SALON.COM : GOP of our days is the continuation of the Demagoguery of Andrew Jackson, President from 1829 to 1837 - Populism for the benefit of the Super Rich, the Blue Bloods. - The Republican Party is not really a pro-business party at all. It is a pro-hereditary wealth party

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The GOP speaks in the accents of Jacksonian populism and pretends to be against “elites” - A Big Lie and Hypocrisy.



SALON.COM
Why do the Republicans nominate blue bloods?
The potent combination of Jacksonian populism and old money oligarchy
By Michael Lind
Tuesday, Jan 17, 2012


Why do the Republicans nominate blue bloods?


Some excerpts :

The GOP crusade to abolish the estate tax — the “death tax” — does nothing for American business in general, even as it chiefly benefits the trust fund babies of a few super-rich families. A lower tax rate for capital gains than for earned income means that the idle rich, and the hedge fund managers who manage their assets and are taxed at the capital gains rate, pay a much lower tax rate on their income than the majority of Americans who depend on wages or professional fees for a living. Self-made entrepreneurs? Hardly.

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The conclusion is inescapable. 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.

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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.

Old or new, Jacksonianism has always combined the pretense of egalitarian rebellion against privilege with the reality of domination by upper-class rentiers and crony capitalists. In the 21st century as in the 19th, the Jacksonian oligarchs divert the attention of their yeoman followers from what is going on by means of military jingoism (Jackson bellowed at France, today’s Republicans threaten Iran). Central to the Jacksonian tradition is the exploitation of paranoid fears of federal tyranny, combined with dark undercurrents of racism (witness Ron Paul’s recent denunciation of the Civil Rights Act and the blacks-on-welfare trope cynically deployed by Gingrich and Santorum).

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