On April 29, 1954, a cross section of Cincinnati’s municipal bureaucracy—joined by dozens of representatives drawn from local employers, private charities, the religious community, and other corners of the city establishment—gathered at the behest of the mayor’s office to discuss a new problem confronting the city. Or, rather, about 50,000 new problems, give or take. That was roughly the number of Cincinnati residents who had recently migrated to the city from the poorest parts of southern Appalachia. The teachers, police officials, social workers, hiring-department personnel, and others who gathered that day in April had simply run out of ideas about what to do about them.

“Education does not have importance to these people as it does to us,” observed one schoolteacher. “They work for a day or two, and then you see them no more,” grumbled an employer. “Some don’t want modern facilities—if they have a bathtub, they don’t use it,” another meeting attendee claimed. And the charges they leveled only descended from there: “They let their children run wild.” They left their trash in the street and refused to go to the doctor. They misspent what little money they had. They fought and drank with abandon. Some were even rumored to disregard “laws here, such as it being a felony to have sexual relations with a member of their own family or with a girl who consents.”

Marshall Bragdon, the long-serving executive director of an advisory commission to municipal government known as the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee, had conceived of this daylong “Workshop on the Southern Mountaineer in Cincinnati,” as the gathering was billed. Though he did not like what he heard, he was hardly surprised. A key objective of the workshop, Bragdon would explain, was to “de-stereotype the city man’s and urban agency’s views of and attitudes toward hill folks,” so that they might be better able to assist this growing population of poor rural newcomers to the city. As the litany of complaints poured forth during the workshop’s opening bull session, it was clear that there was much de-stereotyping to do.

[Michael Powell: A Democratic senator defends ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’]

The 1954 Cincinnati workshop is a little-known episode in 20th-century American history, yet it would prove to be extraordinarily consequential. In its aftermath, municipal coalitions in a host of midwestern cities that were likewise on the receiving end of an influx of white migrants from the Appalachian South were inspired to take similar action. The workshop introduced new and influential ways of thinking about poverty in the postwar city, which would circulate broadly within liberal policy-making circles and, before long, would even come to shape the development of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

This essay was adapted from Max Fraser’s new book.

At the same time, the Cincinnati workshop also revealed a yawning cultural divide separating the middle-class professionals in attendance from the white working-class objects of their reform-minded concern, one that was replicated throughout the region and in Washington, and that would only grow deeper and wider over the decades to come. Although none of the workshop participants was overheard talking about a “basket of deplorables,” the resonance between their descriptions of their new hillbilly neighbors and that more recent political malapropism—which might have cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election—is unmistakable. Then, as now, liberalism found itself confronting a white working-class problem at least partially of its own creation. The sequence of events set in motion by the 1954 workshop offers important insights into our current political impasse—and into the lessons the modern Democratic Party has failed to learn for more than half a century.

In the two decades that followed World War II, when the great 20th-century migrations out of the rural South were at their zenith, the “hillbilly ghetto” appeared as a suddenly ubiquitous and more and more problematic feature on the landscape of the urban Midwest. In neighborhoods such as Over-the-Rhine and Lower Price Hill in Cincinnati, Uptown in Chicago, Stringtown in Indianapolis, Briggs and the Cass Corridor in Detroit—and in similar neighborhoods in smaller cities and towns across the region—growing clusters of poor southern white newcomers alarmed longer-term residents and amplified concerns about an onrushing crisis of the American inner city.

Residents of these hillbilly ghettos, as they were commonly referred to by public officials and in media accounts at the time, stood out for their rural mannerisms and regionally alien cultural markings, for being, as Cincinnati’s director of health education put it, “different—different in speech, in dress, in culture, in habits and mores, in education, in social status, in work experience, and in health.” The neighborhoods themselves, meanwhile, were marked by rates of unemployment, housing insecurity, poverty-related medical issues, and crime and policing that more closely resembled predominantly Black urban neighborhoods such as Avondale, Paradise Valley, and Bronzeville than the postwar era’s growing middle-class suburbs.

