the-old-days
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Explanation
The Joke
A nostalgic older person begins with "This country was lost its way. We need to go back to the good old days when America was prosperous." Two younger people eagerly ask how to do that. The elder then launches into a detailed and horrifying prescription: "All you have to do is fight a just war against a powerful overseas empire... have all your economic competitors' infrastructure destroyed... prosecute the war in such a way that your own nation's infrastructure is ruined... attend college, collect boring engineering and business degrees... maintain social cohesion and the boom in consumption associated with populating a devastated planet... make the world's best brands grow ever better through thousands of engineers, inductors, and discoverers." In the final panel, one of the listeners deadpans, "He was doing that 'listing easy steps' thing again, wasn't he?" and another replies with a sarcastic remark about the plan being simple.
The comic skewers the "Make America Great Again" style of nostalgia by taking the demand to return to the "good old days" at face value and spelling out what actually produced mid-20th-century American prosperity. The answer is not some simple policy change but the entirety of World War II and its aftermath: the destruction of every other industrial economy, the GI Bill, massive infrastructure investment, and a unique geopolitical moment that cannot be replicated.
The Humor
The joke works by exposing the absurdity of nostalgia for a bygone era by listing, in excruciating and increasingly impractical detail, the precise historical conditions that created that era. Each item on the list is individually true -- WWII did destroy competitors' infrastructure, the postwar boom was real -- but strung together as a to-do list, they reveal how unrepeatable and contingent that prosperity was. The deadpan reaction of the listeners, treating this as just another instance of the old person's habit of "listing easy steps," adds another layer: even when the full absurdity of the nostalgia is laid bare, it gets brushed off as a familiar quirk rather than a genuine revelation.
References
The comic is a commentary on postwar American economic exceptionalism and the nostalgic political rhetoric that invokes it. The United States' economic dominance in the 1950s and 1960s was largely a product of World War II having devastated the industrial capacity of Europe and Japan, leaving America as the only major economy with intact manufacturing infrastructure. This is a point frequently made by economists and historians when responding to calls to "return" to that era of prosperity.