The era between the New Deal and the Reagan Revolution was, according to Chayes, a period of enlightened democracy and restrained capitalism: The franchise was extended to previously excluded groups. The eight-hour workday became the norm. Blue-collar workers earned fair wages for a fair day’s work. The worst excesses of financial capitalism were checked by effective regulation. Safety nets for the elderly and the disadvantaged guaranteed a reasonable standard of living for most Americans. Environmental regulations led to breathable air and drinkable water. People ate nutritious food supplied by family farms. Incomes became more equal. Politicians treated their opponents with civility and politics operated without the take-no-prisoners approach of the Gilded Age and a new Age of Greed that bookended the New Deal/Great Society interregnum. “The political and economic systems, so long twisted to serve the wealth-maximizing objectives of the Gilded Age networks was straightened out a bit” during this enlightened age (247).In her earlier books, Chayes documented rampant political corruption in Afghanistan, Central America, and Africa where kleptocracy is the norm. On Corruption builds on those insights. The book has five parts. The first and third focus on corruption in the modern world. The second and fourth revisit the Gilded Age to examine how democracy was wrested from America’s plutocrats at the time. The fifth section posits a trend toward a new American kleptocracy in which Democrats and Republicans are equally complicit.If Chayes had taken history (and economics) seriously, she might have written a thoughtful and persuasive analysis that could have bolstered her thesis that America has entered a new Gilded Age. She could have reaped the benefit of a substantial literature about modern corruption and a smaller historical literature—not least the eleven essays in Glaeser and Goldin’s Corruption and Reform, seven of which address Progressive Era reforms.1 Had she done so, she might have appreciated the difference between rent-seeking, which is endemic to all political regimes, and outright kleptocracy, which is not. Rent-seeking is costly and often socially corrosive, but its difference from kleptocracy is not one just of degree. She might also have taken seriously the difference between what Wallis labels “systematic” (politics corrupting the economy) and “venal” corruption (economics corrupting the polity).2 Most of the time, the social costs of systematic corruption far outweigh those of venal corruption.Chayes might also have made the case that venal corruption trumped systematic corruption in the Gilded Age, but she would have had to offer more than a potted history. Chayes’ book, in fact, lacks any serious historical analysis. Two examples stand out. First, Chayes villainizes the Jay Cooke & Company bankers as brazen “hustlers” who “dreamed up the mad idea of mass marketing [government] securities” during the Civil War (72); they were “criminal masterminds” full stop (74). If the endnotes are a fair indication of her sources, she cites neither Larson’s nor Oberholtzer’s monumental accounts of Cooke & Company nor Ott’s study of how the mass marketing of bonds to finance America’s participation in World War I was based on lessons learned by Cooke.3 Cooke was entangled in the railroad mania of the 1870s, but that story is more complex than mere criminality.A second example of Chayes’ historical lapses involves her discussion of the post-Reconstruction South and white planters’ manipulation of the crop-lien system to keep black sharecroppers in servitude. Chayes’ principal source is a contemporary novel, apparently ignoring a rich and contentious economic history of the postbellum South or even Woodward’s classic volume.4 Did bad men rule the South? Surely. Were they kleptocrats? No. Were they undone by the Civil Rights Movement? We tend to think so. Did their undoing take too long? Yes. But the question of how they were undone is directly relevant to how modern kleptocrats might be undone. We know that neither organized labor, the Populists, nor the New Dealers were responsible; all of them threw black croppers under the bus. Chayes provides no answer and no useful history.That said, who is to blame for the new Age of Greed? Chayes singles out the Koch Foundation, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, among others, for imbuing greed with an intellectual sheen and the post-industrial behemoths Amazon, Google, Apple, J. P. Morgan, and Goldman Sachs, among others, for bending the regulatory state to their will. Uber and the gig economy threaten organized labor’s hard-won gains. This is not, by Chayes’ telling, a new golden age. It is a new Gilded Age. As in the first Gilded Age, those with great wealth seek to dismantle liberal, republican, and Western democracy to attain more wealth. We stand on a precipice, and wannabe kleptocrats have no need to push because we are eager to jump. We venerate wealth above all else. We abandon organized labor. We relinquish our data to social-media companies. We neither vote, organize, nor care. We get the government that we deserve.Chayes may be more pessimistic than necessary. She offers no compelling reason for anyone more optimistic to agree with her. In the end, On Corruption in America shares more with the breathless and self-righteous outrage peddled by cnn and msnbc during the Trump administration than a genuine contribution to the social sciences.