The postwar era, not coincidentally a period when income inequality declined, was the time when business executives could say that what was good for G.M. salaries were relatively lower, but the voice of business in the national conversation was much more potent, perhaps in part because it was less exclusively self-interested. Business leaders of the postwar era were individually weaker but collectively more effective C.E.O. Mizruchi, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, documents in his recent book “The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite,” this is not the business lobby that shaped America so powerfully in the 1950s and 1960s.

Often, these are fights for lower taxes and less regulation, but they are motivated by the bottom line, not by strictly political ideals, and they benefit very specific business people and companies, not the business community as a whole.Īs Mark S. This is very specific work, with each company or, at most, narrowly defined industry group advocating its self-interest: the hedge fund industry protecting the carried-interest tax loophole from which it benefits, or agribusiness pushing for continued subsidies. The first is political lobbying strictly focused on the defense or expansion of their economic interests. MOST plutocrats are translating their vast economic power into political influence in two principle ways. But the Kochs are the exception rather than the rule, and even in their case the grass roots they nurtured now follow their script imperfectly. The Koch brothers, who have found a way to blend their business interests and personal ideological convictions with the sponsorship of a highly effective political network, are easy to latch on to partly because this self-dealing fits so perfectly with our imagined idea of a nefarious plutocracy and partly because they have had such an impact. Why are the plutocrats, with their great wealth and a political system more likely to listen to them anyway, losing some control to the populists? The answer lies in the particular nature of plutocratic political power in the 21st century and its limitations in a wired mass democracy.Ĭonsider the methods with which plutocrats actually exercise power in America’s New Gilded Age. Money also drives political engagement: Citizens United, which removed some restrictions on political spending, strengthened these trends. Bartels and Martin Gilens have documented the frightening degree to which, in America, more money means a more effective political voice: Democratic and Republican politicians are more likely to agree with the views of their wealthier constituents and to listen to them than they are to those lower down the income scale. The limits of plutocratic politics, at both ends of the ideological spectrum, are being tested. Even the Tea Party, which in its initial phase was to some extent the creation of plutocrats like Charles and David Koch, has slipped the leash of its very conservative backers and alienated more centrist corporate bosses and organizations. Summers as Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration) and their sympathy for Wall Street. Summers as part of a wider backlash against the so-called Rubin Democrats (as in Robert E.

The left wing of the Democratic Party opposed the appointment of Mr. de Blasio is winning because he is offering New Yorkers a chance to reject the plutocratic politics of Michael R. Summers.Īll of these are triumphs of populists over plutocrats: Mr. But the centrists are losing out in more genteel political battles on the left, too - that is the story of Bill de Blasio’s dark-horse surge to the mayoralty in New York, and of the Democratic president’s inability to push through his choice to run the Federal Reserve, Lawrence H. The rise of the political extremes is most evident, of course, in the domination of the Republican Party by the Tea Party and in the astonishing ability of this small group to shut down the American government. TORONTO - HERE’S the puzzle of America today: the plutocrats have never been richer, and their economic power continues to grow, but the populists, the wilder the better, are taking over.

Plutocracy definition and example