POLT 282 - The Politics of Inequality in the United States

FC SSCI

4 credits
This course examines the political and historical sources of inequality in the contemporary United States. We start by unpacking contemporary inequality’s relationship to the restoration of business power in U.S. politics and the decline of New Deal liberalism. We then examine accounts that show how liberalism itself enabled this restoration and shaped contemporary inequality, either by fostering different patterns of social privilege and marginality or by addressing these patterns in contradictory and unsustainable ways. We close by considering how the political order underlying inequality in the U.S. is currently evolving and how public should respond to this moment.