12-08-2018, 05:45 PM
(12-08-2018, 02:52 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I have a theory about why nothing has happened. You aren't gonna like it.
As a result of the Civil War 4T the Democratic economic elite were decimated financial and they ceased to play a major role in national politics. The did manage to regain dominance of the South, a region falling further and further behind the North in wealth as the industrial revolution took off. To retain some degree of political relevance, the Democrats added working class immigrants in the North to their base, and urban Democratic machines provided another source of Democratic political elites. Democrats also began to warm towards organized labor as a means to gain yet more additions to their base. So there was a hodgepodge of special interests and their leaders who made up Democratic elites, but no overarching wealthy establishment like the antebellum Southern aristocracy.
Basically the Democratic Party became a reactionary party in the South, standing for agrarian interests against everything else. If it ever made alliances outside the South, it made them with Northern industrial workers who shared a similarly0intense disdain for Northern industrial elites (if for very different reasons)!
Quote:Meanwhile, the new industrial rich were beginning to develop a sense of class consciousness, with social registers were established in 19 major cities between 1888 and 1918. Elite boarding schools flourished with enrollment in the top twelve increasing fivefold over 1886-1926. The period saw the rise of the "policy-planning network" comprised of organizations like the Carneige Corporaton, US Chamber of Commerce, Rockefeller Foundation, Brookings Institute, NBER, and the Conference Board over 1911-23. Thus, by 1929 there was a wealthy elite "Establishment" of people who socialized with each other, educated their children at elite institutions isolated from the riff-raff, and who had created a network of policy experts to advise them on how best to run the country in order to maintain peace and order and the continuation of a "Progress" that, not surprisingly, benefited them.
For them, profit was the definitive expression of progress, and anything that got in the way was suspect.
Quote:Most of the establishment were Republicans, and so when the Democrats took power in 1933, they were free to advance policy that was anathema to the Establishment, without discomfiting Democratic political elites too much.
Note that the industrial ownership of the 1920s had been so stripped of wealth in the economic meltdown of 1929-1932 that they had to concentrate on survival and regeneracy instead of political power. This may have prevented any fascistic movement in America, including the once-powerful (and dangerous) KKK, from gaining political power in a time of great social distress. (So did Jewish ownership of the film studios, and they made clear that both Nazism and Bolshevism were to be avoided). The Right was as concerned about a Commie takeover, and it was best that America have leadership that improved things for workers while allowing capitalism to recover.
Quote:Democratic success created a new category of elite, what I call "the mandarins", who supplemented the Republican establishment. The mandarins were (and are) technocrats whose livelihood is not dependent on a capitalist elite's patronage, so they are independent. But over time they have gained wealth, their sons and daughters have sometimes done well in business and so become capitalists, and so the two classes have become intertwined dynastically. Hence today the 1% are pretty much evenly split between Democratic and Republican elites. The old urban machine bosses and labor leaders have been displaced as party leaders by the mandarins.
But much of this split is the private-public split. Elites in manufacturing, real estate, agribusiness, banking, insurance, and much of retailing remain decidedly right-wing. Public employees and people in creative activities are heavily left-leaning. I would guess that the medical industry is well-split between Left and Right; many physicians have welfare and Social Security as their biggest vendors. The Right has tried to take over the public sector, but seems to have failed.
Quote:The result is that neither party can enact any sort of economically transformative policy without goring the ox of their own leaders.
It may take another Great Depression or an apocalyptic war to force a transformation that does not fully satisfy one side at the expense of the other.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.