Kim Phillips-Fein

One interpretation presents the country as irredeemably tainted by its past. Another contends that the United States has also tended toward egalitarianism.

Two books argue that private equity created an economic order in which getting rich quickly preempts other values, undermining companies and evading the law.

The study of poverty has flourished in recent decades. Why haven’t the lives of the poor improved?

How conservatives made him their icon and distorted his ideas.

A new history of American politics examines the past and future of political realignments.

How many rich moderates would join the MAGA far right if redistribution policies threatened their wealth?

Three books explore a history of fractious extremism that predates Donald Trump.

A new book shows just how porous the dividing line has been between the far right and mainstream conservatism.

How public interest groups inadvertently aided the right’s ascendency.

A new history of Ed Logue and his vision of urban renewal documents the broken promises of midcentury liberalism.

We are at the end of an era, as choices made in the 1970s have created a society that seems unable to cope with a crisis such as that posed by the coronavirus.

We can only understand the left’s present dilemmas by seeing them in light of the conflicted legacy of the New Deal.

His political evolution points to a different locus of power than the one liberals tend to invoke when discussing the era’s history.

To be Gen X was to be disaffected from the consumer norms of the 1980s, but to be pessimistic about any chance for social transformation.

Tech was meant to help us transcend our most intractable problems. What went wrong?

Without accounting for the often-invisible work of others in his research, Robert Caro's new memoir is not so much inspiration as an exercise in self-celebration.

What the backlash to the emergency legislation reveals about the age-old pathologies of the right.

What the battle between Herbert Hoover and FDR can teach us.

Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge’s strange elegy for capitalism.

All of Andrew Carnegie’s arguments were devoted to explaining why inequality ultimately was good: not only for its beneficiaries, but for poor people as well.

The radical and reactionary currents of New York at the turn of the 20th century.

The 200-year legal struggle that led to Citizens United and gave corporations the rights of people.

How businesses campaigned to win constitutional rights and expand their political reach.

A new book on James Buchanan and public-choice theory explores the Southern roots of the free-market right.