The real cause

Excessive inequality erodes democracy and strains to bursting the social fabric. It raises stressful questions about injustice and does violence to any notion of shared citizenship. It batters all sense of common belonging or that there might be any such thing as a common good. The competitiveness of the marketplace, unchecked, pits Americans against Americans and goes a long way toward explaining why the country is now so divided and riven. Unfortunately, division and hostility are often misidentified or misdirected against immigrants or those of other races. What goes unnamed is the neoliberal framework that entraps us all.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 43