Alain Connes and Nigel Higson pointed out in the 1990s that the Connes-Kasparov “conjecture” for the K-theory of reduced group $C^\ast$-algebras seemed, in the case of reductive Lie groups, to be a cohomological echo of a conjecture of George Mackey concerning the rigidity of representation theory along the deformation from a real reductive group to its Cartan motion group. For complex semisimple groups, Nigel Higson established in 2008 that Mackey's analogy is a real phenomenon, and does lead to a simple proof of the Connes-Kasparov isomorphism. We here turn to more general reductive groups and use our recent work on Mackey's proposal, together with Higson's work, to obtain a new proof of the Connes-Kasparov isomorphism.