This is such a complex topic that an entire volume of books could be written on it. Unsurprisingly the article just scratches the surface barely enough to do it

This is such a complex topic that an entire volume of books could be written on it. Unsurprisingly the article just scratches the surface barely enough to do it justice. I wrote up a long “better” explanation I hope to share here later, but suffice it to say, this article greatly overstates the causation coming from the public’s political views when it really was a consequence of more material changes. Namely, communications technology, computers, and financial innovation started allowing smaller groups of people to produce value (obsoleting many low/mid provincial middle class jobs in the process) for much larger markets just as the rest of the developed world started to catch back up in manufacturing. As a double whammy plastics and aluminum hit prime time and disrupted the massive existing steel/textile base businesses they competed against. And the USSR began falling behind for their own reasons so nobody really worried about losing the lower/middle classes to socialism - but short of extreme isolationism it’s not like anything could really fix the competitiveness problem.