What’s the Matter with America?

1. What’s Wrong, America?

This review considers two recent works on U.S. political economy – Goliath by Matt Stoller and The New Class War by Michael Lind – as examples of a backward looking, communal resistance to capitalist globalization. Both books proceed by means of advocating deeply ingrained American identities as antidotes to neoliberal hegemony. Like Donald Trump’s Make American Great Again (MAGA), both works overlook the problems with the past models of U.S. political economy that they endorse.  Like MAGA, these works imagine that there is nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed with what was once right about America.  In this sense, these texts can be read as jeremiads.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton announced that America is great because Americans are good – an apt characterization of the liberal state/society complex – the good people, after all, imprint their goodness on the state, which then infuses the state with greatness. Michael Lind (The New Class War) and Matt Stoller (Goliath) change this formula in their accounts of why the US political economy has become oppressive rather than progressive. The people are still good, of course, but America isn’t great because America has been overwhelmed by anti-popular forces: for Lind it is the unchecked dominance of the capitalist overclass/managerial elite; for Stoller it is the depredations of monopoly politics. Both books attempt to convey a populist message of hope: if ordinary people, the “plain people” in the populist vernacular, or “workers” (meaning everyone not associated with the capitalist elite) asserted their rightful interests and agency, the world would be set right.

It is important to make sense of popular political economy for the simple reason that these accounts are part of the reality which they purport to study. One question that emerges from the discursive reality of the US political economy is: what is wrong with America? This particular question refers to Thomas Frank’s What’s Wrong with Kansas? Kansas used to be a liberal state, but it turned conservative largely on the basis of culture war issues and movements while the economic interests of ordinary folks have been systematically undercut by conservative (anti-tax, anti-regulation and anti-union) economic policy. “The genius of America,” intones Phil Kline, one of the conservative backlash politicians that Frank profiles in his book, “…is not found in the halls of power…it is found at our kitchen tables, our living rooms, our places of worship” (2004, 232).  If only we could have guides to U.S. political economy that reflect these heartland values. And this is indeed is what Lind and Stoller deliver.

Lind and Stoller share the sentiment that there is nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed with what was once right with America. In this particular sense, both books participate in a kind of communal resistance to capitalist globalization by advocating the assertion of a deeply ingrained American identity over the hegemony of neoliberal technocracy. Our collective salvation lies with becoming more authentically American and the problem of “What is Wrong with the United States?” is rooted within the fundamental change that occurred in the US’ political economy over a half century ago: the end of the thirty year so-called golden age of American capitalism of sustained economic growth, rising real wages and relatively low inflation. We still live in the shadow of the transition from Fordism to neoliberal capitalism. Much of what ails America – rising economic inequality, oligarchic domination of politics, rising levels of racial and ethnic antagonism – stem from how this transition unfolded. Lind and Stoller offer diverging narratives about the origins of our times. Both books argue that neoliberalism displaced a more equitable political economy created by the combined crises of the Great Depression and the Second World War.  For Michael Lind, the prelapsarian past consisted of democratic pluralism in which capitalist elites were obliged to share economic, political and cultural power with the different communities of the working class. For Matt Stoller, it took the form of the New Deal regulatory state that dismantled monopoly capitalism, demobilized the powers of finance capital and, in doing so, created an industrial democracy – to cite Louis Brandeis’ term – in which ordinary citizens could economically compete with other Americans through the establishment of small businesses. Both authors claim that the remedy for the ills of neoliberalism is a return to the status quo ante: for Lind, the reconstruction democratic pluralism and for Stoller, a revived effort to dismantle structures of the monopoly control over the economy. Both authors are Manichean in orientation, dividing the world into forces of light and darkness – an intellectual commitment that stems from their identification of American identity with the good -and are unable to discern contradictions and ambiguities that inhere within their analytical frameworks.

2. Democratic Pluralism

The basis for democratic pluralism in the United States, argues Lind, was the existence of countervailing power, which shifted political and economic power away from the managerial elite that had come to dominate US capitalism by the beginning of the 20th century. Countervailing power emerged from interstate conflicts, which required political elites to mobilize their populations for war, promising them social rights as well an expansion of the extant civil freedoms associated with bourgeois liberal democracy. As the United States entered the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt sought to revitalize the New Deal era expansion of social rights. There was a similar turn to the development of social rights throughout Western Europe after the defeat of fascism and the onset of the Cold War.  Throughout the West, the managerial elite became obliged to share economic, political and cultural power with workers because of the existence of domestic (labor unions) and external (axis powers and communist bloc) countervailing forces.

