Annie Lowrey gets the decade exactly right (“The Decade in Which Everything Was Great But Felt Terrible“):

“… when the United States grew to its wealthiest point ever—and when the middle class shrank, longevity fell, and it became clear that a whole generation was falling behind. The central economic dynamic of the 2010s was that no matter how well the market was doing, no matter how long the expansion lasted, no matter how much the economy grew, families still struggled. It was a decade that strained America’s idea of what economic growth could do, and should do, because it did so little for so many.

. . .

In household terms: The rich had it great, growing richer than they have ever been and accounting for a greater share of American wealth than at any other point since the Gilded Age. The gaps between the 10 percent, the 1 percent, and the 0.1 percent grew. The difference between doctors and hedge-fund managers widened, just as the difference between doctors and janitors did. But everybody in the top 20 percent, roughly speaking, thrived in the 2010s—most of all, the richest of the rich. The country got its first centibillionaires.

At the same time, the Great Expansion did not do much for working families. Wages are at last growing quickly at the bottom end, after years of slack demand holding down earnings. Still, it would take years and years of that kind of growth to chip away at the country’s inequality and to improve the standing of the country’s hourly employees relative to all workers. Research by Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, shows that the top 1 percent of families captured half of all real income growth between 2009 and 2017. The incomes of the top 1 percent have grown nearly four times as fast as those of the bottom 99 percent since the Great Recession ended. Inequality is now a 50-year story.

Credit Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party for destroying the post-World War II economic consensus (embraced by Eisenhower and Nixon, but by no Republican President since then), and giving us an economy much nearer to the GOP ideal.

The Democratic Party has often failed to push back, but if ever there was a time for a change, this is it.