![]() They have reaped the benefits of an unprecedented attack on regulations that police big corporations and protect consumers, workers, and the environment. The plutocrats have gotten huge tax cuts. ![]() They brought their long-standing policy ambitions into the federal government and carried them out with a vengeance. When Trump took power, he handed much of the power to people loyal to the plutocrats, or to the plutocrats themselves. Among the biggest winners were the right-wing plutocrats who had been at the heart of the establishment. Yet if the past few years have witnessed a Republican civil war, it has been a very civil war, in which the side allegedly losing has made gains it could have scarcely contemplated just a few years before. In the new GOP, public officials either bent their knee to Trump, retired from the scene, or were demolished. Ultimately, it was because they chose plutocrats over everyone else. They did neither – that they cultivated voter identities that were so intense, exclusive, and divisive that they ramped up white backlash even as American society as a whole was becoming more tolerant – wasn’t because voters gave them no other options. And if they had moderated their economic stances and softened their cultural appeals, they could have brought more nonwhite voters into the fold. If Republicans had weakened their embrace of plutocracy, they would have adopted economic priorities closer to those of less affluent GOP voters and diminished their reliance on divisive appeals. And what best rallied those troops, they discovered, was outrage. ![]() These were groups, in short, that could rally their troops, creating sharp lines between friend and foe and instilling a sense of threat. For the groups that aligned with the GOP proved unusually skilled at creating durable shared identities that motivated citizens, and then getting those citizens to show up, not just on election day, but whenever big shows of strength were needed. If finding groups Republicans could rely on to navigate the Conservative Dilemma took time, it was time well spent. It is a problem inherent in democratic politics in contexts of extreme inequality.Ĭhapter 2 – Republicans Embrace PlutocracyĮxtreme inequality creates three fundamental threats to healthy democratic politics: divergent elite interests, disproportionate elite power, and diminished elite commitment to democracy itself. The Conservative Dilemma is not a problem of a particular moment. These elite responses to extreme inequality enter into politics mainly through conservative parties, which must navigate the tension between unequal influence and democratic competition. They are also likely to come to fear a fair democratic process in which those citizens have significant clout. Whenever economic elites have grossly disproportionate power and come to see their economic interests as opposed to those of ordinary citizens, they are likely to promote social divisions. What happens when an economic system that concentrates wealth in the hands of the few coexists with a political system that gives the ballot to the many? Plutocratic populism is rather new the political dilemma that gives rise to it is very old. That shift is the rise of plutocracy – government of, by, and for the rich. ![]() Instead, it is about an immense shift that preceded Trump’s rise, has profoundly shaped his political party and its priorities, and poses a threat to our democracy that is certain to outlast his presidency. Hacker (Yale University), Paul Pierson (University of California, Berkeley)
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