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• Wednesday, December 3, 2008 07:26 AM

  Careful -- you're verging dangerously close to analyzing how factors such as wealth & social connections shape politics & policy

  And that's just not allowed in this country. Oh, sure, it's okay to speak about other countries in which things like social class or inherited wealth or institutions of socialization and policy planning networks affect who runs for and is more likely to win office, and what sorts of policies are consistently supported over time.

  But you cannot do that for this country, for then you are an extremist fringe lefty conspiracist paranoid.

  Finding there to be any worthwhile, systematic, long-term patterns that suggest any sort of economic / social upper class influence over politics and policy is at best for pop sociologists of the 1950s through the 1970s, but thankfully we got over all that.

  [T]he idea that a relatively fixed group of privileged people dominate the economy and government goes against the American grain and the founding principles of the country. "Class" and "power" are terms that make Americans a little uneasy, and concepts such as "upper class" and "power elite" immediately put people on guard. Americans may differ in their social and income levels, and some may have more influence than others, but it is felt that there can be no fixed power group when power is constitutionally lodged in all the people, when there is democratic participation through elections and lobbying, and when the evidence of social mobility is everywhere apparent. So, it is usually concluded by most power analysts that elected officials, along with "interest groups" like "organized labor" and "consumers," have enough "countervailing" power to say that there is a fluid, "pluralistic" distribution of power rather than one with rich people and corporations at the top.

  http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/national.html

  What's even funnier is that researchers such as Domhoff are routinely dismissed as 'Marxist' when he's actually arguing quite specifically against the actual Marxist arguments.

  But then, in this country, it's just not done to link wealth to power in any systematic fashion.

  —El Cid Read El Cid's other letters
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