Neoliberalism can sound benign. After all, it’s a theory of government predicated on the government getting out of the way and doing no harm. But the force that replaces the government when it abdicates its collective responsibilities is “the market,” and that is a force that is inherently amoral and ungenerous. The market values profits over people and commodification over children.

More importantly, the market doesn’t allow you to vote for the outcomes you want. Sure, market aficionados will say you can “vote with your wallet,” but even that pallid analogy presumes people have wallets hefty enough to make a difference. In a market-driven government, the people with the most money get the most “votes.” When neoliberals cede government functions to market forces, what they’re really doing is giving away the power of the people to affect and change the society they live in. From prisons to pollution, neoliberals have let the profit motive—instead of the will of the people as expressed through representative democracy—decide what kind of world we live in.

Most people trace the birth of neoliberalism to Ronald Reagan—with the Democrats hopping on board in the 1990s with the election of Bill Clinton. But Clinton merely consolidated neoliberal ideas and turned them into a national agenda. I do not blame Clinton’s successful presidential campaign focus on “It’s the economy, stupid” for kick-starting the party’s fascination with neoliberalism in 1992. I place the birth date of neoliberalism on October 24, 1978, because that is the day that President Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act into law.

I will freely admit that the Airline Deregulation Act is something of a pet peeve of mine. It’s a law that makes me irrationally angry, although it is objectively not as important as our antidemocratic voter suppression techniques, nor as vile and racist as our treatment of immigrants. But I believe the law to be a consequential misstep for the entire country. It is the moment when the Democratic Party turned its back on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and instead adopted the language of the free-market, unregulated claptrap pushed by capitalist thugs. It’s a language that has been swallowed whole by the corporate media and now bleeds out into our national conversations about the social safety net, social justice, and even the power of the government to combat the greatest threat of our age, climate change.

I cannot say that the Airline Deregulation Act caused many of the bad laws we still live with today. I can say that if you understand how Democrats passed the Airline Deregulation Act, you will understand nearly every fucking mistake the Democratic Party has made over the last 50 years.

Obviously, to get to the point where the airlines could be deregulated, they needed to have been regulated in the first place. Prior to 1978, the airline industry was one of the most heavily regulated sectors of American life. That makes sense when you remember that rocketing human beings tens of thousands of feet into the atmosphere and expecting them to come down again at a gentle, survivable rate of speed is an insane thing to do. The world’s first libertarians, Daedalus and Icarus, learned too late that having minimum regulatory standards for human flight is a good and necessary thing.

It should also go almost without saying that the air is shared space and thus must fall under some basic level of public regulation. I know that concept bothers a certain kind of billionaire who assumes that he has a right to buy everything he can see, but you can’t own the sky, Elon Musk. Regulations are needed to govern what goes up, if for no other reason than to prevent everything that’s up there from crashing into each other and coming back down on all of our heads.

But air travel wasn’t regulated just because of safety concerns. Crisscrossing the country with reliable commercial air traffic requires massive public infrastructure spending. Airports, it turns out, are not the kinds of things the free market will easily provide. The sheer amount of physical space airports require, combined with the need to have the area surrounding the airport clear of obstructions like trees and buildings and little kids flying military-grade helicopter drones, means that the government has to become involved. Moreover, the market is bad at providing comprehensive air traffic routes. The market tends toward overserving big population centers, while leaving smaller cities and rural areas without air service.

Vanderbilt law professor Ganesh Sitaraman’s book Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It brilliantly details the pre-1978 regulatory environment. Many early airline “regulations” were carried out on behalf of the US Postal Service through its Bureau of Air Mail, which was organized in 1917, because delivering the mail was an essential government function, and the airlines were better suited to doing it than literal horses. The key concept here, according to Sitaraman, is that airlines had to get permission from the government to fly between certain cities. Because the sky is shared space, the airlines had to be granted access to use that space by the government, and the government’s interest was establishing reliable mail service to every part of the country, even to places where the airlines had no financial interest in flying.

The system worked well enough to deliver the mail, but when it came to commercial passenger travel, for the most part, the early airline environment was a disaster. Smaller carriers were gobbled up by larger ones, tickets were ridiculously expensive, few cities had access to passenger air travel, and airlines were financially unstable. When the Great Depression hit, a bunch of them went under. In 1938, the Roosevelt administration, which had come to view commercial air travel as critical to national security in the prewar years, erected a brand-new agency to oversee the industry: the Civil Aeronautics Board. The CAB needed to solve the most vexing problem for national air travel: How do you make low-demand routes affordable for consumers yet lucrative enough to get airlines to fly there? Everybody wants to fly from New York to Chicago. Fewer people want to fly from New York to, say, Akron. Because of the low demand, it’s actually more expensive for carriers to fly the NYC-to-Akron route even though NYC to Chicago is farther away.

