The delusion, of course, is that in “America” it doesn’t. Here, Steve Fraser dissects six key monuments of the mythical “classless America” in order to show both how class tensions underlay the historical actuality of each case and how social, political, and ideological forces have managed to obscure that agonistic reality. The result is a tour de force of scholarship-based popular history and inspired social and political criticism. Having written on these themes before — from his historical studies of labor and ruling-class power to his books on Wall Street and late twentieth-century “acquiescence” in growing inequality — Fraser now distills his wide-angle learning into a brief, readable, and compelling account of American history. Writing for a historical moment when the Trump, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez phenomena have partially reawakened the language of class, Fraser emphasizes the darker portents that follow from the dogged American dialectic of classed reality and the...

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