What these movements represented was the supersession of the supposedly populist consciousness of the postwar era by a new consciousness of class struggle. Postwar leaders of the New Deal order had depicted economic growth as a positive-sum game: there was no need to fight over how the pie was divided so long as everyone’s slice was getting bigger. Squeezed by inflation and international competition, the radical labor movements of the 1960s asserted that the working class deserved a larger slice, whether the overall pie was growing or not. If corporations passed on the bill for wage hikes to middle-class consumers in the form of rising prices (arguably the most popular explanation at the time for the inflation of the 1970s), that might be regrettable, but it wasn’t the responsibility of workers like the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement to deal with it. They had sacrificed enough.

The radical labor movements of the late 1960s and early ’70s ultimately failed because they proved unable to overcome the divergences in short-term interests that the postwar political economy had established among a working population divided by geography, race, and gender. Over the course of the 1970s, many blue-collar white workers in the deindustrializing and rural US chose to ally with small business owners and corporate plutocrats rather than to join with a cross-racial, working-class movement that seemed to threaten their short-term livelihoods. When the unionized truckers in the Teamsters collaborated with growers to bust the United Farm Workers union in 1970, or when 200 white UAW members broke up a largely Black wildcat strike at three Chrysler plants in 1973, or when the AFL-CIO organized one thousand union construction workers to attack an anti-war rally in the aftermath of Kent State, they were not simply troubled by their opponents’ cultural elitism, as Frank suggests. These groups perceived — correctly — that their already tenuous middle-class livelihoods depended on precisely those features of the New Deal–order economic edifice that the radicals were attacking: racist labor market stratification, wage increases carefully managed by union leaders to avoid provoking capital flight, and torrents of federal defense spending.