It's a review of Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich by Kevin Phillips

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The great hope of some reform-minded Americans is that there will be, sooner or later, a political backlash against rising inequality in America. Kevin Phillips, a former Republican adviser, is one of these. A principal aim of his wise if sprawling new book, Wealth and Democracy, is to show that the growth of private wealth in the 1990s was analogous to the rise of private wealth in previous eras, especially the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century and the 1920s.

In all these periods, Phillips argues, great fortunes had the effect of undermining democratic values and creating difficult economic times for many and perhaps even most other Americans. In the past, the nation always seemed to alternate between the domination of private and of public interests, and it is possible that it will do so again. The Gilded Age of Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Astor, and Morgan was followed by new regulations on business and commerce, progressive income taxes, and the establishment of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The 1920s of the Fords, Mellons, duPonts, and Joseph Kennedy, among others, were followed by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which adopted further serious restrictions on business, established Social Security and unemployment insurance, created a minimum wage, and raised income taxes. Joseph Kennedy himself was the effective first chairman of the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission. "The early twenty-first century should see another struggle because corporate aggrandizement in the 1980s and 1990s went beyond that of the Gilded Age," Phillips writes.

But why hasn't it happened yet?

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