Democratic pluralism comprised a new political, social and economic compact in the West, but Lind does not consider its limits, particularly in the U.S. These are evident in the political dynamics of the New Deal. The southern wing of the Democratic Party was determined to uphold white supremacy in the South, even as they agitated for more New Deal relief programs (Katznelson 2013). Southern democrats allied with Republicans to block the expansion of the labor movement and bitterly contested federal workplace standards – such as the federal minimum wage, which carried a presumption of racial equality. In order to stop the expansion of a national labor movement, Southern democrats aligned themselves with Republicans to approve the 1946 Taft-Hartley Act, which sharply limited the capacity of labor unions to expand in the South. This was part of a pervasive pattern. The Labor Relations Act of 1935 excluded domestic and agricultural workers from collective bargaining rights while other New Deal welfare programs, like the now terminated Aid to Families with Dependent Children, gave states the capacity to administer these programs in racially exclusive ways. Indeed, the same point applies to the GI Bill, from which black veterans were largely excluded (for a recent examination of this point, see Clark 2020). The failure of the New Deal to address racial oppression ensured that patterns of racial domination in the United States undermined the capacity of the Democratic party to pursue a pluralistic alternative to laissez faire capitalism.

In this sense, the very formation of democratic pluralism was itself highly problematic.  Put differently, the key flaw of democratic pluralism is that it could not absorb efforts to dismantle racial segregation in the United States.  Lind, however externalizes the problems of democratic pluralism:  they arise from how managerial elites abandoned democratic pluralism and how, subsequently, the structures of democratic pluralism dissolved with the disappearance of labor unions. Lind focuses as well on the hollowing out of political parties and transformation of civil society from bottom up mass membership federations to top down fundraising networks, managed by the not-for-profit wing of the managerial elite. In Lind’s account, spaces of democratic pluralism have been colonized by a resurgent managerial elite. As managerial elites strengthened their grip on economic, political and cultural power, ‘populists’ – workers without college degrees – were left politically homeless. This may be the case with the post-McGovern Democratic Party, which turned its back on organized labor and focused on educated professionals as its core constituency, but it hardly explains the ease in which ‘populists’ were absorbed into the top-down presidential coalitions of the Republican Party (Edsall and Edsall 1991).   Populists, as Margaret Somers (2006) has explained, have been progressively booted out of the organized political communities of democratic pluralism, but, in exchange, they got to bask in the thick national identity traditional Americanism. Lind is silent about this antagonism of the nation versus the liberal state because he wants us to see ‘workers’ or ‘populists’ – Lind uses these terms interchangeably – as victims rather than as willing participants in the disintegration of democratic pluralism.

It is not surprising, then, that Lind is eager to identify what he terms ‘pseudo critiques’ of the Trump administration. The first of these is that Trump represents a nascent form of fascism. The second is the contention that Trump is a kind of Manchurian president (no longer just a candidate!) of the Russians. The whole point of these arguments by Lind is to suggest that working class support for Trump represents a genuine rejection of the bipartisan liberal consensus on free trade, globalization and American empire. One can accept, of course, the idea that workers were unhappy with a political establishment that has, for decades, overseen and endorsed the destruction of their livelihoods. But why does this mean Lind must then attempt to minimize Trump’s racism – or the vast and inexplicable influence that Russia has over Trump and the conduct of US foreign policy? One would assume this is because Lind does not want to see Trump discredited by neoliberal-establishment critics. Or maybe he wants to believe that Trump – or a more competent version of Trump – can carry out a nationalist alternative to neoliberalism.  To be clear, though, Lind’s defense of working people is not support for Trump. He suggests, in fact, that Trumpian populism is deeply flawed and that it will likely incite a revived ‘oligarchic neoliberalism’, which will, in turn, lead to the emergence of a new cycle of populism. Thus the US will oscillate between populism and neoliberalism – much as does Latin America, although here Lind’s comparisons are inexact (2020, 86-88). More than anything else, Lind seems to be referencing an overarching conception Latin America where deep inequality drives persistent political instability.

