Writing something doesn't necessarily make it true, reading something doesn't validate its veracity. The author claims that "Democrats" became convinced of the neoliberal notion that the workers’ painful precarity and dislocation were inevitable and even morally necessary to move society forward." How does she know this? Was she there in some sort of high-level meeting where Democrats discussed abandoning class-based positions and shifted to identity-based politics? It's not likely that the Democratic policy makers had any idea what "neo-liberalism" was back in the '80s when Reagan was kicking their electoral butts and their decades long majorities in Congress vanished like smoke in the wind.
They WERE thinking about endemic double-digit inflation, for which Democratic social safety net programs and spending got all of the blame. They WERE thinking about moribund big industry unions who were helping the big auto makers to lose the market battle to Japan and Europe, while setting themselves above average working-class Americans who could only dream of making their kind of wages with their kind of benefits.
Most importantly, they were NOT in power, holding the House, Senate and Whitehouse for only 2 years between 1980 and 2008, and without a filibuster proof majority in the Senate then.
Love it or hate it, our political system requires large margins of majority, representing a large degree of agreement among the U.S. people, to make ANY large legislative move. LBJ had such a majority and passed Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Medicare, Medicaid, ground shifting advances for working class Americans, and then stumbled tragically into Vietnam and destroyed his presidency AND the Democratic majority coalition.
Had Bobby Kennedy not been assassinated he almost certainly would have won, and the country would have taken a different course. As it was Nixon squeaked in to the Oval in '68 and won a LANDSLIDE victory in '72. This should give you some idea of the appetite of the U.S. voter for progressive politics...it simply didn't exist.
Carter slipped into office with the help of a third-party candidate who siphoned votes from Ford but his full employment "Humphrey Hawkins" Full Employment Bill was blamed for runaway inflation and the Iran hostage "crisis" handed the election to Reagan in a landslide.
It's so easy for an academic to sit back and propose simplistic and conspiratorial causes for the course of U.S. politics and policy...far easier than plunging into the ACTUAL history and dealing with the complexities that actually set the course.
