At the end of the 1950s the US was near the height of its powers...

>Racism was rampant,
So
>women were still nothing but breeding and cooking machines.
Not even true but even then so what? Why do your assume your cliche morality is default?

My moral view of people being equal stems from the constitution of the US (it started with the French I think) and it's default because it's the prevailing view on things of all successful modern societies, which I am -luckily- part of.

Racism wasn't even rampant either. 90+ of the population was European and the 9% or whichever which were Black only faced institutionalized racism in the former south.

>How did it suffer such a drastic collapse in less than one generation?

Black people and mexicans flooding the nation

>So?
>So what?
Woah, 2 edgy 4 me.

The majority of people in the US were second-class citizens in the 1950s (either because of their gender or their race).

You may be indifferent to that fact but the majority of the population enjoyed far greater rights and freedoms after your 'collapse' than they did in the 1950s.

Your attitude to it is irrelevant - the majority of the country will have seen that as progress.

>The majority of people in the US were second-class citizens in the 1950s
That's not true though. As point out, women and men both and had Civil Rights which were logical for their genders. Including voting, divorce, ect.

This

US was at its strongest in 1990s not 1950s

Well it wasn't it before the war so I guess that explains it. You'd need to instigate a major world war every decade to turn everybody into your ideal patriotic drone. Compare the 90's with the 00's.
In the lead up to the war there were major progressive and socialist movements and also mob violence and lynchings.

>women and men both and had Civil Rights which were logical for their genders. Including voting, divorce, ect.
By calling your worldview "logical" (and I'm sure you don't know the first thing about logic) you're just trying to validate it as an objective interpretation, which it isn't. I seriously doubt that what you consider "logical" does apply to all of those women (who are still individuals) who do not want to comform to your fantasy utopia, and this could NOT be the case in the '50s.

Secondly, I don't see why you are deliberately taking people of color out of the picture. They were still American citizens, and they were still subjected to actual, open racism. Why sould I say that living in the US was great, since you had 1 in 10 chances to live as a second-class citizen for your entire life? That's terrifying.

Are you denying that the US was not extremely self-confident at the beginning of the 1960s and no longer so by the end of the decade?

>The 50s were not such great years as you want to believe. Racism was rampant, women were still nothing but breeding and cooking machines. The US was extremely powerful and did not respect other countries, at all.

None of this answers the question of why the US was extremely powerful at the time, and more importantly willing to apply that power to pursue its objectives, but was no longer so within less than 10 years. It's nothing but a morality whine.

>That's not true though
I think you're wildly deluded. The fact that they had certain rights does not mean that they enjoyed anything approaching equality when you take into consideration the overall picture. They both faced considerable discrimination and were institutionally denied basic opportunities enjoyed by white men.

In case you're wondering, I'm not some sort of loony left SJW. What I'm trying to point out is that 1950s America was not a place of false victimhood; there was plenty of the real thing going around back then.

I'm questioning the source of that confidence, and how much of it was reflected by actual societal successes. While there are many good things that can be said about the '50s, I would say that anyone who actually believes in human rights would say that it was still an essentially morally bankrupt society.

No but seriously, if you look away from OP saying that the fifties were hella great, why were the 70s and 80s in Murica so bad? Urban decay, gang violence, segregation..

CIA invented crack cocaine and started smuggling cocaine and heroin in the big cities.

they did apply their power to pursue their objectives, they just stopped considering full employment and space exploration as objectives

1) War-weariness. The self-doubt, contempt for authority and nihilism you're describing were all closely related to public dissatisfaction with Vietnam.

You can even make a case for a lot of drug-use being Vietnam-related as well - a lot of young people picked up shitty habits in southeast Asia that they brought back with them. Not to mention the mental health problems and violent crime plaguing Vietnam vets upon their return to America.

2) America in the late 1940s, early 1950s was one of the few parts of the developed world that had not been absolutely obliterated by WWII. Europe was a wreck, Asia was a wreck, the US was largely unscathed. As the rest of the world rediscovered its industrial capabilities, US dominance began to waiver.

3) Exploding labour market. As civil rights and feminism progressed, the available workforce grew dramatically. This was further exacerbated by the baby boomers coming of age. This meant that the workforce exploded just as international industrial competition ramped up.

The little blond billy on the 50is commercial looks angry as fuck.

...

but y tho

because obviously the 50is werent realy all that and OP is masturbating over vintage marketing ads

No one is answering why the US economy went to shit in the 1970s, or why its national cohesion and self-confidence suddenly collapsed so abruptly

We all know it was Reagan, there's no need to repeat it everytime.

Faggot, explains this then If things were so peachy after the 1950s, why did the crime rate spike as it did?

