I agree with Yoshie that the fifties are not much to write home about, either in the US or in Britain.
In both cases the social contract meant consolidating the core of the indigenous male working class into respectability and loyalty. This was the resolution of the pre-war class conflict - incorporation of the core, with the resultant emphasis on the exclusion of the periphery.
(Those who assert the common cause of organised labour with the oppressed have to deal with the actual history of discrimination at the worklplace.)
However, the attitude to the mid-century is determined by the attitude to the present.
For New Labour types over here, and I guess 'New Democrats' over there, everything since is progress, so the mid-century compromise represents everything that is wrong. If you endorse the present set-up, then it stands to reason that it is superior to what it replaced.
I see things rather differently.
What has happened since is not that the excluded have been included, but that the included white working class has been excluded.
The recessions of the early eighties and the early nineties dislocated all the elements of the social consensus. The family wage was effectively abolished. The intermediation of the labour movement between labour and capital was dismantled. Representation in social democratic parties was removed.
It appears that our own times are less discriminatory, and in a sense they are. Racial and sexual divisions mean less because the relative privilege of the core of the working class has been dismantled.
But that has not been through the elevation of those 'minorities' that were excluded, but by the demotion of the white working class.
Nostalgists like Thomas Frank, Cornel West, Kevin Phillips etc have an exaggerated view of the advantages of the prior dispensation because they are unhappy with the present. However, they do have a point. The boundaries of the socially included have been narrowed, not extended.
Has education improved? No, I suspect not. If Britain is anything to go by, the university system has been reduced to a mechanism for reducing youth unemployment. The multi-cultural syllabus is as awkwardly ideological as the previous one, if not more so.
In message <v04210100b5a4db751f30@[140.254.112.107]>, Yoshie Furuhashi
<furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> writes
>Try as I might, in my sympathy for cult stud Thomas Frank, I cannot
>feel nostalgic for the mid-century "middle-class republic" of Truman
>& Eisenhower, segregated lunch counters & valium-popping housewives,
>the Korean War & the CIA coup against Mossadegh, etc. The "social
>contract of mid-century" did make the "family wage" possible for a
>significant number of American working men, but the bargain involved
>swindling women out of war-time gains, putting an end to union
>organizing in the South, and swearing the loyalty oath to
>anticommunism at home & abroad. And what's ironic is that the very
>success of the anticommunist part of the social contract eventually
>helped to destroy the contract itself. No more Cold War = no
>necessity to sustain the expensive Welfare State; no more communism &
>populism abroad = plenty of low-wage labor abroad; successful
>capitalist showcases like Japan & West Germany (+ East Asian Tigers)
>= increasing international competition. The Third Way used to mean
>Swedish-type Social Democracy, the NIEO, etc.; now the Third Way
>means Clinton, Blair, & Schroeder.
-- James Heartfield
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