> This is true, but why did it get going in earnest in the mid- to
> late-1970s and not ten or twenty years earlier?
(1) US military-industrial Keynesianism was still viable, (2) trade links weren't sufficiently developed to permit the offshoring of the industrial base (e.g. container shipping takes off in the late 1960s), and (3) the US had virtually no peer economic competitors.
By the mid-1970s, the military-industrial strategy became increasingly self-destructive (it devoured vast resources, produced limited productivity gains, and encouraged wasteful rent-seeking and disastrous neocolonial wars), trade links meant that industrial jobs could be outsourced (goodbye unionized industrial workers, hello service-sector debt-serfs), and Japanese and Western European competitors began to out-maneuver, out-engineer and out-invest US firms (their export surpluses triggered the end of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system).
I think this is why Reaganism, the first stage of neoliberalism, took the specific ideological form it did: as the politics of a bogus nostalgia tied to anxieties about the erosion of imperial privilege. Thatcherism did much the same, though on a lesser budget.
-- DRR