By Ryan McMaken
We’ve entered a new era of politics and government in America, and the Left is pretty happy about it. This week, for example, The Guardian announced “Biden's $1.9tn Covid relief bill marks an end to four decades of Reaganism.”
From this point of view, “Reaganism” is code for extreme free-market libertarian public policy. Or as some call it: “neoliberalism.”
The idea that this sort of Reaganism took over the country contradicts reality, of course. By virtually every metric—from tax revenues and federal spending per capita, and in to the size of the regulatory state—the size of the American state has expanded relentlessly for more than 40 years.