> Because the vibe I get is that it was better than today for the people who wanted to work hard...
The "vibe" you get? You were there?
I'd point out that during the Gilded Age, women were largely excluded from the work force, blacks were forced into sharecropping and tenant farming while under threat of racial violence including lynching, Chinese workers were forced into the most dangerous jobs and then punished for the privilege (see the California's Foreign Miners' Tax), and so on.
But I guess if you were a white Murican with ambition and a willingness to do whatever it took to succeed, it was a great time to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
So you're saying that the mobility was a direct result of oppressing minorities? That's certainly a take. (See, we can both play this stupid game.)
At the end of the day most of those downtrodden minorities you think you care about ultimately wound up creating successful ethnic communities, before we adopted, at the behest of people like you, central policy that dismantled them starting in the mid 20th century.
This is an example of the type of law that was passed during your "good vibes" period that was designed to push out non-white labor.
So the point that you don't want to seem to acknowledge: the period of time that you seem to be holding up as an ideal (read: where Americans could work hard and get ahead) was filled with laws and even violence that sought to restrict opportunity for non-whites and women.
This is historical fact, whether you like it or not.
> At the end of the day most of those downtrodden minorities you think you care about ultimately wound up creating successful ethnic communities, before we adopted, at the behest of people like you, central policy that dismantled them starting in the mid 20th century.
What in the world are you on?
But this is the perfect example of America today: you can't have a vigorous debate without somebody resorting to casting aspersions on another's intentions and blaming them for things that happened when they weren't even alive.
Unless you think the racism and sexism is a key part of what enabled economic mobility and prosperity for others bitching about beliefs people held in the past that are now considered unfashionable/wrong/a drag on society is whattaboutism at best.
> Unless you think the racism and sexism is a key part of what enabled economic mobility and prosperity for others...
It is an historical fact that women and minorities were excluded and discriminated against in the 1800s, and that this was to the benefit of white men.
It's easy to criticize other cultures through the lens of your own. If you're not a moral relativist, then find the best culture as your benchmark, not your own - you're not going to be magically lucky enough to live in the one morally right culture in history. Some of your own beliefs about right and wrong are going to be backwards - if you can't face up to that, stop being a cultural supremacist.
Or accept that every culture does things that look bad to outsiders and that doesn't change the fact that they may have gilded ages - no matter how good social mobility is for black people today, it's still crap for chickens.
The "vibe" you get? You were there?
I'd point out that during the Gilded Age, women were largely excluded from the work force, blacks were forced into sharecropping and tenant farming while under threat of racial violence including lynching, Chinese workers were forced into the most dangerous jobs and then punished for the privilege (see the California's Foreign Miners' Tax), and so on.
But I guess if you were a white Murican with ambition and a willingness to do whatever it took to succeed, it was a great time to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.