It was never really true, but there was more than a bit of truth to it. Much of the world was horribly poor, and much of the rest of it was recovering from war. Back then it was easy to spin the stuff that we were actually doing wrong as stuff we were doing right. Because we were rich! Well, richer than just about everybody else, so everybody else must have been doing something wrong.
Now lots of places are pretty rich. There isn't one clear SUCCESS model along the "capitalism"-democratic socialism continuum. Just examples of stuff which seems to work pretty well, and stuff which doesn't. Like our health care system.
