The New Deal, World War II and the Cold War made America a superpower that could afford guns and butter. the US didn't have to rebuild or repay after WWI, giving us a leg up on the old world empires. we came through the Great Depression with a rebuilt infrastructure and without a civil war or even major regime change. We fought much of WWII as the factory and breadbasket of the allies. We emerged from WWII with our population and means of production mostly intact.
We then immediately entered the Cold War and spent rocketships of money on research in outrageously obscure and cutting edge fields like nuclear physics and space travel. And this gave us so many unintended inventions that it fueled our economy for 60 years. This changed America from a nation of producers to a nation of consumers.
It was during this time that the nature of business changed, and business became much more political and profit hungry, eating it's own legs from the early 1970's on.
Business got greedy and saw the money spent on the people as just more money that could be spent on it. Business changed politics to be about businesses vs the people, and the people lost.
Now businesses don't want their government to invest in big ideas that will grow everyone, because some of the money will go to their competitors. So they starve the government, after feeding from it for so long that they can no longer see where they came from.
I find it useful to write about history in order to prime myself for writing RPG history. It can help design the setting to see where the differences can create new things. In the other direction, you can deconstruct settings to see where the divergence is.
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