He United States emerged from the Second World War as the world’s pre-eminent military and economic power. America exercised a commanding role in international trade and was the only nation in possession of atomic bombs. While much of Europe and Asia struggled to recover from the horrific physical devastation of the war, the United States was virtually unscathed, its economic infrastructure intact and operating at peak efficiency. In 1945, the United States produced half of the world’s manufactured goods. Jobs that had been scarce in the 1930s were now available for the taking. American capitalism not only demonstrated its economic strength but became a dominant cultural force around the world as well. In Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, American products, forms of entertainment, and styles of fashion attracted excited attention. Henry Luce, the publisher of Life magazine, proclaimed that the twentieth century had become the “American century.”
Yet the specter of a deepening “cold war” cast a pall over the buoyant revival of the economy. The tense ideological contest with the Soviet Union and Communist China produced numerous foreign crises and sparked a domestic witch hunt for Communists in the United States that far surpassed earlier episodes of political and social repression.
Both major political parties accepted the geopolitical assumptions embedded in the ideological cold war with international communism. Both Republican and Democratic presidents affirmed the need to “contain” the spread of Communist influence around the world. This bedrock assumption eventually embroiled the United States in a costly war in Southeast Asia, which destroyed Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency and revived isolationist sentiments. The Vietnam War was also a catalyst for a countercultural movement in which young idealists of the “baby boom” generation provided energy for many overdue social reforms, including the reforms that were the focus of the civil rights, gay rights, feminist, and environmental movements. But the youth revolt also contributed to an array of social ills, from street riots to drug abuse to sexual license.
The social upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s provoked a conservative backlash as well. Richard M. Nixon’s paranoid reaction to his critics led to the Watergate affair and the destruction of his presidency.
Through all of this turmoil, however, the basic premises of welfare-state capitalism that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had instituted with his
New Deal programs remained essentially intact. With only a few exceptions, Republicans and Democrats after 1945 accepted the notion that the federal government must assume greater responsibility for the welfare of individuals. Even Ronald Reagan, a sharp critic of federal social-welfare programs, recognized the need for the government to provide a “safety net” for those who could not help themselves.
Yet this fragile consensus on public policy began to disintegrate in the late 1980s amid stunning international developments and less visible domestic events. The surprising collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of European communism sent policy makers scurrying to respond to a post-cold war world in which the United States remained the only legitimate superpower. After forty-five years, U. S. foreign policy was no longer keyed to a single adversary, and world politics lost its bipolar quality. During the early 1990s East and West Germany reunited, apartheid in South Africa ended, and Israel and the Palestinians signed a previously unimaginable treaty ending hostilities—for a while.
At the same time, U. S. foreign policy began to focus less on military power and more on economic competition and technological development. In those arenas, Japan, a reunited Germany, and China challenged the United States for preeminence. By reducing the public’s fear of nuclear annihilation, the end of the cold war also reduced public interest in foreign affairs. The presidential election of 1992 was the first since 1936 in which foreign-policy issues played virtually no role. This was an unfortunate development, for post-cold war world affairs remained volatile and dangerous. The implosion of Soviet communism after 1989 unleashed a series of ethnic, nationalist, and separatist
Conflicts. In the face of inertia among other governments and pleas for assistance, the United States found itself being drawn into crises in faraway lands such as Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
As the new multipolar world careened toward the end of the twentieth century and the start of a new millennium, fault lines began to appear in the social and economic landscape. A gargantuan federal debt and rising annual deficits threatened to bankrupt a nation that was becoming top-heavy with retirees. Without fully realizing it, much less appreciating its cascading consequences, the American population was becoming disproportionately old. The number of people aged ninety-five to ninety-nine doubled between 1980 and 1990, and the number of centenarians increased 77 percent. The proportion of the population aged sixty-five and older rose steadily during the 1990s. By the year 2010, over half of the elderly population was over seventy-five. This positive demographic fact had profound social and political implications. It made the tone of political debate more conservative and exerted increasing stress on health-care costs, nursing-home facilities, and the very survival of the Social Security system.
At the same time that the gap between young and old was increasing, so, too, was the disparity between rich and poor. This trend threatened to stratify a society already experiencing rising levels of racial and ethnic tension. Between 1960 and 2010 the gap between the richest 20 percent of the population and the poorest 20 percent more than doubled. Over 20 percent of all American children in 2012 lived in poverty compared to 15 percent in 2000, and the infant-mortality rate rose. Despite the much-ballyhooed “war-on-poverty” programs initiated by Lyndon B. Johnson and continued in one form or another by his successors, the chronically poor at the start of the twenty-first century were more numerous than in 1964.
World History
