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Excellent as always, Danny. Another critical historical component to this analysis is that the "era of mass politics" in this country can be situated as an anomaly within the broader history of American empire.

Arguably some form of actually effective mass politics began with Roosevelt's New Deal and lasted through the end of the 1960s (as you rightly say) and has been regressing ever since. So, rather than "recapturing" some essence of America (as many liberals and progressives seem to believe) our project should be focused on problematizing the entire American experiment as itself a driver of oligarchy and contextualizing the mid-century era as an anomaly that cannot be recaptured within the structure of our present political economy.

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