In the wake of the financial crisis, pundits left of the center argue for the need to restructure finance. Ideas like a return to Glass-Steagall or a new New Deal have been floated — welcome changes, to be sure. However, these policy proposals leave a deeper question unresolved: how did Wall Street elites end up gaining control of finance in the first place? How did they channel large pools of finance into a narrow range of obscure financial investments without Americans knowing it? How did our financial system become so undemocratic?

The standard narrative points to deregulation under the Clinton Administration in 1999. But at best, this can only be what social scientists like to call a “proximate cause.” There was a time in the postwar period when average Americans made a real effort to control finance through institutions of collective bargaining. The exact way in which they failed reveals a fifty year war in America waged by the elite against financial democracy.