The tendency of the ultrarich to see themselves as an ‘aristocracy’ rightly ruling the rest of us

In her newsletter this morning, historian Heather Cox Richardson takes us through the enduring belief among the superrich that they’re a natural elite that, naturally, should be in charge.

“In 1858, in a period in which a few fabulously wealthy elite enslavers in the American South were trying to take over the government and create their own oligarchy, South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explained to his colleagues that ‘democracy’ meant only that voters got to choose which set of leaders ruled them,” she says.

Hammond’s ideology gave us the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court found that African Americans “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States,” Richardson says.

“In 1889, during the Gilded Age, industrialist Andrew Carnegie embraced a similar idea when he explained that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few was not only inevitable in an industrial system, but was beneficial,” Richardson says.

Carnegie’s ideology gave us the 1905 Lochner v. New York Supreme Court decision that states couldn’t require employers to limit workers’ hours in a bakery to 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week, Richardson says. The court reasoned that there wasn’t a need of such a law for workers’ welfare or safety because “there is no danger to the employ[ee] in a first-class bakery.” The court concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protected “freedom of contract”: the right of employers to contract with workers at any price and for any hours the workers could be induced to accept.

“In 1929, after the Great Crash tore the bottom out of the economy, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon did not blame the systemic inequality his policies had built into the economy. He blamed lazy Americans and the government that had served greedy constituencies,” Richardson says. “He told President Herbert Hoover not to interfere to help the country.”

Mellon’s ideology gave us “Hoovervilles” — shantytowns built from packing boxes and other salvaged materials — and the Great Depression, Richardson says.

Citing various news articles, Richardson says, “Today, an ideology of ‘aristocracy’ justifies the fabulous wealth and control of government by an elite that increasingly operates in private spaces that are hard for the law to reach, while increasingly using the power of the state against those it considers morally inferior.”

But, Richardson says, in the 1850s, the Gilded Age and the 1930s, “Americans pushed back against those trying to establish an aristocracy in the United States. That project appears to be gaining speed as well in today’s America.”