Income Inequality Is Driving Political Turmoil, and It Always Has, says Sean Wilentz | Big Think

I think a lot of people think the party is no longer serving their interests or their desires. It happens. It's happened before in American history plenty of times.

Parties are always coalitions anyway, so there's always somebody who's feeling as if they're not getting, you know, not being served well by the party, but it's gotten to be a real cleavage these days. One of the big reasons, this is 2008, which was a big, big year looking back on it. I mean, not only the financial crash but Obama's election.

Obama's election really signaled the end of the culture war that had been in Republican politics for a very long time and it was going to go over, continued but really we were going to actions but that was it. And then the crash, in American history, the question of inequality has been a perennial. We think of it now as something that has suddenly come up, but it's been a perennial; it's always there, the idea that somehow vast inequalities of wealth in particular are dangerous for democracy. That's nothing new.

But the idea can submerge for a very long time, and it did, some submerge for a very long time, and 2008 brought it right back up again with a ferocity that we're seeing on the campaign trail today. From the very beginning of American history and American politics, the question of slavery and race was there from the very beginning and it was actually being agitated with the margins at first, it later become more mainstream.

So that's always an aspect of American politics. The question of slavery and its legacy in American political history. The economics, I mean, from the very beginning, Washington's administration arguments about how the country should - questions about where the country should be headed? What kind of country we were supposed to be?

There were some who thought that by bringing in a moneyed class, by building a moneyed class to consolidate the economy as to how. There were others who thought that power and economics really ought to be decentralized more than just the Jeffersonian view; more spread around. That's putting it very crudely, but that's kind of what it was. It was an issue from the very start, and you could see that issue playing itself out.

We've seen in American history there have been divergences and convergences. The period in American history, for example, after World War II, historians and economists call it The Great Compression, The Great Convergence, where vast inequalities left over from the 1910s, 1920s actually began to narrow. And that continued right until the 1970s.

So, American politics, and it's about politics primarily, has had the ways to flatten those differences, to make them less garish, to make them less severe than they've normally been. Since the 1970s there's been a pressure towards divergence. It really began to take off during the 1980s and Reagan's policies made a big, big difference in terms of not only tax policy but in terms of regulation as well.

We're seeing the fruits of all that, the bitter fruits of all that in the 2000s, and the deregulation and the financial collapse in 2008 only made it worse. So, political decisions that the country made and the policies that followed after that have enormous consequences...