Like many nations, the United States is undergoing a revolution in economic and political geography. The shift from an industrial to a knowledge economy is feeding both political polarization and economic polarization. Scholars of American political development have long stressed that the United States’ diverse economic geography and strongly territorialized institutions encourage sectional policy conflict. Prominent scholars of contemporary politics have similarly argued that territorially based representation encourages policy responsiveness to local communities. We argue to the contrary that several key mediating factors – the increasing antiurban and status quo bias of American political institutions, the nationalization of US party coalitions, and the path-dependent character of inherited policy regimes – have greatly weakened the representation of place-based economic interests (PBEIs) in contemporary American politics. Indeed, because of these “filters,” each of the nation’s two major party coalitions manifests what we call a “PBEI paradox,” a set of policy commitments starkly at odds with the underlying economic needs of the areas that vote for it.

Since the 1970s the American political system has undergone a dramatic increase in partisan polarization. By polarization, we mean that the parties are “far apart” from each other. This is largely, but not exclusively, a matter of policy views, although it may include important elements of identity-based tribalism. In a highly polarized environment, parties view one another as competing camps engaged in a battle where the stakes attached to victory or defeat are extremely high.

The COVID-19 pandemic that struck the United States in early 2020 amplified already-stark economic and political divisions and revealed a nation unprepared to launch an immediate public health and economic response. Whether it was the fragmentation of the American federal system, the glaring racial and class disparities in economic and health outcomes, or the weaknesses of America’s tattered safety net, the crisis brought America’s distinctive mix of multi-venue governance, limited social protections, weak labor power, and loosely regulated markets prominently – and often tragically – into display.

A striking feature of the American political economy is its fragmentation. The constitutionally protected role of the states and the localized quality of many crucial policies foster a political economy that is at once national – the rich world’s most extensive nation-spanning market – and sectional, with states or groups of states constituting distinct political economies that often have enormous scope of their own.

As this group met in Cambridge in late February 2020 to discuss revised chapters for this project, we did not know that a COVID-19 super-spreader event was unfolding less than three miles away – ironically, at the conference of a major bio-technology firm. By October, estimates suggested that the strains unleashed at that single event might have infected 300,000 Americans (Wines and Harmon 2020). Well before then, of course, it was clear that a world-historical calamity was unfolding before us.

The growing insecurity of American households is often seen as an exogenous economic change beyond political control. In this chapter, we argue instead that it is to a very large extent a result of endogenous political and policy developments. Moreover, we suggest that many, though certainly not all, of these developments are specific to the United States. In particular, we focus on three: (1) the erosion of America’s distinctive framework of social provision, which is uniquely reliant on private risk pooling by employers; (2) the weakness of social solidarity and resonance of racial (rather than class) appeals in our increasingly polarized society; and (3) the growing extremism of the Republican Party, enabled and propelled by its capacity to forge an uneasy “plutocratic-populist” coalition of upscale economic conservatives and downscale social conservatives. Understanding these three developments is essential to grasping not just how America insecurity arose but also whether it might yet be addressed.

A decade after a pointed critique of the discipline's retreat from the study of power (Moe 2005), evidence of a “power-free political science” is more widespread than ever. At least as it is practiced in the field of American politics – which plays a leading role in shaping the contours of the discipline as a whole – power and influence remain elusive, unhelpful, and marginalized concepts. When Americanists have gone looking for “power” – decisive political advantages for those with more resources – they mostly haven't found it. There is very little evidence showing that campaign contributions or lobbying systematically effect roll call votes in Congress (Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2012). Stephen Ansolabehere, John de Figueiredo, and James Snyder provocatively asked, “Why is there so little money in American politics?” They found that although this was partly because donating raised big collective action problems, it was equally because money seemed to make little difference to electoral outcomes (Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, and Snyder 2003). A broad and sophisticated study of lobbying from some of the leading scholars of interest groups recently reported that it could “find virtually no linkage between [group] resources and outcomes” (Baumgartner et al. 2009). Of course, the inability to find power in empirical research is especially puzzling given the extraordinary increase in economic inequality in the United States over the past generation.

Nor is the elusiveness of power just an empirical matter. More fundamentally, power doesn't really fit in the leading frameworks for studying American politics. These frameworks typically depict politics as fluid or “plastic.” Elections follow a Downsian logic; this cycle's loser adjusts and becomes the next cycle's winner. Take out incumbency, David Mayhew observes, and presidential elections over the past century or so have been essentially a coin toss between the two parties (Mayhew 2002). Legislatures are under the sway of Arrow's paradox of voting so that losers in any legislative struggle are well positioned to cycle back into the winner's position.