In practise there was a significant stretch of time when U.S. governments weren’t completely in thrall to monied interests: roughly 1933-1983. But yes, an effective plutocracy before and after.
The premise of the article remains true insofar as generous state welfare programmes like Sweden’s reduce the extremity of wealth inequality to the point where people don’t feel they’re entirely on their own in desperate circumstances. When one has the lower tiers of Maslow’s pyramid guaranteed and isn’t worried about being driven into the poorhouse by an illness or pregancy or one’s employer going bankrupt or downsizing due to macroeconomic trends, one tends to be a little more forgiving of wealth concentrating at the top – more so when the money there is old enough that it knows better to flaunt itself.
There’s no one specific sociological trigger that most people seem to point to about the pathology in the U.S., just the intersection between the Protestant Work Ethic (from the north), racism-tinged determinism (from the slave-owning south), and the frontier myth of rugged individualism. The confluence of those trends fed everything from the Horatio Alger mythology of the 19th century to the various self-improvement cults of the 20th century to 21st century Libertarian ideology.
