The supply side “City on the Hill” pitch in 1979 (before and since) has generally been that cutting regulations and taxes at the top would help the working class — and blaming “others” when results failed to arrive.
As the New Deal/Great Society Consensus fragmented, Third Way democrats accepted aspects of that corporatist economic platform. It hasn’t worked.
The Third Way was mostly wrong. The “free market” wasn’t free. Supply side policies didn’t help working voters.
Reaganomics and its more conservative iterations have tended to favor idle wealthy freeloaders at the expense of people who do real work in the real world to pay rent and care for dependents. So people get mad. Third Way democrats made a wrong turn, and the GOP would now like to give them an empty bag to hold.
I think that’s partly R. Reich’s point. He served in the first national Third Way administration.