One solution is, you know, fuck Akron. People who need to go to Akron could just fly to Chicago and rent a canoe or whatever and paddle their asses through the lakes on their way home. Alternatively, they could pay a private pilot exorbitant rates to fly to Akron at a price that makes it worth their while. That’s what “the market” would say.

But if you think about air travel as a public service, then Americans have just as much of a right to fly to Akron at a reasonable time for a reasonable charge as they have to fly anywhere else. If you think about this country as something other than a contest of capitalists trying to extract as much wealth as possible before they choke on their billfolds, then it stands to reason that the government should, in some way, be involved in making sure flights to Akron happen.

This is where the Postal Service roots of the airline industry become important, because the post office had already confronted and solved this problem. Preflight mail carriers (the guys on horses) also realized it was prohibitively expensive to take mail to low-population centers, resulting in very high rates or no mail carriage at all to sparsely populated areas. And yet, they were still supposed to deliver the mail to low-population areas, because mail delivery is a public service. The financial innovation that solved this postal problem was… the stamp. Stamps are a fixed-rate fee based on the weight of the letter and not the distance it travels, so it costs the same price to send the same letter from anywhere to anywhere in the country. Stamps, therefore, are a form of public subsidy: People sending their letters along cheap, high-trafficked routes are subsidizing people who send their letters to remote locations along low-trafficked routes. We all pay the same rates even though some of our letters cost more to deliver than others. It’s almost like we live in a society.

The CAB adopted this postal solution and brought a similar kind of price-fixing approach to passenger travel in the airline industry. I know, I know, “price-fixing” is a dirty phrase that makes people think of communist politburos that crush entrepreneurs and economic innovation. But in the context of what the CAB was trying to solve, fixed-rate fares made a lot of sense. The CAB would give popular, well-traveled routes to airlines if the airlines agreed to serve less popular routes as well, for a fixed fee. It was a way to make air travel from New York to Akron affordable, because that route was subsidized by the fares for New York to Chicago.

Price-fixing solved one economic problem but introduced others. The biggest problem, somewhat obviously, was that airlines couldn’t really compete on price to attract new customers. That meant that the only way for airlines to grow was to offer better, more alluring customer services.

For consumers, this was great. Spacious, comfortable seats. Five-star meals. Airplanes even had bars and smoking lounges. American Airlines (famously) had a piano bar… in economy class.

This was the golden age of airline travel that my father and yours fondly remember. For the airlines, however, it was kind of disastrous. Putting aside the sheer gravitational inefficiency of carrying a freaking piano on a thing that needs to float in the air, you have to remember that the airlines couldn’t really charge people more for these luxuries. Yes, enhanced ticket prices for “first class” was always a thing, but the basic fare was controlled by the government, piano included or not.

In any event, it was all fun and games until the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries got its shit together and realized that the West was (and is) entirely addicted to and dependent on oil sourced from countries it used to colonize. The price of fuel went up so hard and so fast that it sent whole economies into recession. If the airline industry had spent its salad days investing its profits in developing fuel-efficient planes, maybe it would have handled the oil shocks of the 1970s better. But no, it spent the money building gas guzzlers big enough to carry an entire Vegas lounge act into low earth orbit. When gas prices went up, the entire airline industry almost went under.

It takes a giant leap to go from “Fuel prices are too high” to “We should deregulate the entire airline industry and give it away to private capitalists.” But some people thought they could use the fuel crisis to pull it off. The cast of characters who pulled off the great corporate heist of our public air space could be plopped into an Ocean’s Eleven movie without the script missing a beat. They include the following characters:

The Orchestrator: Yale law professor Robert Bork. Bork, who is the founder of the conservative judicial philosophy known as originalism, basically invented the case for airline deregulation.

The Safecracker: Future Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer. Breyer cowrote the Airline Deregulation Act and recharacterized the Republican calls for deregulation into something establishment Democrats could support.

The Expert: Future airline executive Phil Bakes. Bakes was a congressional staffer and the other author of the bill, who falsely sold deregulation as populism.

The Face Man: Consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Nader drummed up popular support for deregulation, arguing (rightly) that corporate capture of the CAB had led to industry-regulator collusion while making the case (wrongly) that it would somehow be better for consumers to have industry in charge of commercial air travel.

