That makes sense.

I get frustrated at frequent oversimplifications. Reagan and the neocons certainly made things worse but they were a few out of many factors.

Even if we imagined a world where we have a bunch of Bernie Sanders all over government there are limits to what they can do. Strong unions in the US wouldn't have done anything to stop Asia from industrializing, Europe from rebuilding its economy or the rest of the developing world from trying to move out of agrarian economies. When the US car companies were the only game in town there was a lot of excess that could be spread around to workers. Once a bunch of other countries started offering cars it put more and more pressure on the US companies to spend more money on quality and charge less for finished products. Over here we got used to a war induced monopoly and convinced ourselves that's "normal" or that it's simply the result of democracy or American ingenuity.

If we actually want to improve the state of regular people we'll have much better success if we're honest with ourselves about both the present and history.