Liberals don’t remotely understand their own history, they are intentionally misled by their leaders so they misplace blame for bad governing decisions. Take financial deregulation, a central tenet of modern governance. The main point of financial deregulation, which happened from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, wasn’t to shift wealth upwards, though that was a consequence that later became central. It was to get the public to stop believing that the government could do anything about the economy.

Greta Krippner’s book Capitalizing on Crisis makes the point. Here’s her thesis, from my review:

The era of financialization was not about letting the market decide, it was, as Krippner argues, a specific form of ‘neoliberal statecraft’. It was governing without consent of the governed, by depolitizing decisions to a state-constructed market.

I constantly see liberals arguing that there is this thing called government, and it is essential that a Democrat control it. There is also this thing called the economy, which has innate characteristics like rampant inequality, joblessness, financial crises, and so forth. And never the twain shall meet (unless it is the GOP is in charge).

That line of thinking among the natural opponents of deregulation is basically the victory of the bad guys right there. The people who run our financialized state want you to think the economy is a thing with agency, a thing beyond human or political control. They want you to believe that in the face of this God, the President is essentially powerless. But that’s false. It’s all a choice. The government is intimately involved in all aspects of markets and economics, it is inherent. Who to prosecute, who to subsidize, who to meet with, which rules to pursue, what to sell, etc. It’s all statecraft. Deregulatory statecraft is just about making the natural constituencies of social justice believe that there’s nothing to be done, except on the margins.

Which is crazy.

Even changing that belief would make a big difference. The economy isn’t a real thing, it’s just a tally of all transactions counted by economists. And policymakers make a thousand choices a day about the transactions in our society, whether those transactions tilt towards justice or tilt away from justice. And political expectations matter. If liberals began to expect more justice from their society, they would get more justice. And that’s why they are taught to expect only what this deity called ‘the economy’ delivers. The man behind the curtain knows better, if you know he’s there.