We’ve come to take the pervasiveness and power of right-wing fanaticism for granted these days. And yet, for much of the twentieth century, liberalism and Keynesianism were triumphant, and the basic contours of the New Deal order seemed inviolable. Unions represented a large share of the US working class, and income inequality was suppressed to historic levels.

But the New Deal order was never as secure as it seemed, even at its apex. Black people lived under racist despotism in the South and were subject to housing and school segregation and labor market exclusion and marginalization everywhere. Right-wing evangelicals were already mobilizing. The Cold War had organized domestic unity behind an anti-communism that meant suppression of the Left and radical unionism at home, and bloody imperialism abroad.

And as historian Kim Phillips-Fein discusses in the following interview, businesses and businessmen were, from the very beginning, organizing to destroy the New Deal and the power of organized labor and to spread the gospel of the free market and neoliberalism in their place. Phillips-Fein is the author of Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal. The interview, which appeared on Jacobin Radio’s The Dig, has been edited for length and clarity.