On the 9th of November 1989 the Berlin wall came down, by December 1991 the mighty Soviet Union was dissolved and Communism, which had once vied with free market capitalism for total global dominance, was dead. Received opinion regards this fall as largely an event that had unipolar consequences, but of course, drastic changes which affect globally influential institutions have global consequences.
Which brings us to the Golden Age: the fifties. In terms of the balance between crime, security, public trust, standard of living, technological innovation, national unity and personal happiness, the fifties were perhaps the zenith of Euro-American culture; a time described by author, Bill Bryson as, "a happy time, when almost everything was good". Of course, such was the lingering and disparate impact of WWII that the fifties didn't happen in Europe until the seventies. The best evidence to support the view that the fifties was a uniquely serene and happy time for the Anglosphere is the great lengths that the establishment and intelligentsia have gone to disparage this era and dismiss it's happiness and prosperity as a "myth", in doing so dragging every minor and ever present negative occurrence centre stage and illuminating it in a klieg light of hostile propaganda.
The great achievement of the fifties was the elevation of millions of American workers, who had
previously lived financially precarious lives to a position of unprecedented security and affluence.
The standard explanation for this new paradigm is the industrial and social afterglow of victory in WWII, yet great technological progress and wealth are not historically associated with improvements in the lives of the working classes. The agricultural and industrial revolutions in England were times of great oppression and degradation for the English working man.
There are many, many differences between industrial revolutionary England and post WWII America, but with respect to the democratization of affluence there is one salient difference which is always overlooked: the existence of a seductive, threatening, active and powerful, proselytizing alternative system: Communism. To a large and overlooked extent Euro-American workers owed their new affluence to Communism, and the threat it extended to Western elites. Western elites distributed wealth
to seduce Western workers away from the siren call of revolution.
Bearing this in mind it's possible to understand the post-Communist era as a time of the waning of the
power of the Western worker and a great restructuring and repossession of power and wealth. the principle weapon of the elites in this grab has been mass immigration. The vast numbers of poor workers imported from outwith the "free" West are a tool to destroy the ability of Western workers to resist and organize against the diminution of their standards of living and command of wages.
