ABSTRACT
It’s not for nothing that corporate neoliberal politicians Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Barack Obama gave significant if carefully hedged voice to progressive, populist-sounding values in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, and 2012, even while their campaign teams and the Clinton and Obama administrations were loaded with elite operatives from and for “the 1%.” The epic concentration of wealth and the extreme inequality that have taken hold in the United States during its Second Gilded Age-making the United States more comparable to Latin America and Africa than to Western Europe in terms of economic disparity-stand in cold defiance of public opinion on what constitutes a good society. Most US citizens reject corporate and financial dominance, harsh socioeconomic disparity, and the ruination of social and ecological health in service to the rich and powerful. The vast majority do not accept plutonomy and plutocracy. They prefer a roughly egalitarian society where wealth and power are well distributed and the government is run by and for the populace in pursuit of the common good. “Taken literally,” the Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels notes in his important book Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (2009), the survey data illustrating these and other progressive majority views imply “an astonishing level of public support for what would have to be a very radical program of social transformation,” including the outlawing of inherited wealth and of social and economic advantages based on race, gender, ethnicity, and intelligence.2
