The Wisconsin Supreme court sticks it to the poor and middle class while statistics show it is more than a trend, it’s a feature of the new gilded age.

One of the maddening riddles of American life is why a country with an egalitarian ethos and the world’s oldest democratic system could allow itself to become a grossly unequal land of haves and have nots in recent decades – a society with a pattern of income distribution now closer to that of Brazil than, say, Germany.

Look no further for an answer to the riddle. This alarming new book by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson offers up perhaps the best explanation so far of how the U.S. got on the path to plutocracy.

As the economy fails to improve, as we chart the rise of the Tea Party and the Republican Party’s ability to express disdain for unemployment benefits without significant political cost, Americans lack a roadmap for the role of class and gender in the new American landscape. Joan Williams’ book, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter (Harvard 2010), supplies that roadmap. The book creates an innovative framework for examining the relationship between law, work and family in the post-industrial economy.

We’re Americans. We can dismiss the possibility we live in a banana republic as nonsense, right?