I’m currently getting through the first season of The X-Files (slowly).
The episode “Space” is about a space shuttle being sabotaged. And damn, people really did think it was the end of history in the 90s, didn’t they? The episode starts with Scully asking Mulder “Who would want to sabotage the US space program? The Soviet Union is gone.” And Mulder is like “Maybe terrorists. The space program represents the superiority of American progress. Or maybe it was sabotaged by people who hate technology.” And then he talks about maybe its about hiding aliens because it’s Mulder and of course he would say that.
And here I am thinking about the current state of US Space exploration and Space X, and how naive people were in the 90s. They really thought the US was funding space research because they cared about human progress.
They really thought that this was it. That the US had won and capitalism had won and that it could only get better from here. They didn’t realise that the Soviet Union was the only reason the US was pumping money into Space exploration. It wasn’t about progress to the US oligarchs, it was about propaganda. That’s why it took Sputnik to really get US to really try and catch up.
Once the Soviet Union broke up and “Space race” propaganda glow wore off, they didn’t have to compete with Soviet science anymore, so the funding slowed down now the whole thing is gradually becoming a privatised mess whose progress pales in comparison to Soviet or 70s NASA.
Now all they have to do for space propaganda is get Elon to dance around and send a car or some billionaires into orbit on a piss leaking shuttle now and again.
The West in the 90s had no idea just how screwed they were about to be, now that capitalism no longer felt threatened by a scientific communist superpower.
Holy shit Dirt_Owl it was just a throw away line in the X-Files what is wrong with you. 
Have no source about this, but the welfare state and the quality of live of the first world, was also because they had to show how living under capitalism was better, but once they didn’t had to keep the facade, they went back to any benefit the working class got from the capitalists and this is why now everyone is broke except billionaires.
It was also to hold back socialism because it would’ve been a threat to capitalist hegemony if the citizens were unhappy, once there was no USSR welfare states and workers’ rights started getting stripped.
In the Nordics, which are seen as model social democracies, the US funded succdems to counter the USSR’s influence, for example.
Parenti in particular has written about this, yes