Sup reddit

Read

>No one is answering why the US economy went to shit in the 1970s

basicaly postwar demographic changes and the sort of liberal economic policies that became what is known as neoliberalism (you guys call that neoconservativism)

they werent peachy after the 50is because they werent peachy to begin with, each decade is a development of the one before, its not like in 1959 everyone suddenly became criminaly insane but in 1958 they were all smiling in pastel colours and polka dot dresses and it was all heaven

I'm not sure why the 1950s are idealised so much when poverty rates were so bad back then (around 1 in 4 Americans was living in poverty).

Say what you want about the US economy in the 70s but poverty rates were nowhere near as bad as the 50s.

It would also be interested to look into whether there were any changes affecting the way crime was recorded between the 50s and the 70s. It seems peculiar that violent crime would explode as poverty shrunk.

ignore the tl;dr cucks above me OP

do yourself a favor and look up the frankfurt school. you'll start to realize that things like (((civil rights))) and (((femenism))) were literally just KGB operations, not to mention degenerate (((modern art))) and (((rock music)))

...

Poverty is arbitrary and subjective. Who's to say living off the land is poverty and who's to say owning a lot but being in massive debt isn't poverty?

Confirmation bias, people were more prosperous in the 70s when you look at broader indicators like incomes and healthcare.

>drug and gang-related crime and domestic terrorism approaching the level of an internal low-level conflict
So 0.001% of people were murdered a year instead of the lows of 0.0005%, a little above the prohibition era. Even if this was relevant, the cause was obviously drugs.

>le tendency of the rate of profit to fall meme
t. commies

Labor is just another resource, worker labor in particular is far from the wellspring of all value as Marx imagines.

>successful modern societies
French here. We really need to define "successful".
All morality aside, I really don't feel like I live in a successful society.
We had an empire, it's no more.
We had full employment, it's no more.
We had solid industries, it's no more.
We had a prosperous agriculture, it's no more.
We had safety, it's no more.
etc...
All was lost within few decades.
It's not my definition of "successful" and I'm pretty sure the situation is similar in the US. People being equal may be the epitome of what is a good society, but surprisingly when I look through recent history the more equality we have the less happiness we have. I need solid proofs that it's not related.

The concept of human rights was developed by the post-war American consensus as an ideologically pure path forward. It was a PRODUCT of the 50s.

Literally not an argument

Most progressive Americans, worship European societies.

i enjoy knowing that you clearly live a miserable life and have to hide all of your disgusting pathetic opinions from the people around you to avoid unending shame and ridicule

>why its national cohesion

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965

>1970

Socialist policies, welfare, went off gold standard, government interventions in the economy

That's when US oil production peaked and they got buttfucked by the Arabs, you'd be frustrated too if you needed a car to do everything in society and the gas station was empty. Companies used the high oil prices to increase exploration and the economy recovered in the 80's when new oil fields came online

it's the tail end of white-flight. These cities were depopulated except by homeless, drug addicts, mentally ill, and urban poor. A depopulating city loses its tax base will still having all sorts of infrastructure and other obligations to pay for, thus necessarily is in debt. Unmaintained infrastructure and decrease in ability to police makes it a center of criminal activities as does cheap housing or abandoned housing allow for such denizens, criminals, druggies, etc. to move in.

White flight in the larger cities began immediately after WWII, the effects weren't quite visible until the '60s when it sped up with the race riots and the lose of some manufacturing.

Are you retarded?

Because the rest of the world was in ruins and once countries began to recover, so did american power naturally began to diminish in proportion.

Boomers are whiny, entitled, mindless children.

Most people would say that.

Seems like a lot of them are lurking on Veeky Forums

'Neoliberalism' started after the transformation OP is referring to.

The homicide rate clearly is higher in 1970s than 1950s judging by your chart.

That's interesting, but it sounds like somewhat of a conspiracy theory -- I don't believe that the middle class was destroyed on purpose with market liberalism. It's simply what "happened" when corporations and finance were let loose and countries like China began to demand their share of wealth.

Leaded gasoline was making people crazy.

Nixon and Reagan, and the whole cold war where children where told that their world could end at any minute

>Racism was rampant,
Yeah that was necessary to keep their problematic tendencies in check. Now look at the results after they've been allowed to run wild

Are you seriously defending the shittiness of the old racial order? Kids got beaten to death for looking the wrong way at white people, the South was essentially made up of one party states, political protestors were repeatedly jailed, beaten, harassed, and occasionally killed by authorities, and houses and churches were blown up because residents upset the racist order.

And that doesn't prove your point as I explained in my post .

>if I use the word racist enough times I'll gain moral authority.

I never used the word.

Read the before last word of your post, brainlet.

(((cultural marxism)))

Hello /pol/, kindly fuck off and stop making stupid threads.
There was rampant racism and sexism and only white males lived well, so it never collapsed and is only getting better and better, with each oppressive statue removed being a step in the left direction.

