Mistaking Gilded for Golden, and Vice Versa

Journalista Michael Tomasky is beginning to feel the hot [he would paradoxically call it "cold"] breath of the demographic 42% Gallup-registered self-regarding conservatives breathing on the backs of the 19% self-confessed liberal elite autocracy soon to be demolished. The title of his piece in Democracy.org is "Against Despair:" Key takeaway:

I started to ask myself: What if all these presumptions I grew up with were wrong? What if Reagan wasn’t an aberration? What if Roosevelt and Johnson were the aberrations? True, we had Bill Clinton in the meantime. Poor Clinton never plays a central role in these narratives, and I think today we’re gaining enough historical distance that he is starting to deserve better: His presidency may not have constituted a golden age of progressivism in the way selected Roosevelt and Johnson years did, which remains the reason we focus more on those two, but it was certainly a comparative golden age for the country. Still, as we know, the right marched onward during the Clinton years. And then of course came Bush. The idea we young people of the 1980s once entertained–the idea that the Age of Reagan was somehow false, anomalous, a torn page in an otherwise seamless development of plot–had now to be reexamined, in light of the speed with which Bush and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove undid so many (thankfully not all) of the ideas and policies we had been raised to believe were inviolate.
The historians Nick Salvatore and Jefferson Cowie of Cornell University published a brilliant paper in 2008 in the journal International Labor and Working-Class History called "The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History." In their Abstract, they write:

The New Deal was more of an historical aberration–a byproduct of the massive crisis of the Great Depression–than the linear triumph of the welfare state. The depth of the Depression undoubtedly forced the realignment of American politics and class relations for decades, but, it is argued, there is more continuity in American politics between the periods before the New Deal order and those after its decline than there is between the postwar era and the rest of American history. Indeed, by the early seventies the arc of American history had fallen back upon itself. While liberals of the seventies and eighties waited for a return to what they regarded as the normality of the New Deal order, they were actually living in the final days of what Paul Krugman later called the "interregnum between Gilded Ages."

Read how this self-deluding "man of the left" explains why and how the light at the end of the liberals' tunnel isn't an onrushing locomotive. Mental gymnastics of a high order!