Wealth of Nations Why Trump and Sanders Were Inevitable

the wild-talking building magnate on the right and the wild-haired socialist on the left have met up at the same intersection, one bounded by the four corners of

  1. anti-globalization,
  2. anti-free-trade,
  3. anti-immigration and
  4. anti-Wall Street sentiment.

“When mainstream politicians are unable to generate meaningful responses to inequality, social exclusion and insecurity, populists of various ilk gain ground.”

.. The United States, which once idealized itself as a classless society, has become more socio-economically stratified than the aristocratic “old Europe” of the pre-World War I period, says Piketty. Much of this is the unintended consequence of untrammeled globalization, which has enriched the masters of capital, especially at the expense of blue-collar labor.

On the GOP side, there were those who thought the tea party was libertarian, but nothing could have been further from the truth, as Rand Paul discovered when his presidential bid crashed and burned. Even a conservative in the maltreated middle class doesn’t want less help from government; instead the tea party backlash was anti-immigrant and anti-Obama—not so much opposed to government per se as to how government redistributes wealth.

.. Real wages for most U.S. workers have been relatively stagnant since the 1970s, while those for the top 1 percent have increased 156 percent, and those for the top 0.1 percent have increased 362 percent, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute.