In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how the United States …
As early as 1975, Idaho’s senator Frank Church warned of the “Latin Americanization of the United States.” Church didn’t mean the phrase in a reactionary way, to suggest that the country was losing its WASP identity and becoming mongrelized, or that plebeians were falling for strongman populism. Rather, Senator Church, writing two years after the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, was worried about the power that corporations exercised over domestic institutions. A regressive upward distribution of income, the emergence of “mammoth corporations operating on a global scale that transcends political boundaries” and function “beyond the effective control of the nation-state,” and the abandonment of the idea that it is the obligation of politicians to close the gap between rich and poor threatened, he worried, to do great damage to the nation.