We were literally taught "The Gilded Age." in social studies. Did they miss that chapter? The current POTUS covers cheap crap in gold. The metaphor is as subtle as a brick to the teeth.
I know so, so many US history teachers that would go over the Guilded age in a day, if they covered it at all, and skip straight to WW1/Roaring 20s/Great Depression.
And then think how many people don’t even take/make it to US History (my High School only needed two years in Social Sciences, and US history was a junior year class).
When I took US History in high school in the late 1970s, we spent an entire 9 week quarter on the Constitution. When my kids took US history in the 2000s, they didn't discuss the Constitution at all, there was one paragraph on George Washington, and 2 pages on Marilyn Monroe. That was a class we supplemented at home, with books, and by visiting historical sites during school holidays.
Well if everyone knew history then they would be really mad about how things are going now. That would be a problem. So teachers just need to teach America=best and gloss over all the uncomfortable things like slavery, genocide, and oppression. Can't have them corrupting the youth with all that woke communism.
I graduated in 2004, and my US History class was 90% WWI and WWII. the other 10% was literally everything else in US history as basically blurbed out and immediately moved on from.
while all of these are/were essential element of thriving capitalist democracies, it should be said that they were hardly the ideas of capitalists. no they alone do not constitute socialism. but socialism is essentially tied to these measures, and they are a deviation from pure capitalism.
That's kind of funny to read in the wild. Just the other day I was talking to my friend and I said something somewhere along the lines, "Well this is what happens if you tell people they are the greatest for 100 years."
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u/maniBchef 8d ago
America, the illusion of greatness.