Examining the conditions that not only blocked attempts to make America great again but also actively made the country worse, Why America Didn’t Become Great Again identifies those organizations, institutions, politicians, and prominent characters in the forefront of the economic and social policies – ultimately asking who is responsible.

The period from the late 1970s to 2020s became the best of times for America’s corporate class. As profits grew along with the wealth and income that they delivered for their stockholders and management, their goal was to set new rules for the rest of us to live by with a clear class agenda. Institutions have been organized, government policies reoriented, and economists, journalists, and politicians recruited, funded, and promoted. And so it has not been the best of times for working families, as inequality, stagnant wages, debt, and ever longer working hours became their fate. This book critically analyzes those who very deliberately set out to implement policies enacted at the state and federal level in order to redistribute wealth and income upwards and change the balance of power in the United States in response to the class, gender, and racial challenges that resulted in compressed income and wealth differentials before the 1980s.

An essential book on contemporary inequality in America, Why America Didn’t Become Great Again surveys the past near half century that resulted in American economic instability and inequality, environmental crisis, a crumbling physical and harmful social infrastructure, among the very worst health outcomes, child poverty, food insecurity, and social mobility of the industrialized countries culminating in a Trump regime and the road to further ruin.

Robert Chernomas is a professor of economics at the University of Manitoba. He was also a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University and Bucknell University. He is the co-author (with Ian Hudson and Gregory Chernomas) of The American Gene: Unnatural Selection Along Class, Race, and Gender Lines (2025), (with Ian Hudson) Neoliberal Lives: Work, Politics, Nature, Health in the Contemporary United States (2019), The Profit Doctrine: The Economists of the Neoliberal Era (2017), and Economics in the 21st Century: A Critical Perspective (2016).

Ian Hudson is Associate Head of the Economics and Society Stream in the Economics Department at the University of Manitoba. He is the co-author (with Robert Chernomas and Gregory Chernomas) of The American Gene: Unnatural Selection Along Class, Race, and Gender Lines (2025), (with Robert Chernomas) Neoliberal Lives: Work, Politics, Nature, Health in the Contemporary United States (2019), The Profit Doctrine: The Economists of the Neoliberal Era (2017), and Economics in the 21st Century: A Critical Perspective (2016).