> "Don't Be a Sucker", 1945 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4

I like how the opening scene is 'performance wrestling', which is still around (WWE):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe

Why does your friend think the other team is against international cooperation and is calling him a red?

Unrestricted capitalism often has offshoots of fascism. If you observe how capital treats labor in a market without regulations and respect for human rights, it is very similar to how fascism treats its victims.

Whichever label your current 'flavor' of the political party wears is largely irrelevant. At its core, they are both capitalist parties first and foremost.

> The biggest reason why America's post-war economic boom was so good for America's working classes was that WWII had taught America's ruling classes just how horrible the consequences could be […]

And those lessons have been forgotten given the trajectory the US has been since the 1970s: inequality and wealth concentration is at the same levels seen in the Gilded Age.

Some folks may never have learned them as there are people out there that think the FDR's New Deal policies were a bad thing and American is still "suffering" under them.

> And the Soviet Union was quite obviously trying to spread Communist Revolution - "Workers of the Work, Unite!" - to the rest of the world

It's not that straightforward actually, the Comintern (under the impulse of Staline) wasn't really fond of the idea of spreading the revolution after the mid-twenties. During the cicil war, the Spanish communist party even teamed up with the centrists against the anarchists to crush the revolution that they had started with the anarchists a year before.[1]

It's only after 1947, when the cold war started, that the Soviet union resumed its support to communist insurgencies worldwide, but more as a geopolitical tool than really for ideological reasons (things would indeed have been very different in that regard had Trotsky led the USSR instead of Staline).

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Days

This leads me to wonder, do you think free trade and ad or government subsidized everything from TVs & smartphones to Internet and cellular service to content serve to keep the lot of the working classes satisfied instead of the dignities sought by the European union members & syndicalists of yesteryear?

In addition, it was an objective economic factor. There were few workers because in 1946, the Depression generation started getting into workforce and they were few in numbers. So in the post-war 20 years or so, there was a persistent dearth of workers as WWI vets aged out of work and less numerous Silent generation replaced them, so people enjoyed good salaries because employers had to compete for them. Then, Boomer generation which was by far the most numerous yet, kicked in, and an era of persistent unemployment and stagnating living standards, resulted.