Republicans may win control of Congress. What do they want?

But reruns of that ’70s show reveal some blindspots of the new New Right argument. One is that it tends to misunderstand the origins of the package of tax cuts, deregulation, and free trade that Reagan helped sell to the American public.

Contrary to accounts from opponents on the left as well as some on the right, “neoliberalism” was not a conspiracy by libertarian activists to undermine an otherwise successful model of political economy. As historian Gary Gerstle acknowledges in his forthcoming history, ideas with a long and complicated history gained political traction mostly in response to the poor performance of the U.S. and other Western economies in the 1970s. The most effective argument for freer trade, for example, was not that Adam Smith or Friedrich Hayek said that it was a good thing. It was that foreign companies and offshored production offered consumers cheaper alternatives in a period of rampant inflation.

Understanding the origins of a policy doesn’t entail approving of all its consequences. Still, a realistic assessment of the conditions that sustained the Reagan movement also helps clarify the alternatives. Whatever retrospective critics might wish, there was little political demand for a more statist brand of conservatism in the days of Whip Inflation Now — and little economic prospect that it would succeed.