Back in the day, it was possible to compartmentalize American exceptionalism and American capitalism as completely separate from American socialism. Of course it was for resources, but it had to be sold as something else, and it was easier to keep a hot war going over there to prevent the cold war from becoming a hot war here. So we were told it was all to fight communism, but some of us knew better.
To show you how effective the home-grown propaganda was -- In the fall of 2000, I was in a grad school class with a bunch of fairly young high school teachers working toward their masters degrees, including a couple of history teachers. One young guy, probably not more than 22, 23 years old, just starting his second year of teaching American History at a local high school, was an obnoxious know-it-all. The subject at hand happened to be social change in the 1960s, and I was one of a couple students in the class who had actually been around then. As we started to discuss the power of protests and social movements, this young man dismissed it all as a bunch of left-wing malarkey, that there hadn't been any "movements" that actually accomplished anything.
"Excuse me," I said, looking right at him, "but there were a lot of movements and a lot of protests and a lot of people who got involved and made change happen, or at least started the process. The civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, the women's movement, the anti-war movement."
Our newly minted American History teacher just sneered at me and said, "Yeah, right, like what war was that? The cold war?"
Astonished that an American History teacher could be so ignorant, I shook my head and said, "No, the Vietnam War. You've heard of it, right?"
He apparently hadn't.
Lyndon Johnson inherited a mess he couldn't clean up, and his failures made everything worse, setting the stage for Nixon. But all of it was indeed political, military, and economic, as it still is today. The venues may have changed, but the issues haven't.
= new reply since forum marked as read