“The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.” All of us have the right to contribute to candidates and campaigns, but rather few of us have the capacity to do so on a scale that ensures our interests will be represented in the political system.

Forty percent of all political donations come from an extremely rarified set: the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent. This is not to say that there are no meaningful differences between the two parties, because there are. To the extent that working-class people find political representation for their class interests, it is through the Democratic Party and its enduring alliance with organized labor. But judging by the state of US society, it’s clear that our political system observes its own version of the golden rule: who has the gold, makes the rules.