That the inhabitants of the hillbilly ghetto were white confounded many of their mid-century contemporaries, who struggled to reconcile them with their more familiar bigotries. “The so-called hillbillies, who now constitute a major slum problem in several midwestern cities … are about the only sizable group of white, Protestant, old-line Americans who are now living in city slums,” opined a columnist for Fortune. “The trouble with the latter, as with the rural Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans, is that they simply don’t know how to live in cities.”

Marshall Bragdon may have felt more sympathetic to Cincinnati’s Appalachian migrants, but otherwise he largely agreed with that assessment. The 1954 workshop was intended to focus the city’s attention on what Bragdon called “the struggle for urban adjustment,” which, as he saw it, had left Cincinnati’s rural newcomers ill-prepared to succeed in the industrial city and was turning neighborhoods such as Over-the-Rhine and Lower Price Hill into intractable and dysfunctional pockets of poverty.

Believing that most city agencies “don’t know how to help the migrants,” Bragdon invited Roscoe Giffin, a sociologist based at Berea College, in Kentucky, to help set the workshop attendees straight. In his talk, Giffin explained that the “pathological quality” of the city’s hillbilly ghettos could be attributed to a series of “culturally determined patterns of behavior which the Southern Mountaineers bring with them when they come to live north of the Ohio River”—among them a low regard for “formal education,” an instinctual emphasis on fulfilling “immediate” needs and desires, a “clannish” hostility toward outsiders, and a “fatalistic” resignation to present conditions. These behaviors, Giffin noted, had originated as natural and even rational adaptations to their impoverished rural circumstances. But they became counterproductive and self-defeating “when such people came to live around Liberty and Sycamore Streets of Cincinnati.” The solution, Bragdon and Giffin counseled the assembled city representatives, was time, understanding, and, above all, patient instruction in the expectations of modern urban society. “The basis of all human-relations work with all people,” Giffin reminded his audience, “is that you have first to accept them as they are before they are willing to modify their behavior.”

The workshop proved to be a hit. The Cincinnati residents in attendance appreciated their new insights into the root causes of hillbilly pathology (“It gave me the positive side,” one social worker remarked; “my previous observations of them had been only on the negative”) and were further gratified to be reassured that it was the migrants’ behavior, and not the city itself, that was in need of “modification.” News of the workshop spread quickly through networks of municipal officials, and soon copycat workshops were being staged in other cities across the region, many featuring Roscoe Giffin as an invited speaker.

“Urban adjustment,” meanwhile, became the prevailing paradigm for addressing the overlapping issues of migration, poverty, and inner-city decline. In 1957, Chicago created a Committee on New Residents—the first public body of its kind in the country—“based on a recognition of the adjustment problems presented by the migration to Chicago of Southern Whites, Negros, Puerto Ricans and American Indians seeking increased economic opportunity.” Detroit followed suit with its own Committee on Urban Adjustment shortly thereafter, designed “to try to change some of the values, attitudes, and behavior patterns … of the existing and continually arriving members of the rural lower class.”

The Ford Foundation picked up on the urban-adjustment framework as well. Ford was then at the leading edge of the behavioral revolution in mid-century social-science research (its Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences opened at Stanford the same year the Cincinnati workshop was held), and Bragdon and Giffin’s focus on the more psychological and attitudinal ramifications of rural-to-urban migration struck a chord. Ford would agree to fund an expanded version of the Cincinnati workshop at Giffin’s home institution of Berea College in the summer of 1958, which brought representatives from seven midwestern cities down to Kentucky for three weeks to “study the mountaineer migrants in their native habitat.”

The Berea workshop became, in the words of Ford’s Director of Public Affairs Paul Ylvisaker, “the first real entry point” for the foundation’s growing programmatic engagement with the complex of issues surrounding “community disorganization” and the unfolding urban crisis. The Berea workshop was restaged annually for the next nine years, during which time delegates from more than two dozen cities would attend. Subsequent initiatives spearheaded by Ylvisaker’s Public Affairs Division at the beginning of the 1960s, such as the Great Cities School Improvement Program and the Gray Areas Program, would funnel tens of millions in foundation dollars toward a variety of municipal efforts aimed largely at “citifying the in-migrant population” clustered in the country’s declining urban core. “I had the sense that we were dealing with people problems, not bricks and mortar and not power-structure problems so much, and that we were witnessing the vast migration into the central city—and I shifted at that point, to a concern with the migrant flows and what could be done about that,” Ylvisaker would reflect in a later interview. “Appalachia gave us a chance to touch off the concern with the whole process.”

