Excerpt:
“Countless surveys show that voters preoccupied with life and work are uninformed when it comes to the finer points of foreign trade; the federal budget; or the determinants of investment, unemployment, and inflation. If they must select among candidates and platforms decided elsewhere, how are those choices defined? To either the chagrin or inspiration of many historians, economists, and political scientists, Ferguson has spent decades in campaign finance records and the historical archives of key twentieth-century business and party leaders.2 The evidence he’s found demonstrates that the complex of business corporations and their financiers—whose growth plans would be made or broken by changes to tax law, regulation, foreign policy, and exchange rates—significantly shape candidate nominations, electoral campaigns, and the careers of politicians. In a money-driven campaign and media system, these are the contributions that matter most.
Despite the revelatory nature of his archival findings to the theory of how electoral realignments happen, Ferguson’s prescient warnings of the deep decay of American party politics appeared to go unheaded by partisans ostensibly alarmed by the state of American democracy. As readers search for answers about how to interpret the 2024 US elections, Phenomenal World editors Tim Barker and Andrew Elrod reached out to Ferguson for a conversation about his thoughts on the recent campaigns.”
