The good old days?

I have a hypothesis.

People on both sides of the political spectrum often point to the 1950s as the "good old days" in this country. Conservatives look back with longing on the days when a single income was enough to buy a house, jobs had pensions and full coverage for health insurance, there was enough income and leisure time left over for a yearly vacation, anyone who wanted to go to college could pay for it by working a summer job, and infrastructure was improving rather than deteriorating. Liberals respond "Yeah, that's because the unions were strong and the rich were taxed appropriately." And they're right, of course. But I think both sides have forgotten something:

The 1950s were also the era of McCarthyism, of the Cold War, and of general fear that Communism would take over the whole world.

And the 50s, 60s, 70s, and early 80s were the years that ordinary citizens in this country got the most out of their tax dollars and ordinary workers got the best pay and treatment. Social service programs were being created rather than defunded, transportation and communication networks were being built rather than falling apart, urban and rural areas were being improved right along with suburban areas, most people had health care and no one's health insurance made them pay thousands in co-pays, deductibles, and fees every year.

But around the time the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 80s, the trend started going the other way - wages got stagnant but prices didn't, college and healthcare got increasingly unaffordable, infrastructure stopped getting funded even as military spending grew exponentially (despite no longer having the threat of another nuclear power becoming aggressive and expansionist, until this year), normal people couldn't afford homes or vehicles anymore, the rich got obscenely rich while the rest of us worked more and more to get less and less. 

And conservatives got more and more hysterical about our country having a "radical Left" even as our "left-wing" party drifted further and further to the right. (Seriously, with the possible exceptions of Bernie and AOC they are to the right of Eisenhower. They only get called left-wing in comparison to the people who are so far to the right that they honestly think Joe Biden is a leftist, rather than the centrist conservative he actually is.) They think that "Please could we spend some tax money on making sure the poor don't starve" is authoritarian Communism because they've forgotten what ACTUAL authoritarian Communism looks like.

In other words, my hypothesis is this: 

It looks like the decades that were best for ordinary Americans - the decades in which workers got paid and treated the best, and government spending was doing the most for middle class and poor people - were the decades in which the rich and powerful were afraid that if they didn't do those things there would be a bloody Communist revolution and they would be first against the wall.

Now, I'm NOT saying we actually need a Communist revolution. The outcome would be, if possible, even worse for ordinary workers than the status quo. A totalitarian Left would be indistinguishable from a totalitarian Right. 

I AM saying that maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing if the rich and powerful were afraid of that possibility again.