The question that naturally arises is whether there is a way out of this vicious cycle? Lind seems chiefly concerned here with telling us about all the false neoliberal solutions to this problem.  Neoliberal insistence on meritocracy is bogus: recruit the best and brightest from the subaltern classes and leave everyone else behind to rot. Nor does it make sense to ask or demand that the working class makes itself more valuable by acquiring human capital or that workers should embrace geographic mobility and abandon the depressed heartlands for the dynamic urban hubs. Lind also rejects redistributionist schemes such as a universal basic income or, more modestly an expansion of earned tax credits. These are measures that would provide working people with some degree of insulation from market pressures. For Lind, however, these are proposals that are somehow rooted in a neoliberal antagonism towards workers. What they propose is a “euthanasia of the working class – a neoliberal utopia of a workerless paradise” (2020, 128).  Such measures, he suggests, would provide neoliberal oligarchy with a human face and would do nothing to redress the power imbalance between workers and capitalists. On these points, Lind is far too dismissive. A universal basic income would provide workers with the capacity to reject low paid work. It would also provide them with opportunities to further develop their capabilities outside the context of exploitative work.

Lind’s paranoid view of neoliberalism does not invalidate his basic argument. We need a revitalization of democratic pluralism in the realms of economy, politics and culture. But what remains unclear is how this is supposed to happen. Who are the agents that could bring about the return of democratic pluralism? Are working people at all mobilized to engage in this task? To a large degree, Lind avoids dealing with the problem of agency by talking about democratic pluralism in the conditional tense: it would, could, should, might etc. (2020, 131-45). A more fruitful discussion of democratic pluralism ensues in the penultimate chapter of the book in which Lind begins to think about the prospect of democratic pluralism in terms of international relations. Here, it seems, we come full circle: if 20th century democratic pluralism emerged as part of a response of the United States to the rise of authoritarian challenges, then 21st century democracy might follow a similar script, with China inserted into the place of the Axis powers. China would be the countervailing power, disrupting the longstanding Republican/Democratic consensus on neoliberal globalism and provoking a restructuring of global supply chains would limit corporate arbitrage between states and reverse the deindustrialization of the American heartlands. This could be an effective adaptation to both internal economic disorder and rising external insecurity, but developing such a policy agenda is also going to involve coming to terms with the dangerous pathologies of American identity to which Lind wants to confer absolution.[1]For only in this way could democratic pluralism become genuinely pluralistic.

3. Monopoly vs. Democracy

Matt Stoller’s Goliath offers an account of the US political economy from the point of view of the petty bourgeoisie. Stoller’s vision of the United States is Jeffersonian. Jefferson conceived of the American people as a nation of tradesmen and small farmers and Stoller affirms “we are still a nation of tradesmen” (356). The everyday livelihoods of the people – their property and commercial relations with one another – is what comprises democracy. The people can be self-governing to the extent that they are economically independent and self-reliant. Democracy facilitates the defense of these popular interests.  Stoller conceives of American history as a struggle between the forces of democracy and monopoly.  Monopoly power grew with the development of integrated trusts and cartels.  After World War One, Woodrow Wilson’s progressive reforms were buried under a resurgence of corporate power, centered on the creation of an interlocking system of cross-ownership financed by Wall Street banks, and represented in Washington by banking titan Andrew Mellon.  Mellon served as the Secretary of the Treasury for three Republican presidents in the 1920s. This system of corporate control, dubbed “Mellonism” by Stoller, acted as a fetter on the productive capacities of the US economy, with corporate/financial complexes able to extract income from existing productive enterprises while establishing barriers to entry that kept competitors out. Stoller describes Mellonism in the following terms:

“The Mellon system was a set of industrial and financial enterprises that aided each other and had interlocking boards of directions and even personnel. Coal unearthed on Mellon lands would find its way into Mellon steel mills, which would help build Mellon ships to carry Mellon oil, all financed by Mellon banks….Being outside this system mean a constant battle with Mellon interests’ (2019, 37)