The mark for this con job, the dupe all these people had to gaslight into handing them the keys to the kingdom and ushering in the era of neoliberalism, was one of the most solidly liberal Democrats we’ve ever had in the US Senate: Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Democrats probably never would have turned their backs on a literal New Deal agency like the CAB without a Roosevelt Democrat (who was also functional political royalty) like Kennedy leading the way.

In 1976, with the Republican Party still reeling from the associated scandals of Watergate and President Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Nixon, Kennedy was eager to continue the family business of running for president. But Kennedy couldn’t run against Ford in 1976. Well, I mean, he could have, but in 1969 he had kinda, sorta, actually killed a woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, when he drove his car off a bridge in Chappaquiddick with her in it after a booze-filled party, escaped the submerged vehicle, and left her there without reporting the accident for hours. (He ultimately pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.) Kennedy was still too toxic to run in ‘76, clearing the way for Jimmy Carter to become president, but he was absolutely planning to challenge Carter in a primary in 1980. He was looking for a signature issue that he could push the Carter administration on and distinguish himself from the administration’s “malaise.” He realized, as everybody with half a brain realized, that the fuel crisis was Carter’s biggest weakness.

Meanwhile, airlines were ailing, so the CAB raised airfare prices. That was almost certainly the right regulatory call, but raising prices on an essential service like air travel during a period of economic recession and stagflation caused a lot of pain for consumers and, most importantly, voters.

And there was a deeper problem with the CAB: It had ceased operating like a regulatory agency that oversees the airline industry and started operating like a cartel that protects the airline business elite. It’s a problem that infects almost all “big government” regulatory agencies if they last long enough: corporate capture. Eventually, the wealthy people the agency is supposed to regulate buy the regulators.

If you tell a rich fuck that there is an agency head who is responsible for making up the rules that govern the rich fuck’s business, the first thing that rich fuck is gonna do is try to buy, bribe, or influence that agency head. Should the agency head prove incorruptible, the next thing Mr. Moneybags will do is use his political influence and connections to get the agency head fired. With enough time, pressure, and money, Richie McCashman will eventually get his way and will install his own agency head, who is loyal not to the people or the government but to the rich fuck who got him the job.

That is essentially what happened to the CAB. The major airlines bought it, used it to murder small carriers and new competition, and turned the entire regulatory scheme into a closed market that guaranteed profits to a few wealthy players. When the CAB started raising prices to contend with the fuel crisis, nobody paying attention could trust that it was raising prices out of economic necessity or sound financial planning. It looked, for all the world, like the CAB was just protecting the profit margins of greedy airline moguls.

The high airfare prices and the low trust in the regulators are what, I believe, gave the neoliberals the opening to get to Kennedy. I could spend an entire book detailing the evils of Robert Bork, in the same way the historian Robert Caro set the record straight on Robert Moses. Bork was Nixon’s legal hatchet man. He invented originalism and was a virulent racist. He’s easily one of the 10 most impactfully evil people in American history about whom most people don’t know. But—critical to this story—he was also a key advocate for the conservative false gospel of deregulation.

Bork’s signature view was that courts and government agencies should be solely guided by what he dubbed “economic efficiency” and “consumer welfare.” But he defined those terms poorly: Efficiency essentially translated into “increased profits,” and welfare meant only “lower prices.” His theory was that consumers really care only about price. He intuited that consumers will functionally eat shit in order to pay a little bit less, and so the government should be concerned only with lowering the price as much as possible, as long as the business owner or capitalist can turn a healthy profit on the back end.

Bork’s theory is that the entire point of laws is to bring about these market efficiencies and lower prices. Not to build a better, more fair society or, you know, stop evildoers, but to increase profits while lowering costs. Bork belonged to a school of thought called law and economics (sometimes scholars will shorthand this to the Chicago School, because a lot of these people were incubated at the University of Chicago School of Law), which holds that just about every law can and should be understood through an economic cost-benefit analysis, and the government should pick the most profitable one. It’s incredibly popular in legal circles, and if you spend any time studying law, you will quickly come across people, both liberal and conservative, who will blithely reduce every legal question—from abortion rights to First Amendment issues to healthcare—to a back-of-the-envelope math equation.

