Eisenhower had won the War in Europe in the 1940s. He knew war and he avoided it. His first accomplishment as president was ending the hot war in Korea. He refused to enter England’s dispute with Egypt over the Suez Canal and declined the invitation to join the Hungarian revolution.

Our economy blossomed. Factories hired. Stores stocked up. For the first time since the heyday of Calvin Coolidge, America was booming again without a war.

Eisenhower did this through low taxes, balanced budgets and building infrastructure. Not only did he begin the criss-crossing of America with interstate freeways, but he worked with Canada to build the St. Lawrence Seaway, which opened the Great Lakes to global shipping.

After a 20-year hiatus, the suburbanization of America resumed. People fled the crowded, polluted and corrupt cities for a new life in with large yards, good schools and clean air — much to the despair of Democrats who complained about commercialism, materialism and something they called affluenza.

[Don’s point is worth noting for Hollywood too, which has been at war with the 1950s since the late 1960s. It’s an ongoing cliché, so tiresome that it practically should be its own genre. “The Graduate” managed to be a good movie despite it, but the genre largely consists of smug sneering at suburbia in vastly overrated films like American Beauty, Pleasantville, even The Shape of Water, which was a horrid movie in many different aspects, and so on. The Left has been trying to destroy the 1950s ever since the Summer of Love, and what have been the outcomes? Rampant social problems largely centering on the destruction of the nuclear family model, demolition of objective truth, and faddish embraces of anti-social and mental-illness patterns as a new “normal.” The 1950s weren’t perfect, but is today better? — Ed]