In identifying the causes of mass incarceration, sociologist David Garland argued years ago that societal angst stemming from deep changes in the US economy and society in the decades immediately following World War II ushered in a “culture of control.” The widespread perception of the government’s impotency to mitigate the economic upheavals of the 1970s, notably the twin shocks of stagflation and the oil crisis, fueled the culture of control. The government’s failure to tame these economic demons cast doubt on its efficacy, legitimacy, and raison d’être. As public officials struggled to curb inflation and restore economic growth, they lashed out. They promoted harsher measures to punish crime in the streets for their symbolic and expressive value, according to Garland.

While the culture of control was taking hold in the United States, another radical transformation was under way that has received far less attention. A culture of no control — or little control — over elite-level corporate crime was taking root away from the political limelight. As it doubled down on pursuing and punishing people accused of street and drug crimes and immigration offenses, the United States retreated from regulating corporations and prosecuting and punishing their executives despite a tsunami of elite-level criminal activities by leading banks, accounting firms, and major corporations. Keeping the public focus on immigration offenses, drug crimes, homicides, robberies, and other street crimes was a winning strategy to rivet political attention and public resources on battling crime in the streets, not crime in the suites.

Crime in the suites victimizes more people and causes more harm than crime in the streets. Yet the US media don’t acknowledge much of it; criminologists mostly ignore it; and the country’s leading clearinghouses for crime statistics don’t really track it. And the word “corruption” is seldom used to refer to the criminal activities of US corporations, their executives, and their political patrons.

In hailing the so-called great crime drop that began in the 1990s, criminologists, public figures, and the media focused on trends in street crimes. They did not take into account the huge corporate crime waves that were buffeting the country. As President Bill Clinton was about to leave office, the dot-com bubble burst under the weight of fraudulent initial public offerings (IPOs). In the early aughts, the energy giant Enron and several other large corporations went under in a sea of fraudulent reports about their earnings and debt. Epic fraud in the subprime mortgage market hurled the country and the world toward the Great Recession, which began in 2007. Since then, white-collar and corporate prosecutions have plummeted to record lows. Meanwhile, financial crimes, including eye-popping cases of money laundering, accounting fraud, and market manipulation, have escalated.

The financialization of the US economy, polity, and society over the last half century was a catalyst for the decriminalization of corporate crime. One expert on the US political economy likens financialization to a “Copernican revolution” in which business and society now orbit around a financial sector that has grown to an unprecedented size. Since the mid-1980s, the financial sector has been generating only 4 to 5 percent of all jobs in the United States. But this sector typically accounts for almost a third of yearly corporate profits — up from between 10 and 15 percent in the 1950s and 1960s.

Financialization facilitated an astounding upward redistribution of wealth and political power. In 1982, the combined worth of the four hundred richest people in the United States was $225 billion in today’s dollars. Four decades later, the United States had some 735 billionaires, who together were worth $4.7 trillion. On the political spectrum, these multibillionaires tend to lean toward the Right, the hard right, and the antidemocratic, neofascist right.

Thanks to the unprecedented political and economic clout of the financial and high-tech sectors — including the revolving door between Wall Street, leading corporate law firms, and the top rungs of government — financiers and high-tech executives have amassed overwhelming authority and resources to define the economic and political narrative, dictate the political and policy solutions, and escape major penalties or other consequences for their criminal activities. Call it the politics of entitlement.

As financialization accelerated, leading financial institutions and their executives also had greater personal and institutional incentives to take the economy on a rough ride to the edge of the cliff. And if they misjudged where the edge was, chances had increased that the government would rescue them in the name of rescuing the economy because these financial institutions had become too big to fail and too big to jail.

The Democratic and Republican parties have both been culprits in institutionalizing and normalizing the decriminalization of crime in the suites since the 1970s. Despite loud warnings early on, criminality and unethical behavior festered for years in the mortgage market and infected the wider financial sector. When the White House, Congress, and the Federal Reserve finally acted under President George W. Bush and then President Barack Obama, they ladled trillions of taxpayer dollars on the financial institutions that were the prime culprits. The government bailed out the leading banks and other financial institutions and did not demand much in return, not even meaningful restraints on executive compensation. Banks, financial firms, and their top executives faced no serious criminal penalties. The fines levied against them were minuscule compared to the quarterly profits they raked in.

After promising hope and change in the 2008 election, Obama and his administration forfeited a major political opening to set the country on a new track. The political will to sanction the culprits, heal the harms, and prevent such violence in the future by restructuring the financial sector quickly dissipated. In his memoirs, Obama contends that meting out criminal sanctions to the financiers who triggered the financial and foreclosure crises would have done “violence to the social order.” Instead, his administration pursued modest regulatory reforms that left in place many of the pathogens that triggered the financial and foreclosure crises.

By the end of the Obama administration, a new regime to deal with elite-level corporate crime by top executives and their companies had congealed into a shield that protected them from charges of monumental fraud. The consolidation of this corporate shield had enormous economic and political implications. It cast widespread doubt not only on the legitimacy and fairness of the criminal legal system but also on the legitimacy and fairness of the economic and political systems. The überwealthy’s politics of entitlement shielded top executives and their corporations from serious legal consequences and protected their growing stockpiles of assets, bonuses, and profits. This maldistribution of economic and political power robbed the government and ultimately the wider society of the vital resources needed to foster safe, thriving, and healthy communities with low levels of despair, violence, and premature deaths. The giant fiscal and political investment in the country’s global empire compounded these problems.

