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This is moving and includes valuable suggestions for living better in hard time. But I find the background premise (shared with a lot of these arguments) that the political economy of 1960 was indefinitely sustainable to be pretty implausible. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/everything-is-broken
I really think that it's impossible for us to move forward until we accept that what's remembered as a midcentury golden age was unique, unsustainable, and unrepeatable.
It's same problem whether you concentrate on politics, economics, or culture.
Conditions were also far less arcadian than we now imagine--which is one reason that they didn't last.
On the specific issue of political economy, you simply can't understand the "neoliberal turn" in the '70s, without some acknowledgment that the Keynesian model was collapsing under its own weight.
Maybe policies that were popularized then outlived their usefulness and became counterproductive. Maybe there was a more promising road not taken. But it's not like everything was just fine until Milton Friedman tricked us.
In fact, if you read political and cultural commentary from the period, you're likely to be struck by how familiar the complaints are: anomie, balkanization, deindustrialization, etc., etc.
My point is not that things are terrible, have always been terrible, and will always be terrible. Or that our problems are exactly the same as those of '50 years.
But I am saying societies are complicated, governing is hard, and even the most successful policies create unforeseen problems of their own. The real alternative to the failures of political and cultural dogmatism isn't EVEN BETTER dogmatism. It's humility.
You could tell a similar story about the critique of "flatness". Yes, it feels weird that everyone buys all their stuff on Amazon. You know what Amazon (largely) replaced? Malls and chain supermarkets.
The cultural critics of '50s were *obsessed* with the increasing homogeneity of American material culture. The aesthetic has definitely changed and digital has accelerated the process. But this is not a new concern.
