t force people into second jobs so much as it put the breaks on 50s/60s era rapid industrial development and the modernization of the consumer economy. Women in the professional workforce was more a novelty of the 1970s and the Feminist wing of the labor movement. And that’s when a woman’s college degree began to matter more, women were able to take on personal debt legally, and birth control allowed women to have sex without getting pregnant (thus ending the Baby Boom era).
Had Nixon not dropped billions onto Vietnam, we’d have spent our petrodollars somewhere else. Military Keynesianism wasn’t the only kind.
All those cool loft buildings in places like New York’s TriBeCa and SoHo? Those were originally small factories. They emptied out because the owners couldn’t afford to runt them anymore.
They emptied out because businesses transitioned manufacturing outside of the major city centers. Mass transportation innovations allowed more and more labor to be moved across state lines. More of the urban economy became sales/marketing, banking, and bulk shipping. Its not like the jobs disappeared. It isn’t even as though these businesses failed. They just migrated closer to the agricultural source material (which - conveniently - was where employers could find cheaper labor).
They emptied out because businesses transitioned manufacturing outside of the major city centers.
The 'transitioned because the price of being in a city was too high. The businesses first moved to the American south where the Unions were weaker, and then overseas. I live in New York and you still hear stories about how fast it happened. “SoHo” was a name dreamed up by the artists who started moving into the empty factories. All the folks who’d been priced out of Greenwich Village started moving in.
Also, Vietnam didn’t ‘grow’ the economy. It was more like steroids. The old steel mills that should have been renovated years before were now running 24/7 to make enough bombs.
When the US mills couldn’t produce enough for the Germans and Japanese markets, those countries started building their own plants. These new plants used way less oil than the older American plants, so when the Oil Crisis hit German and Japanese cars became a much better bargain.
If Nixon hadn’t been pumping money into the steel industry it might have transitioned to lower cost plants on its own.
Well, large parts of the US had literal apartheid, concentration camps and what amounted to slavery of black people well into middle of the 20th century. So some were definitely automatically exempt from that prosperity from the moment they were born on account of their skin colour.
Even if you weren’t.
It is true, this post is true only for mostly white for people in the imperial core.
My parents grew up with a literal open sewer on their block where they would dump their shit in then the city would “flush” it with a pass of water then send down the water they would collect for drinking. They had to boil it first. This was in the 50s.
This is why the GOP hates Unions.
There were plenty of non-white people who got good jobs through Unions.
The poor would like a word…
Everyone who remembers was!
It’s. The. Capitalism.
I was making 15 an hour when Clinton was President, no degree. I had to have roommates, it really wasn’t that much money where I lived.
There are something like 40 MILLION workers making less than 17 an hour now.
And for the “but most are teens” crowd, number one they are not mostly teens, and number two teens need to be able to afford housing, transportation, food, and the doctor, like everybody else, and their family needs the money too because minimum wage is freaking seven bucks an hour.
Sorry kids, we need a new ballroom and you would not believe how much gold paint.
Anyone who pretends this was a racial thing and not a class thing deserves a long prison sentence.
Intersectionality my dude, it can be both
Intersectionality is right wing bullshit, sis.
I’m only in my 30s. My dad supported our family on a high school education. I don’t have a college education but I did two different certification programs to work in my field. I’m single with no kids and live alone and I’m still struggling. I don’t know how anyone has a family right now. I can’t even afford me. I’m so mad that my dad raised an entire family and bought and paid off a house and I can barely pay my damn rent and buy groceries with a better education and job than what he had.
I was the first in my family to go to college. I lived an intensely frugal life to minimize my debt, which was successful: I graduated with $3 in my pocket and no debt.
All of that effort got me, after 3 years of job hunting while making minimum wage, a $20 hour job. Almost twice our minimum wage at the time and I didn’t even have the purchasing power my mother did at the start of her career, despite starting mine years later with an education and a whole stack of certificates.
This is the joke that capitalists think is acceptable.
The idea that it was common because that’s what was depicted on TV ain’t really so. Think about how many shows right now, and over the last 30 years, have had people living in NYC, in huge, modern apartments, while working as a cab driver. Or a waitress.
The truth is that our standard of living has increased; real purchasing power has gone up. But we also expect to do more, and have more. And the cost of essentials has increased faster than the cost of non-essentials, which makes the gains feel like they’re being chewed up and spat out.
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/comparing-the-costs-of-generations.html
How I Met Your Mother actually addressed that plot hole by showing the group misremembering the size of the apartment they were in.
