As the Times reporter points out, this won't be the first time the first and second tiers of wealth have started a revolution against the crass invasion of the billionaires. Stand up, you old rich bourgeoisie with your pathetic, under-$20 million/year incomes. Join the fight against the noisy invasions of the top ten percent.
At the turn of the last century it was the bourgeoisie in New York and other major cities who might have envisioned similar gestures of contempt directed at them by robber barons fleeing to Saratoga and Newport during July and August via the era’s own elaborate and expensive means of transport, private rail cars or yachts.
Richard Hofstadter, in his classic work of historical analysis “The Age of Reform,” published in 1955, argued that it was the disgust and disruption felt by those who had previously occupied the highest ranks of the social order toward the new superseding class of self-lavishing bankers and industrialists that ultimately allowed the Progressive movement to flourish. The undermining of status radicalized the formerly complacent, and class politics took shape because one segment of the population had so much money that the merely respectable could now identify with the actually poor. ...NYT
Okay. We Progressives are delighted to get the news. Where's the fight and how can we join?
It's out there at the eastern tip of Long Island where the disgust and disruptions of the outlandishly rich -- the wacka-wacka of helicopter taxis -- are driving the quiet, settled, older rich crazy.
Helicopter traffic at the airport this summer has increased by close to 40 percent over last and with it has come a comparable rise in tension between the very affluent and the exceptionally rich.
"Quality of life truly is being diminished for commercial greed and the convenience of the same people who burned the economy,” a longtime Shelter Island summer resident said to me.“When I look up at small planes and choppers I see a fleet of middle fingers across the sky.” ...NYT
It's an old story in America. What we now call the "urban upper-middle class" is behind a change in politics. The challenger in the Democratic primary in New York, Tim Wu, nails it. And the unleashed capitalism is the target. These newest rich are, of course, the very people whose greed caused the 2007 financial crash and the long recession. Now even the very rich are questioning the extremes of capitalism.
“Mike Bloomberg was a great pragmatist, and there’s something to be said for that,” Mr. Wu told me from a campaign bus, just before he was endorsed in his bid for the nomination for lieutenant governor by The New York Times editorial board. “But we need to get past pragmatism, past the Democratic Party ideas of the ’90s that you could just tinker with capitalism around the edges.” ...NYT
Funny. Ironic. The earlier tea party "movement" -- before it was poisoned by the Kochs and the nuts -- included a share of progressives who were solidly against the bailing out of Wall Street. Now, half a decade later, the increasingly regressive tea party is scarred, ridiculed, and sidelined even as the progressives begin to move in and take a stand against the greed and noise of careless power.