The Mellon system opposed labor reform simply by virtue of the size and power of its corporate and financial network. Stoller remarks in this regard that “Railroads controlled by the Morgan and Mellon interests would refuse ship coal from mine owners that didn’t cooperate [with their anti-union agenda]. Bankers threatened to call in loans” (2019, 46).Prior to the New Deal, Democratic opposition to these policies hardly existed; mainstream Democrats instead devoted themselves to fighting the culture wars of the 1920s –inveighing against prohibition and the KKK – rather than developing a critique of finance and monopoly power. Democratic progressives took a different approach. Here is where, in Stoller’s text, we meet the figure of Wright Patman, a Democrat representing a district in Eastern Texas, which suffered under low commodity prices and the expansion of chain retail stores. Having served in Congress from 1929 to 1975, Patman emerged as a major power broker in the House of Representatives, chairing the House Banking Committee and authoring numerous pieces of New Deal legislation that constrained corporate power. Patman was Mellon’s nemesis.  Building on the progressive reforms of Wilson and drawing on Louis Brandeis’ call for industrial democracy, Patman was a crucial figure in the small business New Deal, which emerged as the power of the Mellon system was dismantled.

One of the virtues of Stoller’s book is that it introduces readers to a forgotten anti-monopoly facet of the New Deal. The great reforms of this period are generally associated with the recognition of collective bargaining and the subsequent development of a virtuous cycle between mass production, facilitated by assembly line production. Large-scale production, based on cooperative labor relations and anchored in the regulatory structures of the New Deal, could be leveraged to advance the public good. Here we are not so far away from Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism; indeed, FDR’s National Industrial Recovery represented the “New Nationalist” current of policy making within the New Deal, to which Patman served as an important counterweight. At issue was (and remains) the virtues of corporate size and technocratic management of the US economy. Patman argued that increased corporate power would lead to increasingly concentrated political power, culminating in the emergence of fascist government. Conversely, taming corporate power would ensure the continued existence of small farmers and businesses throughout heartland America (such as Patman’s district).  Thus the Jeffersonian ideal of the nation of small and independent proprietors could be retrofitted to an industrial age and rooted, adds Stoller, “in a segregated, though equalizing culture” (2019, 159).

Stoller’s view of race merits consideration. Like Lind, Stoller does not see racial domination as core problem of U.S. political economy.  Rather, the racial problem gets swept up into central conflict between democracy (as Stoller defines it) and monopoly.  Even as second-class citizens, he suggests, African Americans would benefit from price supports for agricultural commodities or from the Robinson-Patman act banning the use of discriminatory pricing to drive competitors out of the market. To the extent that African Americans benefitted from the New Deal of the petty bourgeoisie, it was not because anyone addressed racial oppression – as a matter of political survival, Patman regularly voted to uphold racial segregation in the South – but because shackles of monopoly had been removed from all people.  The problem here is that Stoller is willing to subsume racial oppression into his model of progress, which consists of the triumph of democracy (in the form of an economy of the plain people) over monopoly (corporate domination eventuating in the destruction of political democracy). History, for Stoller, becomes a morality play in which the master narrative – democracy vs. monopoly – subsumes all other conflicts.

Stoller also oversells his conception of ‘democracy’. This leads to a myopic conception of capitalist development in the US, according to which antitrust suits provided the key to unlocking the productive potential of the economy. By 1945, when Harry Truman became president, the United States was monopoly-free, like Prometheus, unchained from the mountain. Witness, enthuses Stoller, the emergence of a dynamic aerospace industry, characterized by firms such as Grumann, Boeing, General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas – all of which would become cornerstones of the military industrial complex (2019, 152). What makes these firms a selling point of democracy? Why should we think that the absence of the monopoly is the presence of economic democracy?  In fact, as Thomas Ferguson (1989) has noted, multinational corporations were a critical part of FDR’s coalition. What they sought – and received – from the FDR was the rejection of protectionism and the pursuit of an open-door policy for foreign direct investment around the world – a development that would become institutionalized in the US led, post-war liberal international order. In turn, the international liberal order would become the basis for corporate globalization.  If Stoller were to contend more seriously with the international policy consequences of the New Deal, he would have to address the problem of how to maintain economic democracy amidst corporate globalization, which might lead to the advocacy of progressive localism – the idea of economies scaled to the size of communities rather than the nation state or the world.

