Heather Ann Thompson

What made the American middle class, what made people able to feed their kids, send them to college, buy homes in the suburbs, all the things that were part of this American dream were made possible by a robust federal government, high taxes that provided for the public.

And lots and lots of white families benefited from that, including living in public housing that was taken care of, that gave them a leg up.

By the time

we get to the 70s, lots of black folks who had been left out of all that start to push for inclusion.

And meanwhile, there's a global economic downturn.

The Reagan Republicans take advantage, frankly, of this moment when there's an economic crisis and there's a civil rights revolution and essentially start to say to white working class people, listen, things are going to hell in a handbasket.

Big government's bad.

Trust us in the private sector to take care of everything.

And they're kind of given a Faustian bargain.

Be

because they kind of want to believe it because they're also afraid of black people.

They're afraid of this civil rights era, but they're also buying something that's going to cost them a lot, which is this idea that we don't need public services and that you can count on rich people to take care of you.

Right.

Well, first of all, I remember it as well.

I remember being in the city, New York City in particular.

I grew up in Detroit, but I spent a lot of time in New York City in the 80s.

And for those of us who remember it, it was a really gritty, scary time in America that felt like something different was afoot, like cities were falling apart and there was kind of a new mean austerity economically on the one hand, but on the other hand, there was a

like the age of yuppies, people were making a ton of money, and then there was also a lot of hate crimes going on.

So that kind of resonated to me with right now, and I'm a historian, and I thought, you know, what is, what's going on today, and where did it really get going, this kind of normalization of,

all this rage and all this misinformation and all this kind of real income inequality that we're living with today.