Mark Schmitt says the 1970s were a decade of lost opportunities to reconstruct the New Deal order.
The short postwar miracle was built on a “great compression” of broadly shared economic gains, a “liberal consensus,” around the idea of a supportive government committed to expanding rights and opportunity, and a loose social compact between industry and organized labor. In the late 1970s, these phenomena, dependent on prosperity, gave way to a particularly predatory form of financial capitalism, joined to an aggressive and opportunistic conservative politics capable of winning electoral majorities.
