https://aeon.co/essays/why-western-democracy-is-ailing-and-how-to-fix-it

We entered this era of an unjust social order, political malaise and destabilisation almost half a century ago when the US president Ronald Reagan and the UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher introduced libertarian reforms that were embraced globally.

At his first cabinet meeting as president in 1981, Reagan distributed copies of Mandate for Leadership, whose 3,000 pages came out of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington, DC. This became the ideology of neoliberalism, which advocated a smaller state, industry deregulation, tax cuts, strengthened defence, and roll-back of social engineering. A year later, 60 per cent of the Mandate’s proposals had been adopted by the Reagan administration,