Ours Was the Shining Future: The Rise and Fall of the American Dream

A widely shared post-WWII prosperity collapsed thanks to the right’s championing of corporate greed and the left’s abandonment of the working class, according to this sweeping history of the American economy. New York Times journalist Leonhardt (Here’s the Deal) spotlights economic changes, begun in response to the Great Depression, that made the economy more abundant and fair: New Deal labor laws bolstered unions, a public-spirited business culture cooperated with labor and government, and government subsidies made home-ownership and college attendance affordable. Things changed in the 1970s, Leonhardt contends: torpid labor unions stopped organizing new workers, right-wing intellectuals propagandized a laissez-faire business culture that was hostile to unions and government regulation, and the Democratic Party turned toward liberal social issues that appealed to college-educated professionals and away from blue-collar economic issues. The result, he argues, is a modern America steeped in economic stagnation and inequality. Leonhardt’s narrative of decline is broadly familiar, but he makes it fresh with trenchant quantitative analysis and an unusually sharp account of the left’s culpability. (He critiques the Democrats’ shift from immigration skepticism to an embrace of immigration despite its unpopularity among working-class citizens whose wages it suppresses.) The result is a searching diagnosis of America’s socioeconomic malaise that skewers elites of every stripe. (Oct.)