When asked why he robbed banks, legendary thief Willie Sutton reportedly answered: “Because that’s where the money is.” The police, prisons, and rest of the US criminal legal system consume a greater proportion of public budgets than they once did. But the total amount is still trivial compared to other public spending and to the tax breaks lavished on corporations and the wealthiest Americans. The real money is the more than $1 trillion in military expenditures each year, and the trillions of dollars lost to tax subsidies, tax cuts, tax loopholes, and tax dodges that have engorged wealthy corporations and individuals at great cost to the rest of society. For all the talk of political polarization in the United States, the bloated US military budget sails through Congress most years with just a handful of dissenters, if that. Meanwhile, a growing number of people in the United States, including veterans, are denied adequate food, shelter, and health care, let alone opportunities to lead dignified and meaningful lives.

We need to foster what sociologist Bruce Western calls the “restorative power of thick public safety,” which keeps the peace by nurturing thriving communities and neighborhoods rather than by relying on intrusive and militarized police forces. But since the days of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty in the 1960s, conservatives have hammered away at the social and economic supports that foster thick public safety and reduce homicides and other violent crimes. They succeeded in mainstreaming the view that public assistance and other public investments increase rather than reduce street crime, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

In any account of violence in America, race-related factors are key. The historical evidence is overwhelming that racial animus and the quest to preserve white supremacy have been central factors in American political development, including the disproportionate violence meted out to African American people, indigenous people, and other historically marginalized groups. As the racial order invents new ways and resurrects old ones to target African American people, it has generated punitive, often violent, policies and practices that diffuse to other people in the United States and abroad. At the dawn of the Jim Crow era more than a century ago, the massive disenfranchisement of African American people through poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence overshadowed the vast and simultaneous disenfranchisement of poor white people in the South that stunted the Populist movement during the Gilded Age. Likewise, the hyperincarceration of black men today and the disproportionate number of African American people killed by the police have overshadowed the lethal consequences of state and other violence for other groups of people in the United States.

Deindustrialization and other changes in urban economies and polities in the 1950s and 1960s helped fuel mass incarceration and get-tough policies targeted at African American people in urban areas. More recently, the economic hollowing out of rural and Rust Belt communities in the United States that are not riding the crest of urban gentrification and the high-tech boom has rendered those left behind more vulnerable to state and structural violence today, including incarceration and premature death. Over the last twenty-five years, black-white disparities in incarceration have certainly not closed in the United States, but they have narrowed. In dozens of states (both blue and red), incarceration rates are slowing or declining in urban areas while rising in rural and suburban communities. Black people in the United States are more than twice as likely as white people to be killed by the police. But compared to the rates of police violence in Western Europe and Canada, white people in the United States are also victims of police violence at exceptional rates, including in rural areas. As for interpersonal violence, the extraordinary eight-to-one black-white disparity in US homicide victims overshadows the fact that on the eve of the pandemic, non-Hispanic white people in the United States were two to five times more likely to be murdered than people living in Western Europe.

The US failure to protect its people from all these harms has increased the brittleness of democracy in America. Punishment serves a vital role in reinforcing the moral bounds of society by demarcating what actions are considered wrong and who is blameworthy, as French sociologist Émile Durkheim once noted. The repeated failure to hold corporations, their executives, and their political patrons accountable has fostered political instability and undermined the legitimacy of US political and economic institutions. So has the related rise in state and structural violence. Taken together, these developments raise the prospect of a bleak, undemocratic future as violence begets more violence and America morphs into a failed state.

The collapse of public confidence in all kinds of government institutions, including Congress, the presidency, and the US Supreme Court, has drawn much media and scholarly attention. Less noticed is that the public’s confidence in capitalism and corporations has also declined, even among Republican voters. The downward slide of so many poor and working-class people in the United States — many of whom are white, many of whom are not — and the precarious state of other people struggling to keep their toehold on a middle-class life have been misunderstood, ignored, dismissed, or mischaracterized. This is why the Democratic and Republican establishment and the mainstream media could not fathom that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were anything more than entertaining political sideshows when they first ran for president in 2016. Until they weren’t.

Many people in the United States continued to struggle years after the Great Recession had been declared officially over. But the power brokers in the Democratic Party under Obama’s leadership resumed business as usual and marginalized Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and others calling to break up the banks and reverse the radical upward redistribution of wealth and political power. No wonder that people were ready to heed Donald Trump’s siren call to “Drain the Swamp,” wherever that might lead.

While Trump may be a simple man, his base of supporters is not. In his three quests for the presidency, Trump tapped into and cultivated a vein of racial resentment and rage. But his electoral success is not comprehensible without a deeper understanding of how the forever wars, the de facto decriminalization of crime in the suites, the opioid crisis, and the grossly unequal economic recovery from the Great Recession have contributed to all kinds of violence in America and reshaped American politics.

Slaying the anti-state state, reducing violence in its many manifestations in the United States and overseas, and revitalizing democracy in America will depend on building broad coalitions that incorporate many of the disposable people that the US empire and its political and economic system are churning out. Many of the people that Hillary Clinton reviled as deplorable are living precarious lives.

The most successful periods of political mobilization to foster economic and political equality in the United States — Reconstruction, the New Deal, the civil rights era — rested on expansive political and social movements. These movements did not single-mindedly focus on racial disparities but sought to forge broader political agendas centered on racial, social, and economic justice that drew in a wide range of groups. Likewise, throughout US history, major movements against war and militarism have been broad and multifaceted ones that rested on complex, often imperfect, coalitions. Successfully rolling back the various tentacles of violence in America today will depend on fostering alliances that stretch from the hollers of Appalachia to the streets of North Philadelphia to the victims of the US empire overseas.