By the time Ylvisaker was tapped to sit on the White House’s Task Force on Poverty, convened in early 1964 to begin drafting the legislative foundations of a massive federal campaign to eliminate poverty, it was undeniable just how far and wide the ideas first introduced a decade earlier in Cincinnati had resonated. Ylvisaker’s Gray Areas Program—in its spatial focus on inner-city ghettos populated overwhelmingly by poor rural migrants, and in its programmatic emphasis on replacing deficient migrant cultures with more efficacious forms of “community action”—was the clearest prototype for what became the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, signed into law by Johnson that August. “A lot of the ideas that ended up actually in the legislation,” noted William Capron, who worked on the task force with Ylvisaker and oversaw domestic spending in Johnson’s Bureau of the Budget, “really were developed out of the Ford experience.”

As unlikely as it may have seemed when Bragdon first convened his skeptical colleagues in the spring of 1954, the hillbilly ghetto had helped set in motion a series of events that had culminated in the enactment of one of postwar liberalism’s most ambitious social-policy experiments.

There were always other ways to think about the issue of urban adjustment, of course. Southern Appalachian migrants in Cincinnati, like other groups of rural migrants and low-income residents in the city, were also contending with limited employment options, predatory slumlords, and overcrowded and under-resourced public schools—not to mention an openly hostile police force, which by the middle of the 1950s was arresting white Appalachian natives at roughly four times the rate they appeared in the city’s general population. In Detroit, 10 years after pouring into the Arsenal of Democracy in search of wartime defense work, migrants from the rural South made up fully half of the population crammed into the city’s blight-ridden downtown core, an area already riddled with “thousands of dwellings in various stages of decay and deterioration, the majority of which are utterly unfit for human habitation,” according to the city’s charitable agencies. In Uptown—“seedy, dreary, congested, despairing,” as the Chicago Daily News would describe it, “Appalachia in Chicago”—more than one in four apartments lacked adequate plumbing, and residential overcrowding was exceeded only in the poor Black neighborhood of Lawndale. By the time the Johnson administration was rolling out the War on Poverty, fewer than half of Uptown’s adult residents were able to secure full-time work.

In its focus on “culturally determined patterns of behavior” as opposed to structural factors such as these, the urban-adjustment framing introduced at the Cincinnati workshop consistently mistook the symptoms of the postwar urban crisis for its causes. Instead of recognizing the already accelerating flight of jobs and tax revenues to the suburbs as an early preview of larger-scale disruptions to come, officials used urban adjustment as a rationale for blaming rural poor people for their inability to adapt.

In this way, urban adjustment also anticipated the notion of a separate and self-perpetuating “culture of poverty,” first introduced by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis in 1959 and then widely popularized by the journalist and social critic Michael Harrington over the next few years. Lewis developed his influential theory in ethnographic studies of poor families from Mexico and Puerto Rico. But the catalog of pathological behaviors and attitudes that he identified among his subjects—“a strong feeling of marginality, of helplessness, of dependence and inferiority”; “a lack of impulse control, a strong present-time orientation with relatively little ability to defer gratification and plan for the future, a sense of resignation and fatalism”—in many cases directly echoed Giffin’s portrayals of maladjusted Appalachian migrants.

Before long, a distorted and punitive version of Lewis’s ideas would win both liberal and conservative adherents and find its way to the very center of postwar social policy, first as a means of explaining why certain groups of people became dependent on social assistance and then as an argument for curtailing or altogether eliminating those very forms of public support. As it did, the urban-adjustment framework’s earlier focus on the cultural habits of the rural poor, broadly defined, gave way to the culture of poverty’s near-singular association with the more and more distressed Black inner city.

