Deindustrialization laid low the industrial working class and the labor movement. Lamentable, perhaps—but why should it matter, some might ask? That question itself is evidence of how much our world has lost. For a hundred years the labor movement was the bone and sinew of social protest against the iniquities and inequities of industrial capitalism. It is, either solely or in conjunction with other rebellious elements, responsible for the weekend, for the eight-hour day, for the abolition of child labor, for minimum-wage and hour standards, for some semblance of democratic rights in the workplace and civil rights for excluded minorities, for progressive taxation, for protections against the safety and health hazards of industrial work, for old-age pensions, for low-cost public housing, and for health insurance. That is an impressive list of reforms, to be sure: ones that define much that is essential about modern life, a list that could easily be extended.

In real life, the robber-baron industrialists and financiers of Wall Street were no more aristocrats than my grandma from the shtetl. They were parvenus.

After the dolorous 2010 midterm elections, a certain gloomy apprehensiveness about the stunning triumph of Tea Party resentments has settled in.