Hi, I’m Edward Luce. I am the FT’s US national editor but I’ve occupied several America roles including Washington bureau chief, US columnist, and have written a couple of books in between (The Retreat of Western Liberalism in 2017, and Time to Start Thinking: America and the Spectre of Decline , 2012). Oddly for a British journalist, I also worked for a year in the US government in 2000 as speech writer to Lawrence Summers, who was the Clinton administration’s treasury secretary. So I have witnessed how Washington functions — and also its growing dysfunction.

Right now it is at peak malfunction. America has suffered federal government shutdowns before. The two worst instances were the harsh winter of 1995-96 when Newt Gingrich’s Republicans took on Bill Clinton and failed. Clinton’s victory in that game of chicken laid the platform for his re-election 10 months later. The other was in 2013, when Republicans, led by the acerbic Ted Cruz, tried and failed to hold government to ransom for the abolition of the Affordable Care Act — Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law. At 32 days, Donald Trump’s shutdown is already a record. It is also qualitatively worse than the previous two. It is a perfect expression of the deterioration of American politics.

Trump is holding the US government hostage over his demand for $5.7bn for a US-Mexico border wall — money the Democrats will almost certainly never approve. Quite apart from the dubious merits of Trump’s “big beautiful wall”, the stand-off is over a minuscule 0.1 per cent of the US budget. That means no action over the remaining 99.9 per cent, such as worker training for the gig economy, upgrading America’s creaking infrastructure, and what to do about entitlement reform. It is an almost entirely symbolic battle between two hostile tribes: those who believe America is a land of immigrants, and those who increasingly blame America’s problems on outsiders — legal as well as illegal. It is thus a poisonous waste of time. How did US politics sink to such a low?

Here are five books that help explain why

1. Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann’s It’s Even Worse Than it Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism , tees you up for the Washington swamp before Trump. To be sure, DC has become far more toxic since he took over. But he did not make it that way.

2. Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class in America offers a history of Trump voters before they existed. Class has always been a part of America, even before Benjamin Franklin called the white indentured classes “refuse”. Since the start, poor whites were pitted against slaves. Their descendants are too.

3. George Packer’s The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America provides an intimate portrait of the decline of America’s middle class. Other books offer the statistics. Packer’s is the best-written portrait of the spirit of a meritocracy that is in trouble.

4. Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right is the definitive book on the reclusive and unimaginably rich Koch Brothers — the most important force behind the rise of libertarian politics in America.

5. Joshua Green’s Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency investigates Bannon’s seminal relationship with Trump. It is particularly fascinating on how Bannon unearthed the sources of male rage when he was a Shanghai-based investor in the gaming industry.

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