This is one of the more insightful things I've read this week: "By the late 1930s [the Germans] had developed the weapons that would in the main be used to fight the Second World War.....When the war came they tried to speed the process of development up, to win the war with the weapons of the 1950s. The result was a technical disaster: shortages of resources, constant political interference, the inherent difficulty of accelerating research work at the forefront of science, all meant that German forces got little in terms of performance from the new weapons to match the great expense of producing them. The Allies...stuck with the weapons of the late 1930s, and pushed them successfully to their limits, in most cases overtaking the performance of Germany's most conventional weaponry. When after the war they came to develop missiles, jets, advanced submarine technology, and a host of other vanguard equipment, they simply took German scientists and blueprints." Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won, 243.

The more I read about the German war effort 1941 onwards, the more I’m struck by how they failed to comprehend the nature of the war they were fighting until it was much too late.

There used to be parts of America where the entire horizon existed because a factory needed it to. I find it hard to explain now. General Motors did not just make cars. At its peak, it helped organize an entire industrial civilization across the Midwest and Great Lakes region. Iron ore came down from Minnesota. Coal moved through Appalachia. Rubber came out of Akron. Glass plants burned all night. Rail yards fed stamping plants. Tool-and-die shops trained generations of machinists. Entire neighborhoods timed their lives around second shift. In 1955, GM made roughly half the cars sold in the United States. At different points, hundreds of thousands of Americans worked directly for the company, while millions more depended on the ecosystem around it. And that ecosystem was unbelievably dense. You could graduate high school in Flint, Anderson, Dayton, Janesville, Lordstown, or Detroit, walk into a plant, learn one difficult skill over decades, buy a modest home, raise children, help fund local diners and churches and little leagues, then retire knowing the country still had a use for your labor. People reduce this story to nostalgia because they only look at wages. Of course this misses the real loss. Factories like GM plants gave ordinary people a physical relationship to the nation itself. You could see where your effort went. You could point to highways full of vehicles and honestly say: we built those. Automation reduced labor. Trade shifted. Finance replaced production as the center of American power. Plants closed. Suppliers collapsed. Apprenticeship chains broke. Machine knowledge scattered. Entire towns slowly stopped believing the future would include them. And I honestly think a huge amount of modern American anxiety starts there. Not because factory work was perfect. But because millions of people once had a clear, stable role inside the country’s productive core, and then watched that role dissolve within a generation.

Everyone blames cars for social atomization, but in the early 20th century there was an array of social “third-places” built around the car. Something much deeper broke on a societal level in the 60s and 70s, and again post 2007. Cars are just an easy scapegoat.