On the other hand, if you were corporate titans like the Koch brothers, who grew up in a family with close ties to the John Birch Society, you viewed FDR’s New Deal as a pale imitation of Stalin’s totalitarian gulag. The Gilded Age was the American Eden before the Fall. The death of America’s middle-class dream was only collateral damage in the war for the freedom of the fortunate few to pursue their happiness without government interference or regulation. In this extreme version of capitalist theology, any federally sponsored policy of income redistribution was heresy. The emergence of a
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