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Three classes kept America balanced
The Working Class
The working class had stable jobs, often in unions, and a pragmatic, economically focused politics. The contest between left and right was about who could better raise workers' living standards, which centered politics on a fairly rational basis.
Business and Experts
The business class by the 1940s and '50s was grandsons, publicly traded companies, and professional managers, an institutionalized world of regulated monopolies and oligopolies: one phone company, a limited number of airlines, three networks.
Between them sat the experts, the technocrats and administrators, who followed the best peer-reviewed social science. They regulated businesses so they didn't get too greedy and kept workers from becoming so demanding that the system collapsed.
Disarray Today
With all three classes in disarray, the country is not organized to answer questions like what to do about AI in the old ways. America remains the only potential pillar of global stability, so its internal incoherence undermines any chance of global stability.
Why did regulated monopolies dominate postwar business?
AT&T, nicknamed Ma Bell, ran nearly all American telephone service as a regulated monopoly until the government broke it up in 1984. The Civil Aeronautics Board set airline routes and fares until the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. Governments allowed these arrangements because the industries needed huge networks of wires or aircraft that were thought wasteful to duplicate. In return the firms accepted regulators' control over their prices.
Why were unions so strong in the 1950s?
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 protected the right of workers to organize and required employers to bargain with unions. Manufacturing employed a large share of workers, and big factories made organizing easier. The Bureau of Labor Statistics data show roughly a third of American wage and salary workers belonged to unions in the mid-1950s. That share has fallen to around one in ten today.
How did managers replace owner families?
Historian Alfred Chandler described the rise of salaried managers in his 1977 book The Visible Hand. As railroads and factories grew too large for owners to run themselves, firms hired professional managers to coordinate them. In 1932 economists Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means documented how ownership of large corporations had split from control. By the 1950s most large American companies were run by managers who held little of the stock.