In 1962, in the midst of the Cold War and the civil rights movement, Edmund Wilson published a book that decried the Civil War literature of “patriotic gore” by which men and women of the time justified horrors and bore tremendous burdens.

Oligarchy is a term we’ve been hearing more frequently to describe the future of the United States—whether it’s the patrimonial capitalism predicted by Thomas Piketty, based on his comparative historical income statistics which support an interpretation that the huge wealth of the top 0.1 percent creates a dynamic of heritable privilege for a tiny and powerful set of our fellow citizens, or whether it’s the feared consequences of the Supreme Court’s several decisions to gut the laws governing campaign finance and voting.