Heather Ann Thompson

And I think from the very beginning was exhibiting a problem with authority and

feeling misunderstood and anger and all of those things.

But I also was struck by the way in which that was not the explanatory thing that we might think it was.

Yes, he was a loner and he

was an electronics nerd who lived by himself and worked for himself in part because he had a difficulty, I think, getting along with others.

But on the other hand, he was a guy who would step outside of his apartment in the 1980s New York and just be so irritated.

And

angered at the garbage piling up on the stoop and the sex trade going on on street corners and the scores of people suffering the ever-deepening AIDS epidemic.

And he felt a degree of abandonment and fury by that and saw all of it as the fault of a liberal do-gooder government that

that was not taking care of business, not cleaning things up.

And in that sense, he was this everyman white American who was feeling dislocated and discombobulated by the time of the 70s and ever more so as the austerity of the 80s kicked in.

I remember it.

Many of us do.

It was grim.

It felt dangerous to be in the subways.

It felt abandoned to walk down almost any city street, wherever you grew up.

And it felt like we were in an absolute crisis in the 1980s.

And so it wasn't that I doubted the sentiment on the ground, but what was striking to me was why was it that people were interpreting that

really terrible urban situation as the fault of its weakest residents, its most marginalized residents, those who were already poor, those who were suffering, frankly, this crisis far worse than they were.

And that was when I really began to dig into the politics of the Reagan 80s and, more importantly, the economics of the Reagan 80s.