The Toll Plaza On The Road To Ruin - Or - How The West Was Lost

After WWII, western democracies sought a system which joined nations that embraced the principle that  no human being was inherently more valuable than another, that all individuals should be equal before the law. The USA provided the necessary leadership in this group to stand against totalitarian governments. This system meant support for human rights and for the idea that, to the best of their ability, all people had a right to decide their own fate. In the U.S. that system meant laws at home that regulated business, provided basic social welfare, and promoted the infrastructure that sought to provide  an even handed access to opportunity for most citizens.
 It also meant that, overseas, we participated in agreements and military alliances to try to promote democracy and to keep fascism or other totalitarian methods of rule at bay.

That era is done. It's plated and it has a fork in it's back.
The truth is that America's post-WWII course was hugely popular with both Republicans and Democrats. After all, they had seen unregulated capitalism cause the Depression and fascism create the unprecedented horrors of WWII, and they were determined to use democratic government to prevent those things from happening again.
The side effect of these policies was that America's prosperity grew by leaps and bounds,
and so too did our influence and credibility among like nations.

 But there was always a group of people who hated the post-WWII order.
Businessmen in the Republican Party resented the idea that they could not do whatever the hell they wanted without government bureaucrats whining about minimum wages or other labor laws.
They despised being told they couldn't dump waste wherever they wanted without public safety concerns,  and they hated the taxes the newly active government required.
They sneered at postwar military alliances, believing that they cost too much money and that they limited America's ability to use its new leadership role in the world in ways that would funnel windfall profits to themselves.
Theirs was a strong-man vision of society rather than the rules-based one in which everyone was equal before the law. They believed that society's leaders should be unfettered to run the world as they saw fit and that government's role was to be a subservient agent for businessmen.
 In those most prosperous times, they had been a minority.

As time went on, the living memory of America before FDR faded (the United States was a far different country than it became after FDR.  Nearly a third of Americans had lived in poverty. A third of the country's homes had no running water, two-fifths lacked flushing toilets, and three-fifths lacked central heating. More than half of the nation's farm dwellings had no electricity and most African Americans still lived in the South, where racial segregation in schools and public accommodations were still the law) support for an inactive federal government grew. As living memory of Pre-FDR America faded, those who favored the "strongman" approach to society gathered more support until the 1980s when most all the New Deal regulations that protected labor, prevented foreign ownership of news media, and held monopolies and trusts in check were removed. The republican businessmen hated paying for labor, and they despised organized labor so when Reagan fired the Air Traffic Controllers for striking, it was a death knell for the power of unions.

This faction had managed to take over American government in the 1980s, and gradually purged from their ranks anyone who disagreed with them. For the past 3 decades, they have gutted government regulations and welfare legislation, slashed taxes, and neglected infrastructure.
Their policies hollow out the middle class as they use their wealth to purchase more power in government affairs. At the same time, they pour money into the military and increasingly call for war rather than negotiations to solve international crises. In this transformed demented new version of America, instead of our traditional democratic alliances, we are helping and praising totalitarians like Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Kim Jong Un in North Korea, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The current president publicly admires their strength in control of their populations. All of our recent ideological shifts have benefited them.

In this "post truth" era, it becomes more difficult with each passing day to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one's own place in the community or the economy.
In this brave new world
that has forgotten the lessons of the last century,
properties are institutional and abstract.
They are beyond your individual control.
Abstractions such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, and shares bury the importance and value the mutual good or pleasures of family and community life.
These things are being replaced by commerce with impersonal self-interested suppliers
and a placeless citizenship . While we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else's legal chattels, we are free only within narrow margins.  For all our talk about liberty and personal autonomy, there are fewer and fewer choices that we are free to make.
Oh sure, you can choose from a duopoly of corporate brands and a generic cereal.
You can choose which disinformation bubble pollutes your head.
But you can not choose quality in any sense.
Nor can you choose to not be a consumer.
Sales are it. There is nothing more...nothing else.
The Ferengi rules of acquisition have replaced the Bill of Rights.

The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth.
This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community,  it destroys  the foundation and practical means through which democracy moves.

In the 1970s films like American Graffiti and television shows like “Happy Days” portrayed the 1950s as a carefree era--a decade of tail-finned Cadillacs, collegians stuffing themselves in phone booths, and innocent tranquility. 

There was a bit of that sort of charm yes,
but in truth, the post-World War II period was an era of intensity
 and of dynamic, creative changes.

During the 1950s, African Americans quickened the pace of the struggle for equality by challenging segregation in court. A new youth culture emerged with its own form of music--rock ‘n' roll.
In the 1960s that music became the amalgamate voice of a generation. The music industry in the 1970s generated far more money than all professional sports combined.
Alas, where there's money, corporate raiders wait in the wing to milk it dry.
This music became important precisely because it was not controlled... and once the corporate world  did take it over, consolidated it, and homogenized it... it died.
It had no more value. Not in the way it had previously.
That my friends is the metaphor.
This is what is happening to democracy.
It's been bought and sold. Out with the mutual prosperity and the experts!
In with the Businessmen focused on their personal gain and their sycophants.

Surely we do not need an ideology of any kind and can see ideologues are essentially cretins.
Well meaning or not.
But what we do need is heart, mind, common decency, and a rejection of the excess of individual greed over the common prosperity..."At Home And Abroad" as they once said.