There is some enticing evidence for Frank’s claim that Democrats deliberately shunned American workers. He points to a 1971 manifesto by Democratic strategist Frederick Dutton, who wrote that workers had become the enemy because they were “the principal group arrayed against the forces of change.”

The Colorado Democrat Gary Hart, one of the many elected to Congress in 1974 as a reaction to Watergate, called his standard stump speech “The End of the New Deal” and President Jimmy Carter’s adviser Alfred Kahn wrote, “I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off. I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off. . . . I want to eliminate a situation in which certain protected workers in industries insulated from competition can increase their wages much more rapidly than the average.”

The centrist Democratic Leadership Council announced a “postindustrial, global economy” as it re-arranged the party to be friendly to business and trade, and President Bill Clinton, with Summers giving him advice, deregulated finance via repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Frank blames for the Enron debacle and the 2008 banking crisis.

Such changes made the champagne flow for the urban professionals even as the workers were left parched.