The Reagan-era "deregulation" was severely overrated. The highlight of the so-called "Golden Age of Capitalism" where supposedly full employment and Keynesian demand management prevailed had, for instance, a Federal Register that was a seventh the size of what it is today. Reagan did pay a lot of lip service to free markets and rugged individualism, but his fiscal record and foreign policy doctrine speak otherwise.

It seems to me like a lot of left-leaning commentators have a sort of vested interest in maintaining this pseudohistorical divide between "embedded liberalism" from around 1946-1974 and the "neoliberal" period since then. Many of them never lived through or remembered this period (neither have I), so it serves as a sort of utopian benchmark of hope that we should return to.

A more accurate picture to me would be a virtually constant period of state-merchant/corporate coalition since the mercantilist era after the dismantling of feudal relations, to the present.

(After all, it was the Golden Age of Capitalism when the Truman Doctrine was in full effect and the United States had some of its greatest foreign policy ventures, a true renaissance for the military-industrial complex.)