The consequences of that shift would reverberate to the present. For poor Black communities, the racialized discourse around poverty would be an unmitigated disaster. The slow death of federal poverty-reduction programs begun under Richard Nixon, the massive expansion of a racially targeted war on urban street crime during the 1970s and ’80s, and the culminating assault on welfare “as we know it” during the Clinton years would all be executed under the logic of eradicating a culture of poverty that was said to be the defining hallmark of a new Black underclass.

[Read: How working-class white voters became the GOP’s foundation]

The new preoccupation with race would also further obscure the one redeeming feature of the urban-adjustment framework. In its focus on the common circumstances confronted by populations of the rural dispossessed clustered around the margins of affluent society—Black, white, Hispanic, and otherwise—urban adjustment held out the prospect of a more materially grounded kind of analysis, one that might have seen beyond the cultural or racial explanations for poverty and grasped the larger social and political forces beginning to undermine the postwar economy. The window for turning the language of urban adjustment into a multiracial, bottom-up politics of the poor, though, was always small. By the end of the ’60s, it had been shut for good.

As a final consequence of all this, the white poor and working classes would come to occupy a more marginal position in the worldview of Democratic liberalism over subsequent decades. After playing a crucial role in catalyzing liberal attention to the social effects of the postwar urban crisis, the hillbilly ghettos of the urban Midwest largely disappeared from view after the formal launch of the War on Poverty. Meanwhile, as deindustrialization, automation, off-shoring, and new waves of import competition brought ever-widening devastation to the blue-collar workforce of the country’s industrial heartland, professional-class interests elevated by the new knowledge-and-service economy moved to the center of the Democratic Party’s agenda. These “New Democrats” offered the occasional promise to retrain out-of-work miners and factory hands as computer programmers—but in downwardly mobile white working-class communities throughout the region, precious little came of it. Instead, right-wing politicians from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump would find a rich soil in which to plant the seeds of populist resentment, creating one of the more consequential class realignments in modern American political history.

Hillary Clinton had these voters in mind, back in 2016, when she wrote off “half of Trump’s supporters” as a “basket of deplorables.” Whatever truth there was in her description of the “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it” nature of Trump’s base—and subsequent events would indicate that there was clearly some truth to it—it was the wrong message for the moment, easily construed as casually elitist and politically tone-deaf. Rightly or wrongly, Clinton seemed more interested in modifying the behavior of these voters than in trying to understand the material foundations of their grievances. When about a quarter of white working-class Obama voters forsook Clinton for Trump in that fall’s election, it was hard not to attribute the results at least in part to Clinton’s failure to convince that portion of the electorate that the party had anything to offer them beyond condescending disregard.

If anybody seems to have learned the lessons of Clinton’s faux pas, it is Joe Biden. Since entering the White House, Biden has done more than any Democratic president of the past 75 years to reinvigorate American industrial policy, all while steering its focus toward those parts of the Midwest and South that suffered the effects of deindustrialization most acutely and where the Republican Party has made the most gains among working-class voters. Might this be enough to overcome liberalism’s decades of pathologizing poor and working-class whites? Recent polling suggests that Biden faces an uphill battle among these voters in crucial midwestern swing states. But to paraphrase Roscoe Giffin, a party has to first understand where it’s gone wrong before it will be willing to change its behavior.

This essay is adapted from Max Fraser’s book Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class.

Well before Milton Friedman died in 2006 at 94, he was the rare economist who had become a household name. A longtime professor at the University of Chicago, he had been writing a column for Newsweek for a decade when he won the 1976 Nobel Prize in economics. Then, in 1980, his PBS series, Free to Choose—­a didactic, yet not at all dry, paean to the free market—­made the diminutive, bald economist something of a star.

