The Great Depression was cause by a demand problem: there wasn’t enough demand for goods, prices crashed and so did employment.
The policies put in place by the New Deal were almost all intended to increase demand and prices. Farm support, social security and so on. Elites were slaughtered by the great crash of 29 and the Depression. Not all supported the New Deal, in fact many don’t, FDR bragged they hated him. But obviously FDR had elite support.
This chart shows what happened:
I think that’s pretty clear. Union membership soars with new Deal, plateaus, then slowly declines. Elites after WWII were not nearly as scared, the economy was good, and Truman’s veto was over-ridden when an anti-union bill which made foreman inelligible for union support passed.
Over time public support for unions also declined. What happens is that those who remembered the depression and the time before it age out: we’re not talking GI, we’re talking Lost and older generations. The GI saw the depression, but they didn’t experience the roaring 20s. They didn’t get what life was like before all the wage, price and demand supports put in place by FDR.
But the mid 70s these people are out of power: not only was there a wave of deaths, but in the 70s there was a movement to replace them in Congress. The incomers wanted process fairness, not outcome fairness and they replaced the old timers. (Matt Stoller has written about this extensively.)
Soon afterwards the neoliberal era dawned, and its intention was to make the rich richer and everyone else poorer: to crush wages, ostensibly to deal with the supply shock by stopping people from consuming goods and services which required petroleum products. Children of the 70s supply shocks, they were terrified of inflation and figured that rich people don’t produce inflation which matters. (This is before the era of private jets.)
In general all successful political action requires some part of the elite to support it. It doesn’t have to be all, it doesn’t even have to be a majority (it wasn’t during the New Deal) but it must exist. Popular support is a power source, but it requires transmission and an engine to turn it into action.
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