Racism doesn't need to be defended, it's been a huge success historically.

Once. Hardly very often.

You probably wouldn't say that if you were black in 1960s Mississippi.

>There was rampant racism and sexism and only white males lived well,
Oy vey

Better to be black in 1960s Mississippi than in 2010s Detoilet.

>only white males lived well
even that is fucking debatable considering the rate of poverty in the 50s. Also you know, there was the Korean War that kicked off at the beginning of the decade, which was pretty shitty.

>USA is only getting better and better
More poverty, more illiteracy, more chronic diseases... All in all much much more people left behind, numerically.

That's the culture of neoliberal capitalism for you.

>numerically
No shit, the population is over twice as big now.

Not even close.

I said numerically in case of "hurr durr not proportionally". In the end what really count is the number of people left behind, you can't claim "things go better and better" when in reality there's a huge and increasing number of miserables.

I would guess cynicism of Vietnam combined with typical generational rebellion by silents and boomers of their parents who fought in the World Wars and were the parents of the post-war boom period. They grew up with everything but with strict parents and grew dissatisfied as a backlash becoming the Me Generation, the first to really think only of themselves and their own immediacy and not others and the future.

That's all just what it looks like to me though. I really need to read Lasch's Culture of Narcissism.

White racism was, and is still, less horrific than black criminality.

More blacks are killed in Chicago, each year by other blacks, then were lynched in 80 years in the entire southern region. Not just one city in the South. THE ENTIRE SOUTH.

In what sort of hell do you view this state of affairs as a heaven?

> Its people were unquestionably confident in the country's anti-communist purpose and mission, and unabashedly nationalistic.

No, they weren't. A lot of them were just being comformists as long as things were looking good for them. Dissident voices were suppressed.
Blacks, for example, have always been dissatisfied, but they were ignored until they started organizing.

CONT.

Not to mention that legal meth was a real force in the early 20th century. The blitzkrieg wouldn't have been possible without soldiers being able to operate round the clock.

Of course it ended up biting them in the ass once soldiers couldn't function without their dose of meth.

The population when lynching was at its height was a fraction of today's population. Of course the numbers will be different.

even when taken proportionally you're still completely btfo

At the very most, we have twice the number of people that were in the country prior the civil rights era.

Racist KKK members were far less of a (material) danger to african americans than other AAs.

I'm not the same person you were talking to.

>There was rampant racism and sexism
Yeah, and now we got even more rampant racism, reverse racism, revisionism, drug abuse, forced diversity, 192+ genders and massive sexual degeneracy. So progressive, so much better!

Why is an idyllic 50s community in the north responsible for a bunch of dumb hick racists 1000 miles away?

Wasn't it these same people, the high minded greatest generation who came back from fighting the nazis and wanted to build a better world for their boomer children, who gave the civil rights movement the support it needed? Wasn't it these same people who paid for their daughter's college with their GI Bill bennies so they wouldn't be dependent on their husbands?

Why are leftists so pathologically desperate to accuse this seemingly innocuous group of being evil incarnate?

Why do images like this leave them feeling physically sick and literally shaking? How were they brainwashed to be this way?

>Racist KKK members were far less of a (material) danger to african americans than other AAs.
That's a retarded point. That's like saying Americans are statistically more of a threat to each other than ISIS. Of course, the majority of violence is intra-group, that's always the case.

>How did it suffer such a drastic collapse in less than one generation?
Demographic shifts and geoeconomics.
After WWII Europe was in complete shambles and the rest of the world was rural and impoverished, this allowed America (which had already profited immensely from the war) to rise to the occasion and meet international and domestic consumer demands without competition. By the 70's Europe (and Japan) had recovered economically and were in a position to claim their slice of the cake, this coupled with the expansion of the domestic American labour pool as well as the near-death of the American blue-collar worker due to the offshoring of manufacturing jobs into countries on the cusp of urbanization like China due to Nixon and Kissinger's diplomatic efforts created an economic vacuum in the US that caused the lack of social cohesion you speak of.
Also the White-flight that had begun immediately after WWI had finally culminated by the 1970's as another user said, which basically stripped cities of their economic core and tax revenue, which basically rubbed salt in the wound that was deindustrialization.

It wasn't hippies and leftists.

>tfw the American middle class will die completely within your lifetime

The robber or mugger down the street isn't usually motivated by an ideology or unified movement.

>Racist KKK members were far less of a (material) danger to african americans than other AAs.

You know how much infleunce the kkk and their sympathizers to their beliefs fucked up the black citizeney?

>more people means there are more people who might be unhappy
No shit, but we aren't discussing antinatalism

To describe it in the local parlance if "autism" would be underselling it

Lmao probably because europe finally built itself back up by the 1960's post ww2 damage and rentered the market. Plus the retardation that was the vietnam war.