"“We were promised, all during the time we worked at Caterpillar, that when you retire, you’re going to have a pension and full benefits at no cost to you,” Solomon recalled. He told about a round of contract negotiations he and his colleagues attended in the 1960s during which a management official complained: “We already take care of you from the cradle to the grave. What more could you want?”

Today, that old social contract is gone or, at least, the part of it that ensured healthcare and retirement for blue-collar workers. Now, as Solomon sees it, companies can say: “We want your life, and when your work life is over, then goodbye. We thank you for your life, but we’re not responsible for you after we turn you out.”"

"As everyone knows, it is the Republicans that ushered the world into the neoliberal age; that cut the taxes of the rich with a kind of religious conviction; that did so much to unleash Wall Street and deregulate everything else; that declared eternal war on the welfare state.

"Another thing the Republicans did, beginning in the late 60s, was to present themselves as the party of ordinary, unaffected people, of what Richard Nixon (and now Donald Trump) called the “silent majority”. They cast the war between right and left as a kind of inverted class struggle, in which humble, hard-working, God-fearing citizens would choose to align themselves with the party of Herbert Hoover."

"And so Republicans smashed unions and cut the taxes of the rich even as they praised blue-collar citizens for their patriotism and their “family values”. "

"Working-class “Reagan Democrats” left their party to back a man who performed enormous favours for the wealthy and who did more than anyone to usher the world into its modern course of accelerating inequality."

"In 2004, I went back to my home state of Kansas to ask why it had moved so far to the right since the days of Dwight Eisenhower; the answer, I discovered, was the culture wars – abortion, gun control, obscenity, education and so on.

And beneath every one of these culture war issues lay the burning insult of snobbery. A “liberal elite”, it seemed, was forever conspiring against the values of ordinary people, telling them what to do and how to do it without any concern for what they actually believed. The best thing about the culture wars was that they required the Republicans to deliver very little to their growing blue-collar base; the wars were unwinnable almost by definition"