While Stoller oversimplifies the history of capitalism, his approach does have the value of getting his readers to think about the significance of historical memory – a fact that reflects populism’s status as an historical tradition that is always on the verge of being forgotten. Nothing illustrates this point better than Stoller’s account of the “Watergate Babies” – the post-Watergate generation of Democratic politicians – figures like Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Gary Hart – baby boomers who did not experience the Depression or World War Two, but were shaped by the Civil Rights Movement, the War in Vietnam, higher education and the counterculture of the 1960s. “We’re not a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys,” quipped Gary Hart in 1972 (2019, 337). When the Watergate Babies arrived in Congress, after the 1974 midterm election, they set about uprooting senior members of Congress from the direction of Congressional committees. As an elder statesman without a college degree, Patman was suspect. And as an old white Southerner, he was considered insufficiently pro-Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War. More importantly, as the US economy began to falter in the 1970s, boomer politicians became convinced that New Deal nostrums about the virtues of antitrust and regulated capitalism had become counterproductive. The Watergate Babies were oriented to a politics of affluence, geared to servicing the interests of the consumer more than safeguarding the wellbeing of the producer. From this point of view, the Robinson-Patman Fair Trade Act was anti-consumer. Regulation Q- which limited the ability of banks to compete for depositors by offering higher interest rates – was likewise anti-consumer.  So too were regulations of airlines, commercial trucking and other industries.  Stoller argues that the new Democrats (e.g. the Watergate Babies) became anti-government, anti-union and anti-small business because of how they embraced neoliberal remedies for economic stagnation proffered by Chicago school figures like Robert Bork, George Stigler and Milton Friedman.

And so the New Democrats cut ties with their New Deal party elders and became sympathetic to the Reaganite idea that government is the problem, not the solution.  What ultimately undermined the New Deal order was the betrayal of liberal policy elites.  The difficulty with this argument is that it is only concerned with intellectual debates between policy elites and ignores many of the larger economic, political and social forces that operated to dislodge the New Deal order.  If only the New Democrats had not dismissed the insights of Wright Patman, the United States might have avoided the recrudescence of monopoly capitalism.  Stoller overstates the agency of policy elites and does not consider the larger social, economic and political forces that eroded the New Deal order.  In the post-World War Two period, the New Deal had already become downgraded from being a movement to becoming institutionalized as a set of bureaucratic procedures (Katznelson 2013). In Stoller’s account, the New Deal order was not transformed so much as it was misrecognized by anti-populist, public intellectuals like Richard Hofstadter and John Kenneth Galbraith.  The battle of ideas that Stoller so assiduously documents reflects his conception of politics as a struggle between elites rather a process of interest representation and bargaining conditioned by processes of change occurring both domestically and internationally.

Stoller spends the final pages of Goliath describing the emergence of Google, Amazon and Facebook as the new monopolists that dominate the US the economy. Yet the very platforms that social media corporations have colonized can be liberated: “Across our commerce, our industries can be remade, and remade in remarkably innovative ways, if we would but move aside the entrenched status quo of monopolies and unleash the talents and genius of a free people upon them” (2019, 451). Free of the deadening hand of the monopoly, innovation and the growth can spring forward.  The framework for Stoller’s exhortations to his readers is liberal individualism. Everyone can activate themselves as critically minded and responsible citizens, prepared to reclaim the promise of American life, which is “come together in a system of democracy and use the law to protect and develop themselves” (2019: p. 455). In the last analysis, writes Stoller,  “…each of us is a worker, a businessperson, a consumer and a citizen. The real question is not whether commerce is good or bad. It is how we do commerce, to serve concentrated power or to free ourselves from concentrated power” (2019, 456). It would be nice, in fact, if concentrated power were our only problem, but, in fact, our society is suffused with racism, sexism, militarism and class inequality.   As one of Stoller’s critics (Winant 2020) maintains, Stoller collapses all conflict into the master narrative of the clash of monopoly versus democracy. This is ultimately a narrow conception of power that oscillates between the free individual and concentrated power, minimizing the significance of class, racial, sexual and international politics.

4. Conclusions

What is the balance between the strengths and weaknesses of Lind and Stoller’s accounts of the US political economy? The strengths are that both texts show the relevance of the past to the current problems and impasses that confront the US political economy. Lind illustrates the domestic and international conditions under which capitalist elites became willing to engage in power sharing with workers in the spheres of economy, politics and culture. And he suggests, intriguingly, how US rivalry with China might create the context for a restoration of democratic pluralism. Lind also points to a plausible alternative outcome: the US might oscillate between populism and neoliberalism, in the generic fashion of Latin American, a trajectory that leads to US decline.

