American Aftermath

Where Does That Leave Us?

In the wake of the Cold War, American society was left broken and bankrupt. Morale in the country was left more decimated than before the war had even started, and only led to an overabundance of federal monitorization. With federal acts such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 being instituted, the country had sacrificed freedom and privacy for security; "If we think our issues of national security started with 9/11, we miss the deeper roots of our national obsession with security, which began more than half a century ago" (May 939).

The societal effects can also be seen through a modern day comparison with the eighties. While the Cold War may have been more cold than hot, it still "ushered in an uneasy era often described as 'peacetime'", but when realistically, "war became a fixture of life" (May 939). After the conflicts with the USSR ceased, the American public needed a new enemy to target their aggression towards. Americans went back to fighting fellow Americans, as "the answer on both sides was to retreat into warfare on cultural issues like homosexuality, abortion, flag-burning, and racial speech" (Dickstein 532). 

"A decade of Gilded Age ethics, income redistribution, and antiwelfare rhetoric had left the rich richer, the poor poorer, and the underclass demoralized" (531)