The Republicans’ $3 Million Weekend in the Hamptons – NYTimes.com
Yes, I know. The Republican Party has always been the party of wealth. That’s neither new nor news. Yet, there was a time not long ago when Republicans prided themselves of vigorous support, expansion, and defense of . . . well . . . res publica; the wealth we share in common. And that has changed, big time.
But, before we begin dumping on our Constitutionally brain-dead Supreme Court and its decision to officially and legally endorse our nation’s time-honored plutocracy, consider for one moment that the highest court merely made official a practice that was at least as old as the 1790s, when nearly all of the then thirteen states vastly expanded voting rights to include white men with neither education, nor wealth, nor property. Up until that time the healthy, wealthy, and wise were, for the most part, voting for one another. After the voting rights revolution of the 1790s, wealth had to convince non-wealth that its interests were best served by voting for wealth. And, for the most part, save for some real nail-biters in the 1890s and 1930s, the wealthy have been successful year after year convincing the non-wealthy to return the wealthy to office.
Yet—and this is my point—until recently Republicans had argued that they deserved our vote because they would make sure that republican institutions and values would be preserved; meaning, of course, the expansion of the wealth we share in common, the commonwealth, i.e., res publica. And, so, decade after decade, Republicans supported public institutions: public libraries, public schools, public parks, even public utilities and public health. To be sure, they also opposed organized labor, opposed cheap capital, and opposed internationalism. They opposed those things that granted power to those who did not already enjoy good health, education, and welfare. But this did not make them opponents of common, public wealth per se.
Today, by contrast, Republicans, ironically, are constitutionally opposed to expanding and protecting the wealth we hold in common, res publica, which, of course, is the very essence of their political ideal. Instead, they have become champions of private wealth and private self-interest; which, ironically, is the very opposite of republicanism.
But the biggest irony of all is that, according to recent polls, half of the public of res publica is just as eager today as it was in the 1790s to hand their economic and political fortunes over to the wealth that wishes to deprive them of their economic and social citizenship. The Republican Party is loudly campaigning on a platform of oikonomia—private wealth, private power—instead of on a platform of res publica, which ought to be, and once was, the very foundation of their party.
So $3M here, $3M there. The tragedy is that non-wealth is just as ready today as it was in the 1790s to believe that the wealth of others will protect them. And so, Republicans feel confident that voters will vote for those who wish, openly, to deprive them of their means for political enfranchisement.
Same as it ever was.