the postwar ‘40s and early ‘50s were this weird liminal period not yet obvious that the old empires were dead or that America wasn’t going communist just like everybody else, or that “going communist” meant “becoming a satellite state of Russia under the Lenin Dynasty”

I’m kind of reminded by our modern “housing crisis”, we were starting on a big Euro-style public housing program back then for a similar crisis but then seeing how quick the Austro-Hungarians fell into the Warsaw Pact void rattled us and so with our petroleum infrastructure we had Levittown instead

this was when we really invested in the ideology of “anti-totalitarianism”, horseshoe theory, put 1984 on the high school curriculum to reinforce that whatever our WWII propaganda had said, we were always at war with Eurasia