Michael Lind: The Potent GOP Combination of Jacksonian Populism and Old Money Oligarchy

Michael Lind’s new book, "Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States", will be published in April and can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com.

...The Republican Party is not really a pro-business party at all.  It is a pro-hereditary wealth party.  Its platform serves the interests of those few Americans who are born into wealth and seek to preserve their fortunes, not those who start new companies or invent new technologies.  Naturally, therefore, the party’s presidential candidates are chosen nowadays from among the pedigreed, hereditary social elite who are the chief beneficiaries of its policies.

How is it, then, that the party of old money has succeeded in winning the vote of the white working class since Nixon and Reagan?  To understand how this could occur, we need only look at American history.

In the 19th century the Jacksonian coalition, then identified with the Democrats beginning with Andrew Jackson, was, like the Republican Party today, based on an alliance of white Southerners and Southwesterners with working-class whites in the North.  Like today’s neo-Jacksonian Republicans, the original Jacksonians posed as the champions of the common man, denouncing government tyranny and privilege.

But Jacksonian common-man rhetoric was a camouflage for the interests of the most parasitic rentier elite in American history: the Southern slaveowners, including Andrew Jackson himself.  The rentiers of the plantation South were allied with Northern crony capitalists — businessmen and bankers who sought to loot the public domain by means of what today would be called “privatization.”  That is why the Jackson administration destroyed the Bank of the United States, a quasi-public agency that was the largest corporation in the country, and distributed its financial assets to “pet banks” allied with Jackson and his cronies.  The modern equivalent would be the privatization of Social Security and Medicare and the diversion of their vast revenues into private hands, which, of course, is the centerpiece of the Republican economic agenda for America....