Extreme Inequality and State Capture: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy in The United States

This essay looks behind the failure of representation by the party system and the deep political polarization that marks the rise of populism within liberal democracies to examine two of the basic causes for the 2016 success of Donald Trump: extreme inequality and the exceptional manipulability of the US electoral system. Populism on the right can be found on both sides of the Atlantic, but it is especially dangerous when compared to Western Europe. The interaction between the extremity of US inequality and its uniquely unrepresentative electoral institutions has permitted bigotry to become the platform and strategy of one of its two mainstream political parties, the Republican Party. While this appears to privilege visible “identity” as the main cleavage in the US, this is deceptive, drawing attention away from the central driver of crisis: the concentration of wealth at the very top that permits the capture of democratic institutions.