The weirdness of the show is hard to convey, but “Created Equal,” the fifth of 10 episodes, is representative of its blunt, unwonky approach. The episode opens with shots of wealth and poverty in India. Friedman’s voice-over reminds us that inequality has been a topic of human concern for hundreds of years, courtesy of do-gooders who claim that the wealth of the rich rests on the exploitation of the poor. “Life is unfair,” he says. The camera then zooms in on Friedman, sitting in a seminar room. “There’s nothing fair about Muhammad Ali having been born with a talent that enables him to make millions of dollars one night. There’s nothing fair about Marlene Dietrich having great legs that we all want to watch.” His voice drops just a bit, and he gazes directly at the camera as though peering into the viewer’s soul. “But on the other hand, don’t you think a lot of people who like to look at Marlene Dietrich’s legs benefited from nature’s unfairness in producing a Marlene Dietrich?”

Today, Friedman might seem to belong to a bygone world. The Trumpian wing of the Republican Party focuses on guns, gender, and God—­a stark contrast with Friedman’s free-market individualism. Its hostility to intellectuals and scientific authority is a far cry from his grounding within academic economics. The analysts associated with the Claremont Institute, the Edmund Burke Foundation, and the National Conservatism Conference (such as Michael Anton, Yoram Hazony, and Patrick Deneen) espouse a vision of society focused on preserving communal order that seems very different from anything Friedman, a self-defined liberal in the style of John Stuart Mill, described in his work.

Many of Friedman’s core policy arguments about the virtues of markets were ultimately influential among neoliberals such as Bill Clinton, not just on the right. But by now, his central claims (in particular about inflation and the money supply) have been widely criticized by economists. And at least some policy makers have distanced themselves from his anti-regulatory stances. As Joe Biden declared on the campaign trail in 2020, “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore!”

Jennifer Burns, a Stanford historian, sets out to make the case in her intriguing biography Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative that Friedman’s legacy cannot be shaken so easily. As she points out, some of his ideas—­the volunteer army, school choice—­have been adopted as policy; others, such as a universal basic income, have supporters across the political spectrum. Friedman’s thought, she argues, is more complex and subtle than has been understood: He raised pressing questions about the market, individualism, and the role of the state that will be with us for as long as capitalism endures.

Burns’s effort to recast the brash economist as a nuanced analyst usefully situates him in his 20th-century context. His career, it turns out, owed a surprising amount to the New Deal institutions he spent much of his life critiquing, and to collaborations that complicate his commitment to unencumbered individualism. But Burns skirts the 21st-century legacy of  the Friedmanite view of the world: His libertarian ethos helped seed the far more openly hierarchical social and political conservatism that fuels much of our present-day political dysfunction.   

Friedman was born in  Brooklyn in 1912, the only son of Eastern European immigrants who soon moved to Rahway, New Jersey, where they owned a dry-goods store. His was one of the few Jewish families in town, and Friedman was observant as a young child, but by the time he was a teenager, he had largely abandoned religion. He stood out as a math whiz in high school and discovered economics as an undergraduate at Rutgers University. Heading on to graduate school at the University of Chicago, he arrived just in time for the Great Depression.

Economics as a discipline was then in the throes of a transformation. In the early years of the 20th century, reformers were at the forefront of the field, eager to build a social science that would inform government policy. Many economists focused primarily on historical statistics, determined to capture how the economy worked through detailed institutional analysis. But by the 1930s, the leading figures at the University of Chicago were deeply committed to what had become known as price theory, which analyzed economic behavior in terms of the incentives and information reflected in prices. The economists who left their mark on Friedman sought to create predictive models of economic decision making, and they were politically invested in the ideal of an unencumbered marketplace.

Friedman was also shaped by older traditions of economic thought, in particular the vision of political economy advanced by thinkers such as Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. For them, as for him, economics was not a narrow social science, concerned with increasing productivity and efficiency. It was closely linked to a broader set of political ideas and values, and it necessarily dealt with basic questions of justice, freedom, and the best way to organize society.

[Read: Milton Friedman was wrong]

Just as important, his time at Chicago taught Friedman about the intertwining of political, intellectual, and personal loyalties. He became a regular in an informal group of graduate students and junior faculty trying to consolidate the department as a center of free-market thought—­the “Room Seven gang,” so named for its meetings in “a dusty storeroom in the economics building.” This group, Burns suggests, anticipated the later rise of a “counter-­establishment” opposed to the regulatory state created by the New Deal. Not that the Chicago economists were unaffected by the tumult of the ’30s; shaken by the bank failures of the winter of 1932, they wrote a memorandum to President Franklin D. Roosevelt shortly after his election that laid out a plan for federal economic intervention to stabilize the financial system.

