W hat do populists on the left and the right have in common? There are a few potential answers, but in the U.S., the most notable populist trait that receives the least amount of pushback is the nostalgia for a bygone era: the post-war boom. The yearning for this era goes beyond simple childhood nostalgia and has had and will continue to have political implications.
The narrative goes that, in the first decades after World War II, Americans could provide for a family on a single, blue-collar income, buy a house, and send their kids to college. Everything was made in America. Unlike the flimsy gadgets people buy today, things were built to last for generations. Then, something happened, and after the event(s), things were never the same again — America began a perpetual decline that only a radical movement can reverse.
What happened? That’s where the Left and the Right diverge. On the left many, including David Leonhardt, the author of Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream, argued that right-wing economic policies beginning in the mid 1970s and 1980s are to blame for the lost Atlantis of the post-war era.
On the right, the MAGA movement, spearheaded by Donald Trump and the likes of Tucker Carlson, instead argue that terrible trade deals (especially NAFTA), feminism, environmental regulations, and a too permissive approach to immigration led to the decline. The very name of the movement, “Make America Great Again,” is dripping with nostalgia for an imagined era of past greatness.
The first problem with this idea is that it overstates how high living standards were. In 1950, the average house was 60 percent smaller than it is today. Even after the automobile bonanza of that decade, more than a fifth of American households did not have a single vehicle in 1960, compared with just over 8 percent today. When adjusted for inflation, the cost of gas was not much lower than it is today, and the cars back then needed a lot more of it.
As for sending your kids to college on a single income, only around 10 percent of high-school graduates went on to further studies. One-sixth of households still lacked indoor plumbing in 1960, and over 85 percent lacked air-conditioning. Microwave ovens, dishwashers, clothes dryers, and other fancy technological gadgets were still either nonexistent or reserved for high-income households. While food may seem expensive today, Americans in 1960 spent a higher percentage of their income on food and other basic necessities than we do today.
All of this is to say that, if you are willing to accept a living standard typical of the early post-war years, you can probably afford to be a single-income family today. While pictures and videos on Instagram and other social media may distort the reality that average Americans are living in, Norman Rockwell paintings of happy 1950s families dressed in their Sunday best are not necessarily any more representative of the era that they were intended to illustrate.
That said, the post-war boom is a topic of nostalgia not just because of the imagined high standard of living but also because of the great strides that were made during those decades. Salaries increased, and the economy grew rapidly. Populists left and right might say that this would have continued had it not been for whatever, which, according to their particular narrative, caused it to end.
This, of course, is the second problem with such economic nostalgia: It by and large fails to comprehend the link between World War II and the subsequent post-war boom. At the end of World War II, most of Europe was a bombed-out shell of its former self. Entire cities had been razed, and manufacturing capacity even among the winners was a fraction of what it had been before the war. The United States, with its factories intact, stepped in to fill the void. Sweden, which was also spared the devastation of the war, did the same, though its small size meant it could not manufacture everything Europe needed in the quantities it needed.
With minimal international competition, the U.S. economy experienced a significant boom, particularly within its manufacturing sector. Salaries rose not mainly because of strong unions or a lack of pink-haired feminists but because employers could afford it. Once Europe (and Japan!) was rebuilt and the international competition returned, this was bound to end.
Sweden, which saw even higher growth rates than the United States did during the post-war period, also came to see its economy and wages largely stagnate at the same time as the U.S. did. This happened despite Sweden’s pursuit of the opposite path, with the country raising taxes during the 1980s while the U.S. pursued Reaganism, and despite the slight increase, between 1970 and 1990 (from 77 to 80 percent), in the share of Swedish employees who were members of labor unions. This should put to bed the idea, advanced by the likes of Leonhardt, that American prosperity could have continued had it not been for right-wing policies.
It is true, however, that the minimum wage in 1968 was far higher than it is today when adjusted for productivity, but this ignores the impact of automation. In 1968, shops and fast-food restaurants had no alternative to hiring cashiers, so raising the minimum wage meant only that, while some locations would be forced to close, most would pass the cost on to the customers. Attempting to set the minimum wage at 1968 levels today would only exacerbate automation, with ordering kiosks and self-checkout replacing human staff, as we see wherever implementing such a high minimum wage has been tried. Automation, not outsourcing, is also the main reason why the number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. has declined while manufacturing output has increased.
Regardless of generation, we all tend to view our childhood and the “simpler times” we grew up in with rose-tinted glasses. Typically, this is harmless. What makes the nostalgia for post-war America stand out is that it appears to be enduring even past the lives and memories of those who lived during that era. Only a minority of Americans are old enough to remember the 1950s, but even young Americans born almost half a century later post memes glorifying a past they never experienced.
There are, broadly speaking, three ways that this mythologizing of the past is having a negative impact on politics and society.
First, it has stoked resentment against the generation that supposedly had it all and squandered it. Baby Boomers are considered an acceptable target by just about everyone younger, largely because of the perception that their lives have been easy, that they had everything provided for them, and that they “pulled up the ladder” behind them instead of ensuring that future generations could share in their prosperity.
Second, much as airbrushed models give people the wrong idea about what a regular person can achieve with diet and exercise, this airbrushed version of history conveys a wrong idea about what can be achieved through policy. If the post-war boom had been achieved through a policy (other than “defeat Nazis”) rather than through external circumstances, then it may have been possible to find some silver bullet that could replicate it. If the baseline in the imagination of voters is unattainable, every outcome will seem disappointing and cause further radicalization.
Third, the problem with dreaming about past glory (real or imagined) is that it makes moving on so much harder. Politicians who promise to bring back (low-skilled) manufacturing jobs thereby encourage untold numbers of Americans to cling to a fantasy instead of seeking new opportunities, which may involve moving. Nobody is saying that everyone should or could “learn to code,” but holding on to hope for a past that wasn’t even as good as they imagine is holding a lot of people and communities back. Attempting to perform economic necromancy to bring back a dead economic era distracts from future challenges, not least of them being the entitlement crisis.
None of this is to say that America does not have great potential. A core tenet of conservatism is that we should learn from history. That requires a proper understanding of history. As enjoyable as nostalgia may be, it is and will always be a poor basis for economic policy.