Main points:

How, one must ask, has a party with such objectives successfully gained power?

The first approach is to find intellectuals who argue that everybody will benefit from policies ostensibly benefiting so few. Supply-side economics, with its narrow focus on tax cuts, has been the main theory employed, because it directly justifies tax cuts for the very wealthy. But it is untrue that the tax cuts of the Reagan era unleashed an upsurge in trend US economic growth. Since the economy is now nearing full employment, the benefits of fiscal stimulus would be especially small.

The second approach is to abuse the law. One way has been to give wealth the overriding role in politics it holds today. Another is to suppress the votes of people likely to vote against plutocratic interests, or even disenfranchise them.

The third approach is to foment cultural and ethnic splits. This is sometimes described as the “Southern strategy”, which shifted the old South from the Democrats to the Republicans, after the former enacted civil rights. Yet this is too limited a view of the strategy. More interesting is the echo of the antebellum South itself. The pre-civil war South was extremely unequal, not just in the population as a whole, which included the slaves, but even among free whites. A standard measure of inequality jumped by 70 per cent among whites between 1774 and 1860. As the academics Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson note, “Any historian looking for the rise of a poor white underclass in the Old South will find it in this evidence.” The 1860 census also shows that the median wealth of the richest 1 per cent of Southerners was more than three times that of the richest 1 per cent of Northerners. Yet the South was also far less dynamic.