"You talk about third world countries?" said a former lawyer interviewed by Stolberg. "We're not that far behind here, with the circumstances that people have to live in. And unfortunately, I don't see much coming out of any of the campaigns on what we can do for poverty."

While the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders was a rarity in its focus on soaring inequality, he is operating within a political establishment that has shown deep hostility toward the progressive change he has proposed.

The much-hailed Democratic platform is indeed an improvement over what it would have been had Sanders never entered the process, but it still lacks the urgency necessary to confront the ills produced by an economic order that handsomely rewards the wealthiest at the expense of everyone else.

And such ills are not just present in the United States: As the Guardian's Larry Elliott noted last week, "between 65% and 70% of people in 25 advanced countries saw no increase in their earnings between 2005 and 2014."

Meanwhile, income at the top continue to soar. The Economic Policy Institute has found that, between 1979 and 2014, the wages of the top 0.1 percent in the United States grew by 324.4 percent.

John Dewey would have been appalled by such a picture, but he would not have been surprised.

In perhaps his most famous observation, Dewey wrote, "As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance."