Nostalgia for the nineties among centrist Democrats becomes even more curious when one recalls the conditions under which their own faction emerged. Back in 1992, New Democrats never tired of complaining about intraparty rivals who thought Franklin Roosevelt’s politics had a place in Reagan’s America. The party needed to adapt, they argued, in order to survive. Signs of liberalism’s evolution included welfare reform; a crime bill targeting “superpredators”; the Defense of Marriage Act; and a political economy based on appeasing bond markets, rushing headlong into globalization, deregulating the financial sector, and pretending that an economic boom wasn’t made possible by the tech bubble.