Now it is true that Clintonian policies and rhetoric also didn’t cause all of the good things that happened in the 1990s. The 1993 budget deal didn’t kick off the dot-com boom. The crime bill played at best a secondary role in reducing homicide rates. Bill Clinton’s talk of “safe, legal and rare” and his willingness to talk about the cost of single parenthood were hardly decisive factors in reducing abortion or teen pregnancy.

But the Clintonian synthesis has been orphaned for ideological reasons, not because it was tested and found to fail. Liberals simply don’t want to believe that low-income Americans, black and Hispanic as well as white, might benefit from public paternalism in welfare policy, soft “values” rhetoric on marriage and family, and restrictions on illegal immigration — even though the working class’s best recent decade featured a Democratic president who embraced all three.

They don’t want to believe that soaring incomes for the 1 percent, their great bugaboo, can coexist with real gains for the middle class – even though the two coexisted in the late 1990s.

They don’t want to put any limits on soaking the rich and their investments — even if that means going way above the tax rates that prevailed during the economy’s last impressive boom.