One of our favorite Strong Towns member-contributors is Kevin Klinkenberg (Twitter: @kevinklink ). Kevin is the Principal at K2 Urban Design and blogs at The Messy City, and he’s been gracious enough to share a good deal of his brilliant work with us over the years. This was Kevin’s most popular post on Strong Towns this year, and it’s easy to see why—in the year of “OK Boomer,” a broadside against 1950s nostalgia seems to have touched a nerve with our readers.

Kevin, though, has hit on something important about our culture and the stories we tell ourselves, something far beyond a simple clapback. There’s a reason that politicians on both sides of the aisle hone in on the immediate post-World War II era as a signifier of a better, bygone America. To the left, it was a period in which we could Get Things Done as a society: income inequality was low, marginal tax rates were high, the New Deal policy consensus was strong, and the federal government attacked pressing problems such as poverty with serious muscle and ambition (if a checkered track record of actual success). To the right, the postwar era was a period in which patriotism, cultural unity, and traditional social mores ran strong, and American industrial might and technological ingenuity were the envy of the world.

The story we tell at Strong Towns is more complicated. From a historical standpoint, the postwar era was, as Kevin puts it, “highly unusual.” The U.S. found itself in a position of unprecedented wealth and global dominance, with an economy growing robustly enough that we were freed, for a short while, from the need to make difficult choices, or face any painful near-term feedback on the worst of the choices we did make—at least at the macroeconomic level. (Urban Renewal and freeway building, to be clear, resulted in plenty of immediate painful feedback at the level of the individual communities that were destroyed and displaced.)

While parts of the world in which World War II had actually been fought rebuilt their cities from the rubble, we rebuilt our cities too—but by choice. The suburban expansions that began in the postwar era radically transformed the face of a continent. We’re still grappling with the unintended consequences.

In a sense the decades immediately following World War II were, for our national economy, the equivalent of a household acquiring a large line of credit and going on a shopping binge—new furniture, new TV, refurbished kitchen and bathrooms—and then looking around their blinged-out home and saying, “Look at all this stuff I have! I must be wealthy.”

We’re still fighting the hangover from that binge. We’re fighting it in the depopulated Rust Belt, in Sunbelt cities deep in the Growth Ponzi Scheme, and coastal metropolises facing the evisceration of their middle classes as they find themselves no longer able to deliver on the postwar social contract of a nice house on a quiet street with a yard and a picket fence for every family.

That social contract—the idea that we could sustain it and keep all our promises to ourselves—was always an illusion. Treating that postwar illusion of wealth as some sort of baseline condition that our society and economy should get back to is not going to help us solve any of the pressing problems we face today. It’s certainly not going to help us become a nation of strong towns. –Daniel Herriges, Senior Editor.