Before and after World Battle II, a serendipitous confluence of events created a healthy balance between the market and the polity-between the engine of capitalism as well as the egalitarian ideals of democracy. Under Roosevelt’s New Deal, unions and collective bargaining had been legalized. Glass-Steagall reined in speculative fund. At Bretton Woods, a worldwide economic climate was devised explicitly to permit nations to control capitalism. However this golden period ended up being lightning in a bottle. From the 1970s on, a power shift occurred, where financial regulations were rolled back, taxes were trim, inequality worsened, and disheartened voters turned to far-right, faux populism.

Robert Kuttner lays away the events that resulted in the postwar wonder, and graphs its dissolution all the way to Trump, Brexit, and the tenuous condition of the European union. Is normally today’s poisonous alliance of reckless fund and ultra-nationalism inevitable? Or can democracy find a way to survive?