Social And Political Limits To Reform In The U.S.

Francis Fukuyama goes over 5 books on the financial crisis over at the Browser, and what they illuminate about the U.S. social experiment (also via Mark Thoma).  One of my favorite parts:

Also, as you’ve pointed out, the only real populist outrage has been coming from the right, which doesn’t make any sense at all.
That, for me, is the central puzzle of this whole crisis. You have a crisis that starts on Wall Street and implicates a lot of the deregulated free market institutions that were created since the Reagan revolution. The crisis also had roots in the increasing maldistribution of income in the US. Despite all that, there’s been no mobilisation of people on the left. I really don’t believe Occupy Wall Street represents a broad mobilisation. The particular demographic at issue are the white working or lower-middle class in the US, the so-called Reagan Democrats. In the 1930s, they voted for the New Deal coalition – if they were Europeans, they’d be voting for Social Democratic parties. But in the US, in most elections over the past 30 years, they have voted for Republicans who have pursued policies that largely hurt their interests. That’s the big sociological puzzle about the US, why that phenomenon exists.
It’s partly a lack of interest in politics isn’t it? People are losing jobs but they’ve got cable TV, two cars per family. Life is tough, but they can still go shopping and there are enough distractions never to have to think about politics at all.
That’s right. The economist Tyler Cowen has made the point that, in a sense, inequality matters less than it did 100 years ago. If you were at the bottom in terms of income distribution 100 years ago, it was literally a life-threatening situation, in terms of your life expectancy, your vulnerability to setbacks. It’s still the case in large parts of the developing world right now. But here in the US the level of people at the bottom is sufficient that they can still enjoy their smartphones and cheap clothing at Wal-Mart. The issue of inequality becomes much more abstract. They know there are people making billions of dollars, but it doesn’t bother them as directly.

The whole post is worth reading.  He finds people at fault on both sides of the aisle, and within the U.S. social fabric.  Overall, it is very well-explained by a man who's The End Of History is often seized on by both the Neoconservatives on military support of establishing democracy and the Neoliberals in favor of deregulation and unfettered markets.  I generally agree with almost all of his points.  One thing I didn't understand was why when he mentioned Charles Schumer, he called him a liberal, but didn't also mention that he was the senator from Wall Street, the investment bankers' biggest whore.