I generally agree with your assessment of the rightward shift of Democrats that culminated in the wholesale rejection of Hillary Clinton in ’16, but I believe you are a bit harsh on Carter. While he did help to move economic policy to the right he was the first President to manage a fiat currency that had received a lot of bad press from the gold bugs. Much of his policy was aimed at reassuring the nation that their money wouldn’t be devalued, ergo his attention to balancing the budget. Everyone forgot that we only survived the great depression and was able to contribute to the effort in WWII as significantly as we did by tossing the archaic system aside under FDR.

You also completely failed to mention that Carter’s primary challenge was the oil embargo that more than doubled the price of energy in our productive capacity, creating even more concern over a fiat currency because his pick for Fed Chairman, Volker, was clueless. Much of the impact of the higher price of energy could have been better handled by subsidizing the imports instead of chasing the end results with money creation via the Fed and expecting unions to fight businesses in the trenches to compensate for his lack of ability. The backlash against unions, seen and promoted as the cause of inflation and high interest rates by conservatives and moderate deficit hawks, was very instrumental in electing RayGun and decimating liberal Dems in Congress.

When Americans are economically squeezed they get angry and their anger almost always gets directed to some entity whose status is lower than the average and receiving government support. The concept of government as a “cost” to the economy, while totally backward, is a mainstay of conservative politicians and RayGun wasted no time in setting up a false image of “welfare queens” wasting hard-earned “taxpayer dollars” while living high on the hog. They are not bashful in throwing out dog-whistles of racism even when they can’t produce any concrete examples of their assertions.

Angry voters have little interest in logic or data and Republicans are experts at ginning up anger and misdirecting it downward while portraying their wealthy donors as “victims” of big government that is the only thing standing between workers and a virtual Utopia of trickle-down prosperity. Democrats have never recovered from the PR beating RayGun handed to Carter and, instead, simply jumped on the corporate bandwagon as union membership declined, threatening their main funding source. Trump’s tactics almost exactly repeated RayGun’s except the race of the target group for blame is now Hispanics, not blacks. The pushback against this from Dems is also just as lacking, except from Bernie, as they were against RayGun’s attacks. It’s very hard to fight with one hand in donor’s pockets and the other constantly checking the political wind.