The policies that later became known as "Reaganomics" -- austerity for the poor, pro-business tax cuts for the rich, and deregulation -- actually got their start during the ill-fated Democratic administration of President Jimmy Carter, with an assist from Ted Kennedy.
As Lee Sustar wrote in
Socialist Worker:
It was Kennedy who called for deregulation of the airline and trucking industries as early as 1974, two years before Carter was elected. "[Kennedy] won Carter to the cause in the 1976 campaign and ultimately gave the president the issue," the Boston Globe noted ... The consequences of Kennedy-sponsored deregulation are still being felt in the series of airline bankruptcies today and the virtual deunionization of the trucking industry.
Pro-business Kennedy staffers Alfred Kahn, who became a guru of deregulation under Carter, and Stephen Breyer, now one of the more pro-business justices of the US Supreme Court, pioneered these policies. Breyer also promoted, as far back as 1979, the idea that forms the core of today's "climate change" legislation--using a market in "pollution credits" to address environmental damage.
Kennedy wasn't as conservative as Carter, or as the next neoliberal Democratic President Bill Clinton. In fact, Kennedy mounted a failed liberal challenge to Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980. He denounced Clinton's 1996 "welfare reform" bill abolishing Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
But once the "liberal lion" Kennedy endorsed a free-market policy like deregulation, it made it easier for other more conservative Democrats to go along with the Republican Party as it proceeded to move US politics to the right. Kennedy even voted for the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings bill imposing mandatory budget cuts in 1985....
But we shouldn't forget that -- as a mainstream politician who mastered the Washington game of logrolling and back-scratching -- Ted Kennedy also enabled policies that have devastated the lives of the ordinary people for whom he claimed to fight.