1) The American left has always been suspicious of government and comfortable with the market economy. The range of policies that look acceptable to the social

1) The American left has always been suspicious of government and comfortable with the market economy. The range of policies that look acceptable to the social left skew much more to the right than the social left in other countries. 2) Beginning with Goldwater and culminating with Reagan, the American public internalized economic libertarian ideas.[1] (See, e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/1964/10/25/archives/the-case-against-goldwaters-economics.html https://www.nytimes.com/1964/10/25/archives/the-case-against...) By the 1990s the Democratic Party had lost their multi-generational primacy, and the only politicians able to stem the loses were politicians like Bill Clinton (see also Tony Blaire in the U.K.), whose strategy was to co-opt libertarian economics. [1] The reasons for this are complex. For example, Southern conservative politics becoming vociferous advocates for deregulation and free trade obviously has more than a little to do with Nixon's infamous "Southern strategy". Republicans promised southern states a larger share of industrial manufacturing by 1) shifting it from the North and 2) extracting concessions from foreign manufacturers to build domestic manufacturing plants as part of trade negotiations.