The "Can We Spot It" section is interesting. When I read it, it definitely reminds me of someone. But when my friend, a supporter of that someone, reads it, they're not. And in fact, they're reminded of the other team.
> Fascism came to power in Germany, Italy, and Japan at a time of social and economic unrest.
- really timeskips and glosses over a lot of causal factors. The biggest reason why America's post-war economic boom was so good for America's working classes was that WWII had taught America's ruling classes just how horrible the consequences could be, if the lot of the working classes got bad enough. And the Soviet Union was quite obviously trying to spread Communist Revolution - "Workers of the Work, Unite!" - to the rest of the world.
> The biggest reason why America's post-war economic boom was so good for America's working classes was that WWII had taught America's ruling classes just how horrible the consequences could be […]
And those lessons have been forgotten given the trajectory the US has been since the 1970s: inequality and wealth concentration is at the same levels seen in the Gilded Age.
Some folks may never have learned them as there are people out there that think the FDR's New Deal policies were a bad thing and American is still "suffering" under them.
This leads me to wonder, do you think free trade and ad or government subsidized everything from TVs & smartphones to Internet and cellular service to content serve to keep the lot of the working classes satisfied instead of the dignities sought by the European union members & syndicalists of yesteryear?
> And the Soviet Union was quite obviously trying to spread Communist Revolution - "Workers of the Work, Unite!" - to the rest of the world
It's not that straightforward actually, the Comintern (under the impulse of Staline) wasn't really fond of the idea of spreading the revolution after the mid-twenties. During the cicil war, the Spanish communist party even teamed up with the centrists against the anarchists to crush the revolution that they had started with the anarchists a year before.[1]
It's only after 1947, when the cold war started, that the Soviet union resumed its support to communist insurgencies worldwide, but more as a geopolitical tool than really for ideological reasons (things would indeed have been very different in that regard had Trotsky led the USSR instead of Staline).
True (AFAIK). Though Stalin likely had geopolitical reasons for his lever-pulling in the Spanish Communist Party. And America's ruling classes would be far more motivated to keep their own necks out of revolutionary guillotines than to look deeply into Stalin's motives for backing it.
In addition, it was an objective economic factor. There were few workers because in 1946, the Depression generation started getting into workforce and they were few in numbers. So in the post-war 20 years or so, there was a persistent dearth of workers as WWI vets aged out of work and less numerous Silent generation replaced them, so people enjoyed good salaries because employers had to compete for them. Then, Boomer generation which was by far the most numerous yet, kicked in, and an era of persistent unemployment and stagnating living standards, resulted.
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