Big Business Still Has Enormous Control of American Politics at Every Level
Big business has long held an outsize role in US politics. In a plague year, and as politicians prematurely push to reopen the economy, political scientist Thomas Ferguson argues that its place at the center of American life is more grotesque than ever.
The famous bull near Wall Street in New York City.
Thomas Ferguson has been analyzing the role of money in American politics for more than four decades. Along with collaborators, he has mapped the evolution of shifting blocks of investors who stand behind the Democratic and Republican Parties.
In the last few months, American politics has appeared more unsettled than ever, from the Democratic primary to the coronavirus pandemic to the uprising against police violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Yet as Ferguson argues, these events have often been driven by some very familiar forces. The power of big business has shaped everything from the reckless push to get the country back to business to the responses to the uprisings. He discussed all of this recently with Jacobin’s Paul Heideman.
Paul Heideman
The world staggers under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic; the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has triggered a vast wave of protests that “Black Lives Matter”; and the United States is in the middle of a very tense presidential election. Each of these events is momentous in its own right; taken together, they are almost overwhelming. How do you think we should go about analyzing how they all play out together?
Thomas Ferguson
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