Stories about what we now call “the homeland,” its origins and unfolding, do not, conventionally, feature capitalism. Other tales about the country’s history usually take priority. Favorites include, perhaps first and foremost, the New World as the incubator of liberty and democracy in the Western world. Others emphasize the nation’s embrace of people from a global everywhere, America as the nation of nations. Another is heroic and tracks the conquest of frontiers, both physical and spiritual, a legendary odyssey requiring fortitude and audacity. Organically tied to that one is the apotheosis of America as the land of entrepreneurial genius, derring-do risk-taking, a business civilization resting on a human landscape of indigenous inventiveness. The last tale does indeed spill over into a celebration of capitalism, but less as a form of political economy, more as an epiphany of the self-made man, cleansed of the social abrasions that real capitalism inevitably trails in its wake.

Freedom anchored in acts of self-reliance and the mastery of the market, of nature, of the libido, of other people can be intoxicating, functioning like an aphrodisiac. Even if its social reach recedes as capital accumulation becomes the exclusive terrain of only the mightiest conquistadors, the dream abides.

This is far less a view of Smith’s than of his epigones

The New Deal, or the Keynesian social welfare and administrative state, was something new under the American capitalist sun. It civilized the laissez-faire regime by regulating finance and industry, by recognizing certain collective rights of the organized working class, by establishing a minimum level of material survival, and by licensing the state to intervene into the marketplace, using the levers of fiscal and monetary policy to even out the wild oscillations of economic boom and bust that threatened to undermine the social order fatally. Although this outcome preserved the basic framework of capitalism, it also required a sea change in the way ruling circles behaved; in the scope and powers of the central government; in the reigning ideology crafted to explain and justify the New Deal order that was so at odds with the social Darwinism of an earlier epoch; in the internal composition of the Democratic Party; and in the degree to which capitalism was obliged to make more room for democracy. Whatever the severe limitations of this new world, these were not inconsiderable changes from what the country was accustomed to and they point to the malleability of capitalism.

Oligarchs like Trump, the Koch brothers, the Walton family, Sheldon Adelson, Robert Mercer, and others don’t subscribe to the social and political meliorism typical of the faceless corporate CEOs of the mid-twentieth century

Even at that most elementary level, what’s being limned is a world of winners and losers

even in Glenn Beck’s lachrymose sacrilege at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington