Chris Arnade at The Hedgehog Review:
When I ask him when it all “went wrong,” he launches into a critique of the trucking industry, complains about the decline in lifestyle and wages over his life, and concludes by saying, “And that is the last time I voted for a president, because he stabbed us working people in the back.” “Reagan?” I ask. “No, Jimmy Carter.” And that is when I learn, to my embarrassment, that it was Carter, the candidate I had once campaigned for at my parents’ side, who had deregulated the trucking industry.
That move was part of a larger program of deregulation that would reshape the country, triggering a deluge of consolidation, offshoring, and financialization. While this eroded America’s industrial base, especially in the Midwest, it engorged Wall Street with profits and filled New York City with young, highly educated professionals who would remake it along with the nation, and then result, arguably, four decades later, in Chrome Dome, like a lot of other “low-educational attainment” Americans, voting for and electing Donald Trump, to the surprise of everyone with a national voice.
Yuppies, a new book by historian Dylan Gottlieb, is an attempt to portray how sweeping a national transformation this set of policies (deregulation, financialization, deindustrialization) represented, by focusing on its foot soldiers in New York City: the meritocratic class of strivers who arrived in vast numbers beginning in the late 1970s.
More here.
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