America’s Plutocratic Traditions

[marmar]

from Consortium News:



America’s Plutocratic Traditions
August 6, 2012

Some voters are in disbelief that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would raise taxes on the poor and the middle class in order to reduce them even more on the rich. But government strategies favoring the rich date back to the origins of the Republic, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

By Paul R. Pillar


I recently read a book by University of Maryland historian Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy, which is an account of the intense struggles over wealth and power that emerged in the earliest days of the United States. Bouton’s detailed research was focused on Pennsylvania, but he describes patterns that also appeared elsewhere in the infant republic.

The core of the story he tells is that the colonial coalition that made possible the political break with Britain fractured even while the Revolutionary War was still in progress, as wealthy interests in the colonies quickly had second thoughts about the democratic fervor that they had helped to set in motion and how it might jeopardize their ability to amass still more wealth.

Those interests then devoted themselves to implementing public policies aimed at protecting and promoting the wealth of the moneyed class, and to structuring politics and government in a way that — per the title of Bouton’s book — prevented the more numerous members of lower classes from overturning those policies.

The story demonstrates that strong class consciousness and class-specific drivers of policy have been a major part of American politics since independence. A key part of that class struggle all along has been a strong sense among a wealthy elite of separateness from the non-wealthy, and of having a right to push hard for public policies that favor their own class even if they are clearly detrimental to others. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/08/06/americas-plutocratic-traditions/

[Odin2005]

1. The Constitutional Convention was a reactionary counter-revolution.

The Elites essentially re-created the British system as it was in the late 1700s minus the king.

[kenny blankenship]

2. You could just say American Tradition

"America's Plutocratic Traditions" is an example of what grammarians call a pleonasm, or a redundant phrase.
--Strunk & White, The Elements of Style, 4th Ed.