Stoller undercovers the largely obscured tradition of anti-monopoly politics, a perspective that enables us to link Wilsonian progressivism to New Deal reforms. Significantly, the protagonists of this tradition have been “the plain people” of the US. Stoller also offers an account of the ways in which this anti-monopoly tradition has been erased from our understanding of the US political economy – largely by way of generational change in which baby boomer politicians dismissed the historical experiences and policy insights of their predecessors. Stoller suggests that this process of historical forgetting was an important aspect of the transition from the New Deal political economy of organized capitalism to neoliberalism.

Lind and Stoller’s strengths have to be considered alongside their weaknesses. Both Stoller and Lind are dualistic in their view of history. There are good guys and bad guys – as well as good institutional arrangements and bad ones. For Lind, American workers are the victims of capitalist exploitation and their political responses to the destruction of their livelihoods over the course of the neoliberal era – their engagement in a populist insurrection centered on the election of Donald Trump –  is understandable and hardly worthy of blame. What Lind misses are all the problems that were built into the structure of his vaunted democratic pluralism – particularly the unwillingness of New Deal legislators to address racial segregation and the subsequent willingness of white workers embrace a politics of racial fear as their rationale for supporting the Republicans’ reactionary assertion of neoliberalism. All of this leads to the conclusion that a democratic pluralism worthy of its name will have to jettison the racial politics of the right, a concession that Lind – in terms of his frankly absurd defenses of the Trump presidency – seems reluctant to make.

Stoller oversimplifies the history of US capitalism as a clash between monopoly and democracy.  He does not convincingly establish that the absence of monopoly constitutes the presence of economic democracy. He does not think through the complexities of how New Deal anti-monopoly policy coexisted with the pro-corporate liberal international order. Nor does he consider how erosion of anti-monopoly politics was – like the collapse of Lind’s democratic pluralism – built into the structure of the international political economy of the New Deal. This points to another problem with Stoller: from him, monopoly versus democracy is a purely domestic struggle. The US might as well be the only country on the planet. Finally, his proposals for how to confront the problems of monopoly power rely too heavily on the negation of monopoly power via the assertion of individual capacities for self-determination. All of this overlooks other forms of oppression – class, racial and sexual. Stoller is not obliged to make sense of everything, but he should be more mindful about the limitations of the analytical framework that he brings to bear on the study of the US political economy.

It is important, finally, to reflect on the nexus between national identity and political economy that figures prominently in both of these books. Rhetorically, both texts try to get traction for their ideas by appealing to a better America that antedated the turn to neoliberalism. The tendency for both authors to discover models for change in the past lends itself to the formulation of what Manuel Castells (1997) has termed resistance identities, which are typically formulated by actors who are devalued and stigmatized by the current system of domination. Our moment of neoliberal crisis calls for the formation of project identities, whereby actors build new identities that aim to transform society. The revival of democratic pluralism and anti-monopoly politics are by no means inimical to this objective, but Lind and Stoller would do well to think through how the social antagonisms they are focused on can also incorporate other, related conflicts. All of this is essential to the development of a counter-hegemonic project that can contest a neoliberal capitalism that has grown dangerously dysfunctional.

References:

Castells, Manuel. (1997). The Power of Identity: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Volume ll. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Clark, Alexis. (2020). “Returning from War, Returning to Racism.” New York Times, July 30.

Edsall, Thomas, and Mary Edsall. 1991. Chain Reaction: the Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes

on American Politics. New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Ferguson, Thomas. (1989). “Industrial Conflict and the Coming of the New Deal: the Triumph of Multinational Liberalism in America.” In The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order 1930-1980, edited by Gary Gerstle and Steve Fraser. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Frank, Thomas (2004). What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Holt.

Katznelson, Ira (2013). Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. New York and London: Liveright.

Lind, Michael (2020). The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite. Portfolio/Penguin.

Panitch, Leo, and Sam Ginden (2012). The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. London and New York: Verso.

Somers, Margaret (2006). “Citizenship, Statelessness and Market Fundamentalism.” In Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos, by Michal Bodeman and G Yurdagul, 35-62. Palgrave MacMillan: London and New York.

Stoller, Matt.  (2019) Goliath: The 100 Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy . New York: Simon and Schuster.

Winant, Gabriel. 2020. “No Going Back: the Power and Limits of the Anti-Monopolist Tradition.” The Nation, January 21.

[1] In this instance, one such pathology would be anti-Chinese sentiment that would construe Chinese nationals and people of Chinese dissent as a suspect class of people (for discussion, see Hvistendahl 2020).