Of course, the Eighties have some bearing on the present world. The demise of organized labor, the decline of real wages, and the diminution of consumer industries faced with third world outsourcing; the primacy of finance and the shift toward mass incarceration justified by draconian drug laws; the negative trade balances, federal deficits, and tax cuts evened out by massive foreign purchases of Treasury bonds—these interlinked phenomena form the basis of contemporary governance, and even casual political historians today know how they were first ramped up during the Eighties, and by whom. But our good materialist perspective of the Eighties may be too exact, too sure. The uniform, relentless quality of neoliberal policies as applied once the Nineties began is projected back onto their pivotal decade; the shaky and experimental elements of the eventual consensus in its fledgling years have been effaced by the foreknowledge of its universal triumph.