Friedman (who went on to write his dissertation at Columbia) headed to Washington, D.C., in 1935, one of the many economists for whom the bleak economy of Depression-era America created a job boom. During World War II, he was hired by the Treasury Department, where he helped introduce the system of federal tax withholding that swelled the nation’s tax base to pay for the war.

But his fundamental commitments were consistent. In his early work on consumption habits, Friedman sought to puncture the arrogance of the postwar Keynesian economists, who claimed to be able to manipulate the economy from above, using taxes and spending to turn investment, consumption, and demand on and off like so many spigots. Instead, he believed that consumption patterns were dependent on local conditions and on lifetime expectations of income. The federal government, he argued, could do much less to affect economic demand—­and hence to fight recessions—­than the Keynesian consensus suggested.

In 1946, Friedman was hired by the University of Chicago, where he shut down efforts to recruit economists who didn’t subscribe to free-market views. He was also legendary for his brutal classroom culture. One departmental memo, trying to rectify the situation, went so far as to remind faculty to please not treat a university student “like a dog.” What had started as a freewheeling, rebellious culture among the economists in Room Seven wound up as doctrinal rigidity.

Yet, as Burns’s research has revealed, the intensely personal nature of the economics field also fostered unexpected alliances in Friedman’s case: Women colleagues—­a rarity at the time—­came to play an underappreciated role in his development. Then, even more than now, having a powerful mentor was a great asset in the process of writing a dissertation and finding a job—an asset less available to the few female graduate students in a department that had a single woman professor. Rose Director, one of those few and the intellectually precocious younger sister of Friedman’s close friend and colleague Aaron Director, went the all-but-dissertation route, recognizing the obstacle-­strewn path to finishing her degree and getting hired. She and Friedman had fallen in love, and after marrying him in 1938, she went on to play a central part in Friedman’s intellectual life as transcriber, interlocutor, reader, and editor.

Friedman’s inner circles included other women colleagues, thanks to his early focus on consumption economics—­an area that, given the gendered assumption that household expenses fell within women’s purview, attracted an unusual proportion of female economists. Burns notes that Friedman’s work on the permanent income  hypothesis drew on their 1940s research into the social factors that influence individual consumer’s decisions. Evidence leads her to argue more pointedly that Rose (credited only with providing “assistance”) essentially co-wrote Capitalism and Freedom (1962). She also calls attention to Friedman’s long and fruitful collaboration with Anna Jacobson Schwartz, who had gotten her master’s degree in economics from Columbia and had the same academic adviser as Friedman. Schwartz helped spur his interest in monetary economics and shared her research with him, even while struggling to find a sponsor for her own dissertation. She was awarded her Ph.D. only when Friedman intervened on her behalf after the publication, in 1963, of their co-authored A Monetary History of the United States, which boosted his career when it was in a lull.

Highlighting these dynamics, Burns implicitly exposes some of the limitations of Friedman’s focus on the economic benefits of innate individual talent. He had more than nature to thank for producing associates of such high caliber, ready to benefit him in his career. Culture and institutions clearly played a large role, and sexual discrimination during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s ensured that professional paths were anything but fair.

Even as Friedman criticized the core principles of Keynesianism, he understood the impossibility of simply reverting to the pre-Depression order, as some of the truly reactionary conservatives of the 1940s would have liked. The state, he acknowledged, would have to take some responsibility for managing economic life—­and thus economists would be thrust into a public role. The question was what they would do with this new prominence.

Almost as soon as the Second World War ended, Friedman began to stake out a distinctive rhetorical position, arguing that the policy goals of the welfare state could be better accomplished by the free market. Earlier skeptics of social reform had argued on the grounds of principle—­asserting, for example, that minimum wages were unconstitutional because they violated liberty of contract. By contrast, in Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman made the case that the real problem lay in the methods liberals employed, which involved interfering with the competitive price mechanism of the free market. Liberals weren’t morally wrong, just foolish, despite the vaunted expertise of their economic advisers.

