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Many younger people today find it hard to fathom, but the suburbs and fast food car culture were not (entirely) a capitalist plot executed by General Motors and

Many younger people today find it hard to fathom, but the suburbs and fast food car culture were not (entirely) a capitalist plot executed by General Motors and McDonald's to brainwash the populace into unwitting wage-slave servitude. The WW2 generation built and adopted all that voluntarily, because they like it and think it's a much better way of life than how they lived before the war: in densely packed, dirty cities; unable to remotely afford a car; being obligated to cook for hours every single day before you could even eat a meal, and then often going to bed hungry because there was just not enough food to go around due to the Great Depression. They moved to the suburbs because they generally view having your very own car to drive places, and being able to pick up dinner on the way home in five minutes, as massive lifestyle improvements rather than impediments.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> Many younger people today find it hard to fathom, but the suburbs and fast food car culture were not (entirely) a capitalist plot executed by General Motors and McDonald's to brainwash the populace into unwitting wage-slave servitude. Yeah, a significant part of it was about race rather than capitalism.
- pjlegato 10y ago
  Yes, racism existed (and still exists today.) However, the degree to which racism played a part in the construction of suburban America has now been greatly distorted and exaggerated by multiple generations of leftist academic historians, as part of a much larger political and cultural program aimed at disparaging traditional society in general. This is in turn part of the larger and extensively documented phenomenon of leftists having come to control almost all American academic discourse during the past few decades and systematically stifling any dissenting narratives, especially prevalent in the social sciences. While some racists certainly existed, the vast, vast majority of individuals who moved from the cities to the suburbs neither knew nor cared about any racism that was going on. It was not a factor at all in their personal decisions to build or move to suburbia.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > While some racists certainly existed, the vast, vast majority of individuals who moved from the cities to the suburbs neither knew nor cared about any racism that was going on. The people moving may or may not have known (though I think you seriously understate the degree to which they did), but what is more important is that the people designing and executing the policies (including those of banks and those of governments) which shaped the suburbs definitely and deliberately were not only aware of but actively applying race-based discrimination in so doing.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Many younger people today find it hard to fathom, but the suburbs and fast food car culture were not (entirely) a capitalist plot executed by General Motors and McDonald's to brainwash the populace into unwitting wage-slave servitude. Yeah, a significant part of it was about race rather than capitalism.

pjlegato 10y ago
Yes, racism existed (and still exists today.) However, the degree to which racism played a part in the construction of suburban America has now been greatly distorted and exaggerated by multiple generations of leftist academic historians, as part of a much larger political and cultural program aimed at disparaging traditional society in general. This is in turn part of the larger and extensively documented phenomenon of leftists having come to control almost all American academic discourse during the past few decades and systematically stifling any dissenting narratives, especially prevalent in the social sciences. While some racists certainly existed, the vast, vast majority of individuals who moved from the cities to the suburbs neither knew nor cared about any racism that was going on. It was not a factor at all in their personal decisions to build or move to suburbia.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > While some racists certainly existed, the vast, vast majority of individuals who moved from the cities to the suburbs neither knew nor cared about any racism that was going on. The people moving may or may not have known (though I think you seriously understate the degree to which they did), but what is more important is that the people designing and executing the policies (including those of banks and those of governments) which shaped the suburbs definitely and deliberately were not only aware of but actively applying race-based discrimination in so doing.