Answer

One of the basic concepts that I retained from grad school was Douglass North's framework for understanding societies, and in particular the notion of "limited access order". My preferred formulation of this idea is, "the rich and powerful use their wealth and power to maintain their wealth and power." History interpreted through this prism becomes a series of lurches back and forth between extreme concentration of "access", or wealth and power, and slightly less extreme concentrations. This is not a Marxist view, but class-based analysis is certainly complementary. Populism is, at its heart, the anger of the people on the wrong side of the access boundary. And one major strain of the antagonism towards our government here in the US circa 2010 is that, first, the goverment is part of the establishment that just bailed itself out, at great public expense, from a massive disaster that was entirely of its own making; and second, that the government was the only part of that establishment that was in any way accountable to the public, that might have broken the stranglehold on access, and yet it still aided and abetted the swindle.

On a related note, these quotes from the Economist really grabbed my eye when they were published. (This is, I think, a separate case from the recent acquittal of Chirac's Prime Minister, Villepin, on unrelated charges.) The details are less important than the reaction from France's ruling class:

The French have greeted the decision to put Jacques Chirac on trial for misappropriation of public funds with mixed feelings ... Many politicians are calling for leniency for an old man who has served his country. ... "Why seek to wound him now?" wailed Jean-Pierre Raffarin ... "Today, he's a man who deserves to be left alone," declared Ségolène Royal.—The Economist, "Liberty, equality, no impunity". 7 Nov 2009, p 51.

Glen Greenwald and other bloggers have been calling this the Village Mentality, which is a specific manifestation of "limited access order". In the Village Mentality, the people wielding power and influence are a nice little club, and nothing they do as part of wielding that power could possibly be criminal; the only reason to consider any of it criminal would be as part of a partisan power play between factions within the village. This is, of course, in stark contrast to the notion of rule of law.