[asveikau]

I think worldwide the rightward shift really accelerated in the timeframe you're talking about and the years that followed, when seemingly every elected person of seemingly all persuasions started to love austerity.

And in the US, the Obama years were tempered from day 1 by the crowd that wanted to moderate a perceived left counter-push which never materialized in legislation. Witness Obamacare is not and never was seriously proposed to be single payer, it has always been a 1990s GOP alternative to single payer.