Did Society Peak In 1965
A Semi-Serious Point About The 1960s
Posted by Charlie Recksieck
on 2025-06-26
Free love was here but not AIDS
You could eat eggs and bacon guilt free
Civil rights were on the way
Most people could buy a house
It was still ok to throw trash out the window
This is all a silly exercise but let me just make a couple of supporting points.
Monoculture
The three-channel TV era from the 1950s to cable's advent in the early 1980s is the only time in human history where we really came close to a monoculture. Everybody was watching the same thing.
What people term "watercooler" moments, like Who Shot JR on Dallas, were only possible if we were all watching the same thing. I remember the feverish discussion of the previous night's episode of Happy Days on so many Wednesday mornings in elementary school.
The pop music Top 40 reflected what was on most radio stations and what most people were listening to.
That didn't happen in Victorian England and it's certainly not happening now. It's probably the only 30 years in all of human history where we all listened to and watched the same stories. Is that good or bad? Who knows.
Make America Have Unions And A High Tax Rate Again
The MAGA time we're mystically trying to get back to seems like it was one of safety and prosperity. But why was America so prosperous circa 1965?
The U.S. had an advantage on tech and manufacturing and materials that other countries didn't have. The United States accounted for roughly 40% of global GNP at the time.
The earth has flattened since then and that's not coming back.
Labor unions built the middle class.
Basically, if you had a regular job, you could buy a house.
28-30% of all American workers were in a union (vs. about 6% right now).
The highest tax rate for the richest in 1965 was 70%.
Wow.
We can debate the fairness of that high number but right now the highest rate is 37% - and that would only apply to a tech giant doing absolutely nothing or no tricks to pay less taxes.
Maybe none of those three factors is ever going to come back in any way. But let's at least be aware of what was driving things.
Of Course This Is All Ridiculous, There Are Many Reasons Why The Good Old Days Weren't All That Good
The good old days weren't all that good if you weren't a woman, black, foreign-seeming, gay, etc. No contest. The "good old days" are so very much a white guy thing.
The advances in medicine alone are worth whatever damage that tech and over-connectedness have wrought.
Culturally, we might feel nostalgic for an era where The Dick Van Dyke Show was on TV, and Dr. Strangelove was in theaters. But nostalgia is a funny thing that leaves out the garbage. We forget about My Mother The Car being the best of your three choices on television that night, and Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine could have been playing in your neighborhood theater.
Wrap-Up
This is just a frivolous blog post and I'm not proposing that I'd rather be in 1965 than now.
Every generation tends to imagine a lost "golden age," yet progress and decline coexist. To think of it a different way, maybe society doesn't peak - it transforms.
