Actually, it is not the Republican Party that is the usual choice of the ultra-rich (and of the corporate donations and media power that they control); it is the Democratic Party. The term ‘limousine liberal’ has a very real referent in American politics. What the American plutocrats have on the whole grasped, and few European observers can bring themselves to believe, is that the kind of left-wing policies favoured by the Democrats are obstacles only to small-business people, who must obey the laws, and not to the Fortune 500, who can buy their way out of compliance. The Democrats promise bread and circuses for the masses, and a suffocating mass of regulation to prevent upstart businesses from threatening the established owners of obscene wealth.
The Republican Party of the post-Goldwater period has been financed and supported largely by that segment of the middle class employed (or self-employed) in the private sector. It depends much less on corporate and institutional donations than the Democratic Party, and the policies of Republican officeholders tend, on the whole, to reflect this.
As jordan179 points out above, the middle classes favour the abolition of estate taxes because it is otherwise impossible for them to pass on their modest assets - family businesses, for instance, or even houses in the most expensive parts of the U.S. - to their children. One could argue for a modest exemption; but what good is a modest exemption in, let us say, Los Angeles, where a three-bedroom detached house sells for a price in the millions?
The America of the new Gilded Age (which really began in the latter years of the Reagan Administration, and only took on its full rank vigour during the boom of the 1990s) is not based upon class, but upon ex officio privilege. The CEO of a Fortune 500 company may be obscenely rich, but if his son is a fool, his son will never obtain any such position of power.
Incidentally, there were at least two important reasons why the legend arose of the ‘poor, hardy warrior-peasants living fiercely simple lives and speaking and acting with grim, Spartan simplicity’: the one you gave, the propaganda reason, and the incidental reason that such warrior-peasants actually existed. Rural Rome under the early and middle Republic was largely a country of peasant proprietorship. After the battle of Cannae, when the flower of the legions lay dead at Hannibal’s feet and the rest were scattered in panic, the Senate called for new soldiers - and 200,000 men enlisted, most with the required property qualifications. They were expected to provide their own arms and armour at their own expense, and most of them could do it. The Republic was not undermined so much by the increasing wealth of the rich, based as that was chiefly on the exploitation of the provinces, as by the rootless poverty of the new proletariat, whose grandfathers had been smallholders with a stake in the state, but who were themselves no more than hungry or shouting mouths to be pacified with panem et circenses - until Gaius Marius armed them and made them a political force.
I have long contemplated the parallels between the late Roman Republic and the present state of the American republic. They are instructive and sometimes alarming, but there are important differences. One conclusion I have reached is that the rich, however visible, are not politically important unless they can constitute themselves as a legally privileged aristocracy; and this has not happened. What is more worrisome is the erosion of the middle classes, which was proceeding apace in the 1970s, but has been slowed and even occasionally reversed since.
The most immediate danger is not the formation of a permanent overclass, but of a permanent underclass, beholden to the state and to the politicians who buy their votes. Lyndon Johnson did much to create such an underclass with his ‘Great Society’, but the cost in money and human misery was unsustainable. I give Bill Clinton full credit for the reforms that aimed to turn welfare into a safety net instead of a cocoon. The rise of an American Caesar is perhaps further off than many people suppose.
You should have waited for me to talk about the Democrats (working title: "mutant Democrats") before you sent a correction that, you will find, has no particular reason to exist. I am talking about a CLASS, not about the top two or three individuals. In the heyday of the two-party system in England, the richest two or three Dukes (Bedford, Norfolk, etc.) were always to be found among the Whigs. It was the mass of the aristocracy that voted Tory.
As for the underclass, I will deal with that in time. And the fable of middle-class inheritances being eaten away by death duties is one of the tricks that the Republicans used to sell their otherwise indefensible tax reforms. A properly designed death duty does not prevent heirs from having a reasonable nest egg; it prevents them from inheriting the equivalent of three counties without having done anything to deserve it. And the notion that in order to allow a hard-working storekeeper (if any are left) from passing on his shop and a few hundred thousand to his son, you have to allow multi-millionaire rentiers from passing on their huge incomes and capital intact to their spoiled successors is truly bizarre.
The Republican Party of the post-Goldwater period has been financed and supported largely by that segment of the middle class employed (or self-employed) in the private sector. It depends much less on corporate and institutional donations than the Democratic Party, and the policies of Republican officeholders tend, on the whole, to reflect this.
As jordan179 points out above, the middle classes favour the abolition of estate taxes because it is otherwise impossible for them to pass on their modest assets - family businesses, for instance, or even houses in the most expensive parts of the U.S. - to their children. One could argue for a modest exemption; but what good is a modest exemption in, let us say, Los Angeles, where a three-bedroom detached house sells for a price in the millions?
The America of the new Gilded Age (which really began in the latter years of the Reagan Administration, and only took on its full rank vigour during the boom of the 1990s) is not based upon class, but upon ex officio privilege. The CEO of a Fortune 500 company may be obscenely rich, but if his son is a fool, his son will never obtain any such position of power.
Incidentally, there were at least two important reasons why the legend arose of the ‘poor, hardy warrior-peasants living fiercely simple lives and speaking and acting with grim, Spartan simplicity’: the one you gave, the propaganda reason, and the incidental reason that such warrior-peasants actually existed. Rural Rome under the early and middle Republic was largely a country of peasant proprietorship. After the battle of Cannae, when the flower of the legions lay dead at Hannibal’s feet and the rest were scattered in panic, the Senate called for new soldiers - and 200,000 men enlisted, most with the required property qualifications. They were expected to provide their own arms and armour at their own expense, and most of them could do it. The Republic was not undermined so much by the increasing wealth of the rich, based as that was chiefly on the exploitation of the provinces, as by the rootless poverty of the new proletariat, whose grandfathers had been smallholders with a stake in the state, but who were themselves no more than hungry or shouting mouths to be pacified with panem et circenses - until Gaius Marius armed them and made them a political force.
I have long contemplated the parallels between the late Roman Republic and the present state of the American republic. They are instructive and sometimes alarming, but there are important differences. One conclusion I have reached is that the rich, however visible, are not politically important unless they can constitute themselves as a legally privileged aristocracy; and this has not happened. What is more worrisome is the erosion of the middle classes, which was proceeding apace in the 1970s, but has been slowed and even occasionally reversed since.
The most immediate danger is not the formation of a permanent overclass, but of a permanent underclass, beholden to the state and to the politicians who buy their votes. Lyndon Johnson did much to create such an underclass with his ‘Great Society’, but the cost in money and human misery was unsustainable. I give Bill Clinton full credit for the reforms that aimed to turn welfare into a safety net instead of a cocoon. The rise of an American Caesar is perhaps further off than many people suppose.
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As for the underclass, I will deal with that in time. And the fable of middle-class inheritances being eaten away by death duties is one of the tricks that the Republicans used to sell their otherwise indefensible tax reforms. A properly designed death duty does not prevent heirs from having a reasonable nest egg; it prevents them from inheriting the equivalent of three counties without having done anything to deserve it. And the notion that in order to allow a hard-working storekeeper (if any are left) from passing on his shop and a few hundred thousand to his son, you have to allow multi-millionaire rentiers from passing on their huge incomes and capital intact to their spoiled successors is truly bizarre.
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