Wheels within wheels.

[David Horn]

(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. 

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.

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.

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.

The result is that neither party can enact any sort of economically transformative policy without goring the ox of their own leaders.

Solid analysis, and it supports my own impressions unfortunately.  It becomes more obvious that things won't change until the system is really broken, and that may include a grand failure to manage and mitigate global warming.  I don't see that particular calamity happening in the next few years, so the 4T, such as it is, will very likely not be the corrective needed to establish a new 1T.  If the cycle continues, it will be in an altered form yet again.   At some point, anomalies become the model.

Of course, stupidity can alter the ongoing paradigm too.  We elected Donald Trump, against all logic and reason.  It's like reading Asimov's Foundation series, where careful planning failed to anticipate the Mule.  Given the weirdness we're experiencing, life might copy art.