1987
It seems that the major story of this era focuses instead on another era. Although normally the pull of nostalgia brings us back to earlier times because we forget most of the bad and target fixate on the good, our thinking now seems tinged with regret and concern about how bad things got very quickly.
After all, 1987 is less than four decades ago now, but it was the last time our currency was worth anything. Wages stagnated in the mid-1960s after the anti-racism and anti-poverty programs kicked in, we ran out of real wood in 1987, and we still use 1987 as a benchmark for the value of the US dollar because it became unstable afterwards.
Many of us are looking back and thinking “what went wrong?” since our history after that date has been unsteady with rising factors of decline. We stood to inherit the world: Reagan and Thatcher had browbeaten the Communists into hurrying along their inevitable self-destruction, leaving America the only superpower after it dominated other contenders in WW2.
One of the factors in our decline of course was the loss of an old order. Reagan gave it a last shot and by the end of his presidential term was at about a quarter of a Joe Biden level of bumbling senility. Thatcher had compromised and fought but was out of room. The Right seemed irrelevant as the Soviets faded into historical oblivion.
Perhaps a bigger factor was the amnesty that occurred that year. With it, the government announced that it was so dependent on diversity voting that it could not escape amnesty being used as a bargaining chip. The dark work of the Hart-Cellar Act, which abolished our national founding group, was taking over.
Even more, it was clear that the 1980s were ending. This decade showed a backlash to the civil rights movement of the 1960s that propelled the neocommunists into power and replaced WASPs with Southern/Irish, Eastern, and Mediterranean Europeans. Those are mixed-race groups that would inevitably dilute any heritage Cro-Magnon genetics.
A great exhaustion set in. People had been pretending that “duck and cover” under school desks would protect us from ICBMs with ten megaton warheads. The 1960s revolution in education had taught White guilt and pemmican adulation, so Political Correctness set in at our best universities. It was a self-hating population that greeted the 1990s.
Even more it was clear that diversity was taking over. All of our official propaganda from Hollywood had Black presidents. Science fiction writers thought themselves deep and wise for advocating a future where everyone was “the same color” instead of having races, cultures, and ethnic groups.
This was a bad time for conservatives too. Almost none of them had the intestinal fortitude to be as proactive about social order as Thatcher and Reagan had been, so they substituted for that with extra Jesus/Israel, patriotic manifest destiny, and support for large industries dependent on Leftist notions like unions and immigration.
However, the most likely case is that no one could escape this. The bomb whose fuse was lit in the 1960s, the civil rights and Keynesian socialist entitlement programs, detonated in the 1980s. Government expanded rapidly and business became dependent on government loans, purchasing, subsidies, and protection from lawsuits.
With all this going on, however, for a brief period America peaked. Life was pretty good in those Anglo-Saxon businesses where people worked for as long as it took to get the job done and no longer, without the constant pretending that occurs now where people call business and fluff paperwork like actors pretending to be office workers.
We knew ourselves better then. Having face down many crises, we were confident in what we stood for and understood. It turns out that the Big Lie was hidden among the truths, and that brought us down, but until it emerged, people had something they could believe in. No wonder people who were not alive then look back fondly now.
