If the United States continues on its current course of division, dysfunction, and decline, Paul Volcker won’t be to blame. Since retiring, in 1987, from his position as the chairman of the Federal Reserve, where he had engineered a painful but successful effort to bring down inflation, the six-foot-seven-inch native of Teaneck, New Jersey, has spent much of the past thirty-odd years devoting his formidable energy to public service, most recently as a proponent of stricter regulation of banks. Now, at the age of ninety-one, Volcker has published a memoir that is ultimately a cri de coeur from a patriotic American. Coming from a man who is also a member of what Steve Bannon would refer to as the globalist élite—a former co-chairman of the Trilateral Commission, no less—“Keeping at It,” which is published by PublicAffairs, is also refreshingly subversive, and packed with the sort of perspective that only age can bring.

Volcker is old enough to remember Hitler and the postwar decades, when he worked as an economist at the New York Federal Reserve and Chase Bank, before serving at the Treasury Department under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. “America supported Europe’s economic recovery, helped restore democracies in the free world, and opened global trade and investment,” Volcker writes. The results were self-evident: “Growing populations over most of the world that were healthier and wealthier than ever before.” Today, of course, the postwar model is facing an existential challenge. We have a protectionist bully in the White House; the world’s second-largest economy is a one-party state; and nationalism is on the rise from Warsaw to Rio. “The rising tide of progress toward open democratic societies—the world in which I have lived and served—seems to be ebbing away,” Volcker laments.

In discussing this transformation, he barely mentions Donald Trump by name. Also eschewing Russian bots, James Comey, and the failings of the Clinton campaign, he focusses on the larger forces that created an environment in which such a nonentity could blackguard his way to power. The analysis is an unsparing one. “We embarked on long, unnecessary and ultimately unwinnable wars far from home,” Volcker writes. “We failed to recognize the costs of open markets and rapid innovation to sizable fractions of our own citizenry. We came to think that inventive financial markets could discipline themselves. We underestimated how much the growing size, economic weight, and ambitions of other countries, most critically China, would come to upset the easy assumption of America’s unique global reach.”

This is a lengthy indictment. In narrowing it down, Volcker analyzes recurring failures at the top of major corporations, banks, public-sector bodies, and universities. The common factors he identifies are self-dealing, shortsightedness, and a lack of public-mindedness. Although Volcker doesn’t resort to the language that Bernie Sanders (and also Trump) used in 2015 and 2016, his book amounts to an amicus brief in favor of the argument that large swaths of the economy have been rigged for the benefit of affluent insiders, and so has the political system.

During the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Volcker, who identifies himself as an Independent, fought a losing battle to maintain the Depression-era regulations that separated commercial banks from investment banks. After the great financial crisis of 2008–09, he led an effort to restore some narrower restraints on Wall Street’s risk taking. He duly covers this history, but doesn’t stop there. Writing of the obscenely large pay packages that the heads of big financial institutions routinely receive, he notes that “a kind of contagion seems to be at work. Stepping back, do the CEOs of today’s top banks (or other financial institutions) really contribute five to ten times as much (in price-adjusted terms) to the success of their institution, or the economy, as their predecessors did forty or so years ago? I have my doubts. At least, it doesn’t show up in the economic growth rate, certainly not in the pay of the average worker, or, more specifically, in an absence of financial crises.”

It isn’t just bank C.E.O.s who incur Volcker’s wrath. He is equally critical of corporate directors who fail to ask tough questions of the executives they are supposed to supervise; of corrupt officials at international organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank; and of economists and other academics who prioritize their own arcane research over practical matters. Even the folks who run Princeton, his alma mater, aren’t spared criticism. Commenting on their management of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where he has taught on occasion, Volcker writes, “A great university simply has not risen to the challenge of effective education for public service.”

In a world of self-dealers, knaves, and charlatans, effective public service is essential. This is Volcker’s central message, and he has embodied the role of the competent, non-conflicted public servant. On top of his service in the United States, he has headed up various international committees, including ones that looked into corruption at the U.N.’s oil-for-food program in Iraq, and the dormant Swiss bank accounts of Holocaust victims. In 2013, he founded the Volcker Alliance, whose goals are to make government work better and raise the level of public trust in it. (He cites polls showing that fewer than twenty per cent of Americans trust the government to do the right thing most of the time.)

The rot set in a long time ago, and Volcker is under no illusions about how far it has penetrated. Noting the proliferation of lobbyists, lawyers, fancy hotels, and luxury apartments in the nation’s capital, he reveals that he no longer wants to visit the city where for many years he made a home. “What not so long ago was middle-class, mid-sized city dominated by an ethos of public service today simply oozes wealth and entitlement,” he writes. “We face a huge challenge in this country to restore a sense of public purpose and of trust in government. It will require critically needed reforms in our political processes and leaders who can restore and preserve a consensus on which our great democracy can depend.”

Even after the midterms, which restored a bit of balance to the political system, it’s hard to be more than guardedly optimistic about whether the country can rise to the challenge. Volcker, who still keeps an office at Rockefeller Center, ends his book by quoting some advice that his late mother gave him “during some earlier period of despair.” This is what Ma Volcker said: “The United States is the oldest and strongest democracy in the world. In two hundred years, it has survived a lot. Get back to work.”