Bork’s solution to the airline crisis was to get rid of the CAB. Not reform it or replace it with new, better rules to govern airline behavior but to repeal it outright and deregulate the entire industry. Bork likely had too much racist, literally segregationist baggage to convince Kennedy of anything on his own. (Kennedy would go on to be the critical voice preventing Bork from becoming a Supreme Court justice, after Bork was nominated for the position by Reagan in 1987.) But like I said, Bork’s theory of deregulation had been adopted by a whole crew. Ralph Nader was working from the outside, at the grassroots level, convincing voters that the CAB was the cause of all their consumer pain. Phil Bakes, a Kennedy staffer, was working on the inside, telling Kennedy that opposing the CAB could set him apart from Carter and bring unions (which also didn’t trust the bloated, captured agency) to his side. And Stephen Breyer, then a lawyer for the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, was working the legal angles, essentially translating Bork’s kooky and untested ideas into a legal framework that promised a pragmatic and (pseudo-)scientific approach to answering big legal questions without wading into culture war issues.

All these men sold airline deregulation to Kennedy, who made it one of his signature issues in opposing the Carter administration. Breyer spearheaded Senate hearings exposing the CAB as a “regulatory cartel,” and they both sold the plan to other Democrats as a “moderate” proposition that would show the country that Democrats were not the big-government stooges Republicans made them out to be. Breyer and Bakes wrote the bill.

Introduced in the Senate as the Air Transportation Reform Act and in the House as the Air Service Improvement Act, the bill did exactly what Bork and the neoliberals wanted: It got rid of the CAB and its price regulations. The act eliminated restrictions on route competition, made it easier to start new airlines, and eliminated the subsidies given to airlines that delivered the mail. The CAB itself was to be phased out over a number of years (it effectively died almost immediately after the bill’s passage), and the authority to administer what regulations remained in place passed to the Federal Aviation Administration (because the bewitched Democrats at least remained concerned about planes falling out of the sky) and the Department of Transportation.

The final bill passed 356–6 in the House and 82–4 in the Senate and was signed into law by Carter. You can credit Carter for being politically savvy enough essentially to steal one of his rival’s signature political issues and make it his own. But realistically, when a bill has that much support in the House and Senate, any president is going to sign it.

The first casualty of the Airline Deregulation Act was the ongoing victim of the Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism: organized labor. Introduced to real price competition for the first time in their history, the first thing airlines did was try to cut labor costs. Yes, frills like piano bars were gone, but the airlines also cut wages, overtime pay, and sick days.

Unionized pilots, flight attendants, and baggage handlers saw their wages and benefits cut when the newly deregulated airlines raced to the bottom. Prior to the deregulation act, the CAB enforced collective bargaining agreements and fair labor standards across the entire industry. Without the CAB, every airline was free to make its own deal with its labor unions: If workers objected, they were fired and replaced by scabs. And workers were in many cases compelled to take bad deals, because often the alternative was the entire airline going under and everybody losing their jobs. The new rules, or lack thereof, put many airlines out of business. Fans of deregulation will say that’s a good thing because giants like Eastern, Pan Am, and TWA were ossified and inefficient and were being propped up only by the anticompetitive policies of the CAB. There is truth in that, of course, but what the market Darwinists always fail to mention is that each of these airline failures was a body blow to thousands and thousands of workers who lost their jobs. And under Reagan-era policies, workers sacrificed to deregulation were no longer caught by a social safety net.

The other downside of airline failures is that they largely eliminated one supposed benefit of deregulation: increased competition. For a time after deregulation, more airlines formed, competing on more routes and driving prices down. But ultimately, the bigger carriers that survived gobbled up the smaller carriers. Today, four air carriers—American, Southwest, Delta, and United—account for 75 percent of air travel in the United States.

But what about the prices? Remember, according to many deregulation acolytes, the price is the only thing that matters. Nearly 50 years later, whether the price of tickets actually went down after deregulation, when you take all factors into account, is heatedly debated. I’m not an economist, but the consensus opinion seems to be that prices went down on high-trafficked routes and went up on low-trafficked ones. But people like Columbia law professor Tim Wu argue that these cost savings hide the fact that the consolidation of the air travel market to just a few companies leads to collusion and price-fixing on the most popular routes. Even if you are paying less, you’re not paying as little as the deregulators promised.

I’m glossing over the economics here, and not just because I’m the kind of guy who needs to use the Internet to check my 11-year-old’s math homework. I’m willing to give the baby his bottle and stipulate that ticket prices more or less went down for most consumers, thanks to deregulation. My issue is that unlike Bork or Breyer, I don’t think prices are the only thing the government should be concerned about when making policy. Service is objectively shittier, thanks to deregulation. Labor was screwed, thanks to deregulation.