In a rhetorical move that seemed designed to portray liberal political leaders as incompetent, he emphasized efficiency and the importance of the price system as a tool for social policy. Rent control, for example, aimed to create affordable housing; in fact, Friedman maintained, it would restrict the housing supply and thus drive rents upward. The minimum wage was supposed to benefit workers by creating better-paying jobs; instead, employers would hire fewer workers, increasing unemployment. Licensing for doctors and dentists was designed to ensure quality. The effect, though, was to create a monopoly that could raise prices and would ensure inflated incomes. Even people who endorsed liberal goals needed to recognize that regulations, by ignoring the power of the price system, were doomed to failure: Instead of protecting people from private exploitation, they would leave them at the mercy of the state.

For Friedman, the competitive market was the realm of innovation, creativity, and freedom. In constructing his arguments, he envisioned workers and consumers as individuals in a position to exert decisive economic power, always able to seek a higher wage, a better price, an improved product. The limits of this notion emerged starkly in his contorted attempts to apply economic reasoning to the problem of racism, which he described as merely a matter of taste that should be free from the “coercive power” of the law: “Is there any difference in principle,” he wrote in Capitalism and Freedom, “between the taste that leads a householder to prefer an attractive servant to an ugly one and the taste that leads another to prefer a Negro to a white or a white to a Negro, except that we sympathize and agree with the one taste and may not with the other?”

[Read: Even my business-school students have doubts about capitalism]

When Friedman wrote about school vouchers (his alternative to universal public schools), he knew that white southerners might use their vouchers to support all-white private schools and evade integration. Although he personally rejected racial prejudice, he considered the question of whether Black children could attend good schools—and whether, given the “taste” for prejudice in the South, Black adults could find remunerative jobs—less important than the “right” of white southerners to make economic decisions that reflected their individual preferences. In fact, Friedman compared fair-employment laws to the Nuremberg Race Laws of Nazi Germany. Not only was this tone-deaf in the context of the surging 1960s civil-rights movement; it was a sign of how restricted his idea of freedom really was.

As the conservative movement started to make electoral gains in the ’70s, Friedman emerged as a full-throated challenger of liberal goals, not just methods. He campaigned for “tax limitation” amendments that would have restricted the ability of state governments to tax or spend. In a famous New York Times Magazine essay, he suggested that corporations had no “social responsibility” at all; they were accountable only for increasing their own profits. His PBS series was right in step with Ronald Reagan’s arrival in office—­which, predictably, he celebrated. Friedman’s free-market certainties went on to win over neoliberals. By the time he and Rose published their 1998 memoir, Two Lucky People, their ideas, once on the margin of society, had become the reigning consensus.

That consensus is now in surprising disarray in the Republican Party that was once its stronghold. The startling rise in economic inequality and the continued erosion of middle-class living standards have called into question the idea that downsizing the welfare state, ending regulations, and expanding the reach of the market really do lead to greater economic well-being—let alone freedom. Stepping back, one can see how thoroughly Friedman—despite being caricatured as a key intellectual architect of anti-government politics—had actually internalized an underlying assumption of the New Deal era: that government policy should be the key focus of political action. Using market theory to reshape state and federal policy was a constant theme of his career.

Still, Friedman—­and the libertarian economic tradition he advanced—­bears more responsibility for the rise of a far right in the United States than Burns’s biography would suggest. His strategy of goading the left, fully on display in the various provocations of Free to Choose and even Capitalism and Freedom, has been a staple for conservatives ever since. He zealously promoted the kind of relentless individualism that undergirds parts of today’s right, most notably the gun lobby. The hostile spirit that he brought to civil-rights laws surfaces now in the idea that reliance on court decisions and legislation to address racial hierarchy itself hems in freedom. The opposition to centralized government that he championed informs a political culture that venerates local authority and private power, even when they are oppressive. Perhaps most of all, his insistence (to quote Capitalism and Freedom) that “any … use of government is fraught with danger” has nurtured a deep pessimism that democratic politics can offer any route to redressing social and economic inequalities.

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