Entrenchment: Wealth, Power, and the Constitution of Democratic Societies by Paul Starr (review)

Paul Starr's new book, Entrenchment, is a very welcome addition to the admittedly crowded field of diagnoses of the current global moment of political backlash. It's very nice prose and careful scholarship Bely a simple, but important, argument that the powerful have been able to protect their wealth and power by entrenching them in institutions that are difficult to change. It is not political polarization or partisanship that is the problem of our age and the threat to our democracies, but inequalities entrenched in durable institutions. As we mark the tenth anniversary of Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that allowed unrestricted corporate spending on electoral campaigns, the book's message is timely.

The book develops a political sociology centered on struggles over institutional arrangements. At times, societal struggles take place within accepted institutional arrangements, and at times, the struggles are over the rules themselves. Entrenchment, "the making of changes that then become hard to undo and that increase the resistance to stress at the foundations of society," is neither bad nor good. There have been moments of entrenchment of progressive principles—not only in moments of reform like the New Deal, but also at junctures when antidemocratic power was held at check, such as when British inheritance laws were abolished at the founding for the republic.

Theoretically, the book is anchored in neo-institutionalism and relies on familiar concepts like path-dependence, critical junctures, embeddedness, and institutional deepening to develop a framework of political entrenchment. There are three general mechanisms of entrenchment (strategic entrenchment, lock in, and cultural entrenchment) that play out differently whether the context is one of institutionalized and legitimate authority, or one of sheer force and material advantage. Cultural entrenchment of a new institutional arrangement relies on institutions in the first case, but direct social ties in the second.

The book is essentially focused on the see-saw of entrenchment of elite power in the USA with occasional reference to European cases, particularly as antecedents to the founding of the USA republic. There is a chapter on how challenging inheritance laws weakened the power of the aristocracy in the USA and France, entrenching a more equitable distribution of land. The subsequent discussion on slavery discuss the rise and fall of the South's slave-owning ruling class, able for a time to entrench its power and privilege via the curious institutions of slavery. Yet, despite the victories over land holders and slave owners, the design of US democracy turns out to have been conservative, lacking enough checks on oligarchic power on one hand, while having institutions like central banks and a supreme court, that are insulated from majority rule. The balance shifts again, though, during "great conjuncture," with the entrenchment of progressive reforms, from the 1930s through the 1970s, from progressive taxation to welfare. Of course, these begin to unwind with neoliberal reforms and economic austerity of the recent decades.

The book's final chapter is the most urgent one and picks up on the consequences of the unwinding of progressive reforms. It discusses the current moment of threat to democracy, currently under a "stress test," which Starr sees as coming from two sides: nationalist populism and oligarchic power. It is easy to see the argument for how each have entrenched their power. Decisions like Citizens United, for example, have let corporations have outsized influence on the political process, just as the weakening of the power of unions has removed an important counterweight. At the same time, the senatorial distribution of seats, gerrymandering, and outright voter suppression have given rural, white, and conservative Americans an outsized say over the political process that disempowers immigrants and mostly urban people of color. The danger that Trumpist politics represent is the precisely the fusion between oligarchical power and populism.

And it is with the arguments about populism that the otherwise masterful book perhaps stumbles. Of course, much of the book's writing pre-dates the current...