It's a great way to frame the current political climate and several crucial periods in American history. The author didn't exactly phrase it that way (he is a h

It's a great way to frame the current political climate and several crucial periods in American history. The author didn't exactly phrase it that way (he is a historian not an economist) but I'd recommend The Republic for Which It Stands by Richard White from the Oxford History of the United States series. He starts out the acknowledgments "I have written a book about a time of rapid and disorienting change and failed politics, and now I finish it in a parallel universe" and goes into great lengths about the failure of institutions as they tried to rebuild during the hyper polarized post-Civil War Reconstruction era. Reading it is quite unsettling at times because the later years look almost exactly what is happening now with privatization and erosion of government - symbols that were rapidly arbitraged to the highest bidder.