But then Roosevelt was quite effective in putting the capitalists in their place for an entire generation, perhaps longer, until Nixon and later Reagan turn us to the right again.
That's putting it too strong. He reigned in some of their worst excesses, which were detrimental to the capitalist class as a whole just as much as it was detrimental to everyone else. "The capitalists" are not a single force - it's a mess of conflicting interests, just as the working class. And many of them have interests that are part aligned by parts of the working class. It's not black and white.
But he wasn't, really. Government can't really do much to constrain capitalism. Most of what FDR did was wildly ineffective. Some of the weirdness in how corporate accounting works now go back to tax dodges then ( and since) . There were 90+% marginal rates; that's rather extreme.
Nixon presided over the end of the Bretton Woods Accord but that particular system was already worn out. Some credit the end of Bretton Woods with the rise of international super capitalism. It's debatable. Nixon... wasn't all that clued in - he started wage and price controls.
The stuff that FDR did was more like trying to coordinate things. Most of it didn't work. They did put large corporate entities into contracting big time, of course, because of the War.
Reagan? Didn't really do much but talk. He had tax increases advertised as tax cuts, but the rest was rhetoric. A lot of Reagan's spending was undoing damage done by Nixon to military budgets. Some of it - like Star Wars - was just kinda crazy. Bluff.
The PATCO strike was rather a one off union busting thing; it really wasn't part of a larger pattern. It's just the the large monolithic corporation was evolving out. With that went the ability of unions to bargain.
