The Politics of Inequality

In his pathbreaking 1984 book The New Politics of Inequality, Tom Edsall warned about "a major shift in the balance of power in the United States," reflecting an erosion of political influence "of the bottom half of the economic spectrum" and a significant increase in the political cohesion and effectiveness of the wealthy. Edsall traced the conversion of the Democrats to more business funding and the decline of labor and working-class voting. He predicted that "as long as the balance of political power remains so heavily weighted towards those with economic power, national economic policy will remain distorted regardless of which party is in control of the federal government."

The imbalance in power and its "distorted" effect on policy that alarmed Edsall twenty-seven years ago was a small tumor compared to the metastasized cancer that now threatens our democracy. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's Winner-Take-All Politics is the best book on the American political economy since Edsall's. It is also the essential guide to how the United States went from New Deal egalitarianism—in the thirty years after the Second World War the incomes of the poorest 20 percent of American families actually increased a bit faster than the income of the richest 20 percent—to our present day American plutocracy.