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That era was a mistake in a number of ways and now the excesses of it are running hard up against the wall.
This isn’t a product of some Marxist bogeyman though, although many similar aspects of it you can also find at home in the Marxist tradition.
Even the Nazis of all people recognized this problem under their own paradigm. Hitler wrote about it himself when he talked about the contrast of values he experienced in Munich and when he went into Vienna. He noticed that the cities and program of urbanization led into the production of a new system of social values that was individualistic, against the national community and that he saw as “degenerate.” That’s why his appointed ideologues beneath him like Walter Darre and others came up with notions like “blood and soil.” They viewed the peasantry as the ideal model for German society because of its community and family orientation towards society, and they wanted that adapted to big city life.
It’s also why when they went into Scandinavia, they viewed Oslo as “too American” and “socially degenerate” because of its big city and urban lifestyle. The big cities led to a “liberalizing of social values.” It was yet another example to them as reminder of why they envied the countryside. The Nazis actually disliked many aspects of German rural life and called their immigration into the cities “convoys of death.” But one thing they noticed in the 40’s was that the urban cities were producing less than half of the soldiery and births needed to sustain the war effort. The countryside on the other hand had something like a 13%-16% surplus it provided.
So whether it’s this extreme or that extreme, these lunatics or those lunatics, both ideologies ran into different varieties of the same problem. And no paradigm to date that I’ve seen has good solutions to these.
Not clear to me, looking WAY back in hindsight, how it could have gone differently, though.
Like, I can see how the 2000's could have gone differently if, for example
A) 9/11 never happened. Or
B) Our response to 9/11 was more measured but also reaffirmed our national commitment to not letting other countries fuck with us.
But things like the 2008 financial crisis seem baked into the cake given the incentives involved.
Not sure how to interpret the 1960's in terms of 'the forces of history.' Mistakes were made but seemingly made from a bit of ignorance and irrational exuberance and as you say, the guys trying to keep things sane must have looked like real spoilsports.
Maybe some things require a certain disposition to forecast accurately. Who knows. What but I know for certain is it is possible to use history as a roadmap to accurately assess national policies and social outcomes, because people were doing it.
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