Delays and overcrowding also increased, thanks to deregulation, because while the airlines were allowed to compete in all of these popular markets, nobody told the airports. If it seems as if our major international airports, like JFK, LAX, and O’Hare, are perpetually “under construction,” it’s because they were built for a regulated air traffic market and have never caught up to the sheer volume of deregulated air traffic trying to come to port in their crowded markets. As always, the deregulators never want to talk about the infrastructure that can be built only by the government, which the private companies need in order to reap maximum profits.

Cracking how democrats belatedly came to grips with what they had wrought is a morbidly fun exercise. In 1986, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd remarked:

This is one Senator who regrets that he voted for airline deregulation. It has penalized States like West Virginia, where many of the airlines pulled out quickly following deregulation and the prices zoomed into the stratosphere—doubled, tripled and, in some instances, quadrupled. So we have poorer air service and much more costly air service than we in West Virginia had prior to deregulation. I admit my error; I confess my unwisdom, and I am truly sorry for having voted for deregulation.

Byrd was a former Klansman—literally an “Exalted Cyclops” in the KKK—who opposed the Civil Rights Act, so I can’t really say that the Airline Deregulation Act was even in the top 10 of Byrd’s “mistakes.” But it ranks pretty high up there in political mistakes by Ted Kennedy: He lost his 1980 primary challenge to Carter, so it can truly be said that Kennedy spearheaded the most important deregulation bill in the nation’s history for, politically speaking, nothing.

Eventually, even Kennedy realized what a terrible mistake it had been to support deregulation. In 1988, at a Washington, DC, social event, he ran into his old staffer Phil Bakes. Bakes was by then the president of Eastern Airlines (having previously been president of Continental Airlines). That’s right: One of the guys who used his federal perch to destroy the “regulatory cartel” of the CAB just happened to become a wealthy airline executive. Funny how things work out, isn’t it?

At the event, Kennedy tore into him, reportedly saying, “This goddamn [deregulation]…you know, Phil, you double-crossed me. You lied to me. You said the unions were going to support deregulation.”

Unfortunately, not every Democrat got the memo. Neoliberalism eventually took over the Democratic Party, capped off by Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign. Bill and Hillary Clinton both studied under Bork at Yale Law School, which is a fact I often think about when contemplating why the Democratic Party sometimes looks like an uncanny valley version of the Republican Party. Clinton would go on to appoint Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court in 1994, giving neoliberals key footholds in all three branches of government. In 1996, Clinton declared in a State of the Union address, “The era of big government is over,” to the thunderous applause of both houses of Congress.

And that pretty much brings us to the present day. Many other industries have been deregulated or privatized since the airlines, including the telecommunications industry, large swaths of the financial sector and banking, and even the prison industry. Wherever neoliberals go, the story always stays the same: Labor gets hollowed out, monopolies emerge, service gets worse, and consumer protections disappear. But prices stay low and the stock market goes up, so everybody acts like we’re winning. It’s all been incredibly profitable for a few individuals. In 1978, the top 0.1 percent owned about 7 percent of the nation’s wealth; by 2018, those same people owned 18 percent of the nation’s wealth.

And these incredibly profitable deregulated industries still have access to billions of public dollars whenever anything goes wrong: 9/11, Covid-19, a bunch of rich fucking bankers gambling on the housing market like it was a craps table, it doesn’t matter—the deregulated industries get bailed out by taxpayer money. It’s a great economic model for the industry titans: They reap all the profits, while taxpayers assume all the risk. Capitalists will demand that the government get out of their way while they fly themselves to the freaking moon… right up until one of them gets stuck up there. Then they will demand that the government launch a taxpayer-funded search-and-rescue mission to bring them home.

Planes do not fly backward. There is no going back to the pre-1978 regulatory environment, or the CAB, or the literal price-fixing of airfares. One of the more insidious aspects of deregulation is that, once done, the policy cannot easily or reasonably be undone. Reregulating a market requires intense and sustained political will, and no small amount of pain, as the businesses adjust to being stopped from reaping maximum profits for minimal services. It’s theoretically possible to reregulate a market, of course, but I don’t have any practical examples of that actually happening. No industries in America have been deregulated and then successfully reregulated.

I do think Ted Kennedy was right about one thing in this entire deregulation saga: A presidential candidate who could actually fix the airlines and make air travel something other than the overcrowded, poorly serviced, nickel-and-dime nightmare that it has become would be extremely popular.

Democrats can rediscover the power of how to fix things. But, in the words of Yoda, they “must unlearn what [they] have learned” from neoliberals. A true Democrat uses the power of the government as an ally, and a powerful ally it is.