Because of the corona lockdown I've been rediscovering my love for the Fallout series recently and have just been doing a playthrough of Vegas and Fallout 4. While I do enjoy 4 a lot, I have been identifying things that really bug me about the game, and one of those things is how pre-war America is depicted. Not so much because it doesn't really offer much to the gameplay or your character in terms of how he interacts with the wasteland (after the first couple of quests the SS acts as if he's a wasteland veteran, which I always found off), but rather it betrays the lore surrounding the world before the bombs fell.

From all the in-game info, pre-war America was really, really, terrible - virtually all the major factions in all the major games (except the Enclave) actively mould their societies with the failings of the United States in mind: NCR's steadfast commitment to the values that had made the US great while consciously trying (and often failing) to avoid its pitfalls; the Brotherhood and Mr. House's elitist and autocratic societies were borne out of the corruption caused by, in their view, the mob-rule and absurd jingoism wrought by the States; the Legion's total rejection of the concept of a modern constitutional state in favour of a 12th Century Central Asian-style Khanate LARPing as Romans. All of these saw the U.S. as at best a failure to live up to its principles or outright terrible.

Beyond the political philosophy though, there is a lot of material evidence to show that the U.S. was terrible - it was a corrupt military dictatorship that murdered hundreds, if not thousands, of its own citizens who were peacefully protesting, conducted widespread human experimentation, invaded sovereign states with reckless abandon and committed numerous atrocities in its occupied territories. Death and suffering had become so second-nature to Americans that the fact Nuka-Cola Clear killed people in testing was mentioned only in passing. Economically the country was suffering hyper-inflation, no one could drive except those lucky enough to have nuclear cars, there was mass-unemployment, presumably an extensive draft for all the wars, and what little income people did have was most likely being taxed away to fund the war in China (given how high tax rates were during WWII, and the fact that they weren't using experimental fission and fusion technology, I can imagine top marginal taxes of 98-99% wouldn't be unbelievable). All in all, the U.S. was in such a dire state that the president and his men had basically accepted a nuclear war was coming and went and hid weeks, if not months before the actual event, leaving the country rudderless and holed beyond recognition.

And yet, when you greet your spouse in the morning and drink your morning coffee, life is...wonderful. We're only given a brief snippet of what life was like, but what we do see is not a society in decay. The streets are clean, the houses neat, the lawns well kept. People are happy, either enjoying the sun or relaxing with their families at home for breakfast. Your prime concern is your/your spouse's speech at the veteran's hall, nothing serious. It doesn't feel like a war is about to happen, which, by all accounts, it should have felt like. But here you have a lower middle-class family (Nate couldn't have been a high rank in the army otherwise he'd be on the oil-rig with the President, and low-ranking soldiers don't get paid much even today. Add hyperinflation and extensive conscription, and a recent law graduate on maternity leave for a spouse, and that family is lucky to even own their own home) with a lovely bungalow equipped with the latest, most modern tech, I believe a nuclear-powered car, and a bloody Mr. Handy, and the husband doesn't even appear to have a job. Life could not have been this easy for a family like this during times as trying as this, and this breaks the whole lore surrounding the dystopian pre-war United States. It makes the whole context surrounding the Resource Wars seemingly redundant, because the only reason the U.S. pursued them, instead of hunkering down and waiting on a fusion based solution to be practicable nation-wide, was because it would have meant total collapse at home, akin to a civil war and total destruction of America, and the whole tragedy of Fallout was that their attempts to stop this collapse ended up causing said collapse anyway through the War.

The society of the Sole Survivor was not a society on the brink of economic and cultural collapse - it was a near mirror image of our society but with a robot butler and seemingly a much higher standard of living for the middle-class. It wasn't the society of Pre-War America.