alt Hacker News> The Democrats (in the US) of the 1980s did very little to stop or to slow down the big threats to working-class economic power of the 1980s, namely automation and offshoring (then called "globalization").
Wasn't that the 90s? IIRC, globalization was mainly a Republican big-business project, and the Democrats of that era were the biggest source of opposition, and it only got passed because of some defections.
Also globalization was sold as a bill of goods. IIRC, it was claimed (probably by many economists) that it would increase domestic manufacturing, but when that was shown to be a lie, there was no course-correction, and the sales pitch was changed to "but you got cheap stuff." I hope people have learned their lesson from that, to not trust economists.
But that wasn't really my point. My point was they were better able to handle divisive culture war issues, so you had lots of Democratic representatives from "red" states, even with popular Republican presidents. Today, the only way Democrats can hope to win those seats is if they're handed them through abject Republican incompetence.
My recollection is that "globalization" was a buzzword in the early 1980s although there is a possibility I am not accurately assigning my memories to the right range of years.
It was often paired with another term which I cannot confidently recall, maybe "the information economy".
Although Chinese imports didn't become an important factor in the US economy till the 1990s, Deng's rise to power happened in 1978 and his famous "Southern Tour" happened in 1982. Both events committed China to a course of economic modernization, welcoming Western investment and special economic zones designed to boost exports, which the US media did not fail to notice.
Trump was the first president in the modern era to try to stem the flow of factory jobs overseas. Clinton for example was all-in on globalization.