Politics and PrivilegeIn the United States, the bottom 50 percent of households hold only 1 percent of the nation's wealth. Scholars and commentators have long viewed democracy as the antidote to economic inequality, but US electoral politics bears little resemblance to a struggle between the haves and the have nots. What makes extreme disparities of wealth and income so persistent, and why has the political process failed to address the problem? Based on data from an