Must-Read: From “The Defining Moment” to “The Long Exception”…
(2008): The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History: “The period from Franklin Roosevelt to the end of the twentieth century… [shows] that the New Deal…
…was more of an historical aberration–a byproduct of the massive crisis of the Great Depression—than the linear triumph of the welfare state. The depth of the Depression undoubtedly forced the realignment of American politics and class relations for decades, but… there is more continuity in American politics between the periods before the New-Deal order and those after its decline than there is between the postwar era and the rest of American history…. While liberals of the seventies and eighties waited for a return to what they regarded as the normality of the New Deal order, they were actually living in the final days of what Paul Krugman later called the “interregnum between Gilded Ages”… [with respect to] race, religion, class, and individualism.