The most significant political legacy of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession could turn out to be the ongoing shift in the way Americans understand their class position.

The bursting of the housing bubble—which entailed a collapse in home values and a flood of foreclosures—and spiking unemployment led millions of Americans to realize that their “middle-class” lives were just a paycheck or two from evaporating. The acute crisis has stabilized, though many of the jobs lost then have not returned, replaced instead with lower-wage, lower-stability positions.

Now, in the midst of widespread strikes and unrest among public-school teachers, The New York Times draws our attention to another aspect of 2008’s legacy: the decline of job quality for public employees. But there is little in the Times’s coverage to connect the dots between slashed wages, disappearing pensions, and second jobs to make ends meet and the wave of bipartisan austerity that swept state governments during and after the recession, along with the accompanying attacks on public-sector unions.

“[G]lobalization and automation aren’t the only forces responsible for the loss of those reliable paychecks,” the Times writes. “So is the steady erosion of the public sector.” The Times notes that state and local employees are the smallest share of the American civilian workforce since 1967. Yet these forces are presented as if there were no humans behind them, as facts of nature rather than facets of a particular political ideology intent on reducing the power of labor. The destruction of the American middle class didn’t just happen. It was deliberately done.

Making public-sector jobs worse was an intentional strategy, as Thomas Frank noted in The Wrecking Crew, going back to the George W. Bush days. It was part of Grover Norquist’s stated goal of shrinking government to the size at which it can be easily drowned in a bathtub, and for far too long much of the news media neglected to ask Norquist who would be drowned when that happened. Politicians insist that shedding public-sector jobs will somehow improve the economy, but it has had precisely the opposite effect for most people.