The New Deal sure changed things. Between the Progressive Era (roughly 1890-1920) and The New Deal (1932-1944) so much of what made the 1800s brutal and downright unAmerican, for anybody who didn’t own a railroad, was elevated to civilized standards. Poverty alleviated, sickness treated, playing fields leveled, fairness lauded as a virtue to be aspired to by government, not just Boy Scouts. A radical idea that saved capitalism in America.

But did capitalists appreciate that? Do they ever? From the start there were corporate Republicans who hated it and vowed a multi-generational jihad to take out the improvements and erase The New Deal. They countered The Wagner Act with Taft-Hartley as soon as they could.

Since the 1930s, when then president Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised to break the hold of moneyed men on the government and broker “a new deal for the American people”, a cabal of reactionaries resolved to destroy the new government Democrats created.

Last week’s Janus Decision was just another in a series of conservative Supreme Court decisions taking a sledge hammer to the crumbling foundation of The New Deal. Read Professor Cox Richardson from The Guardian.