AskHistorians

I mean, Carter came into the presidency at a time when Keynesian economics were at their weakest position, both publicly and academically, in decades. I suspect without Reagan achieving 8 years of absurd, cursed, idiotic electoral success, and then HW winning a 4 year term after him, we probably wouldn't regard the Democratic Party as having had a neoliberal turn at all. Mondale and Dukakis were hardly in the neoliberal vein, and arguably even Carter was working from the constraints of his circumstances more than ideology.