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.

As Walmart expanded, the middle-class consumers of Sun Belt suburbia also came to benefit from its always low prices. For the cowboy capitalists, low prices were a hedge against government dependency. By supporting supply chain deregulation and resisting unionization and minimum-wage hikes, consumers could continue to enjoy the “American standard of living” without having to rely on government handouts or high wages attained through class struggle. Behind middle-class consumerism lay the producerism of the Populists’ favorite scripture verse: “If any will not work, neither shall he eat.” Low prices were prices that the middle class could pay, ostensibly, with the sweat of their brow.

Walmart workers and shoppers were not loyal to Walmart “because of” Walmart’s cultural conservatism and “despite” its economic conservatism. Rather, Walmart formed a nexus where economic and cultural conservatism were inseparable and even indistinguishable. As with Amway and McDonald’s, Walmart’s strategy was masterminded by elite leaders capable of astonishing cynicism. But the cynicism of elite leaders does not entail, as Frank and other contemporary left-populists often imply, that the commitment of “ordinary working people” to institutions like Amway, McDonald’s, and Walmart — or the Republican Party — is shallower than it appears. Rather, conservative populism fed on the powerful compatibility between widely and firmly embraced cultural values and the economic interests of particular capitalists.

But the lesson of the past fifty years of grassroots American conservatism is that there’s more than one way to promise economic prosperity. What people take to be an attractive vision of economic well-being simply cannot be separated from ideology and cultural values — and those values can’t be taken for granted. Of course it’s true, as Frank writes, that ordinary people “want their mortgaged farm or their postindustrial town or their crumbling neighborhood to be made ‘great again.’” Clintonian “It’s the economy, stupid” neoliberalism never disagreed. The question is what counts as “great again.” The New Deal–style social democracy that Frank prefers is not the self-evident answer for many “ordinary people.” Citizens do not sprout from the American soil with an innate thirst for economic democracy and worker power; their economic aspirations are shaped by their experience of the making and unmaking of class. Even the traditions of generations past — such as populism — that have been deployed to radical ends in particular contexts can animate a conservative economic vision in periods of working-class decomposition. When institutions of class struggle are dissolving, as they have been over the past fifty-odd years, reaching out for the lost possibilities of the past comes more naturally than embracing the uncertainties of the future. This is the lesson we must draw from the emergence of the powerful working-class conservative movements Frank dismisses as “pseudo-populism.” Political nostalgia, an uncritical turn to an unusable past, is among the greatest dangers for the left today.