The Dream of American Aristocracy
I was a little bit surprised to see Malia Lazu, a friend of mine who I haven’t seen in quite some time and who I didn’t think did this kind of work, on Fox News with Neil Cavuto earlier this afternoon. But there she was, responding to Cavuto’s charge that John McCain’s critics are “bashing the American dream” for pointing out that it’s a bit rich for a guy who can’t even keep track of how many houses he owns to be telling people that the economy is strong and really just in need of some tax cuts for the rich. But to add to what Faiz says about this let’s note that while getting rich is arguably an integral part of the American Dream, that’s traditionally been understood as the dream of getting rich through hard work.
McCain came by his houses by marrying his wife, Cindy, who came by her money from her dad. He made his money the old fashioned way — working for it. But Cindy inherited it, and John married into it. And research seems to indicate that over the past few decades there’s been a trend toward declining social mobility — to more and more rich people just being the kids of rich people. And McCain’s policies, from a failure to expand access to higher education to support for lower levels of taxation on estates and investment income, will tend to further exacerbate America’s transformation into a hierarchical class-bound society.
63 Responses to “The Dream of American Aristocracy”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:37 pm
I wonder what F. Scott Fitzgerald would have to say about your contention that marrying into money is not a quintessential part of the American dream.
Though I’d be surprised if McCain read any of his books…
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:40 pm
You’re arguing the wrong point, Matt. What you should be asking is why hitting McCain for his seven houses is bashing the American Dream, but hitting Obama for his success is not.
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:45 pm
The American dream is to marry a rich heiress and pass parasite policies that fuck your country?
Who knew?
.
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:46 pm
“that’s traditionally been understood as the dream of getting rich through hard work”
Hey, that’s not fair. Screwing Cindy is hard work.
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Here’s the Wikipedia page on the American Dream Clearly not an entry the McCain speechwriters will be cribbing from anytime soon.
Growing up, I feel like the American Dream was always couched in material terms, but very modest material terms (and almost always in terms of the yearning of some poor person in some poor country): “They want to live The American Dream, you know, own a home, a car, a microwave…”
Owning 7 homes has never been part of The American Dream. The American Pipe Dream maybe, but not The American Dream.
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Isn’t Obama attacking him for not knowing how many houses he has?
Also, dwhite10701’s point is pretty rock solid unless you remember that Obama once discussed arugula with arugula farmers.
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:50 pm
I agree. It’s just the wrong point. Hitting McCain for his houses is relatively shallow, hardball politics compared to the democratic norm. This brand of political gamesmanship is asking for whatever wacky defenses conservative pundits come up with. The key is to do what the conservatives do and simply ignore it.
Don’t get me wrong, it is great that Obama is pulling this stuff–it is exactly what needs to be done to win. But taking retorts to these kinds of sound-byte attacks seriously is missing (and simultaneuously belaboring) the point. The beauty of the house attack is that it is easy to understand, quick, and invites no real debate. It’s just there. Learn to love it.
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:51 pm
He made his money the old fashioned way — working for it.
Lol, the old fashioned way, yeah, right. Being rich by birth is not exactly a new concept and hard work is only tangentially related to wealth. If being rich means a couple of millions net worth, chances are you are either incredibly lucky, or incredibly talented or both. Barring that, hard work will probably get you into or keep you in the middle class, but that’s about it and even that is not guaranteed. The American Dream is a devious invention by rich people to keep the people with the pitchforks at bay.
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:55 pm
The American dream is to marry a rich heiress and pass parasite policies that fuck your country?
John McCain and John Kerry: brothers in living the new American dream.
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:55 pm
He made his money the old fashioned way
You mean, via bootlegging?
August 22nd, 2008 at 6:03 pm
New Republican slogan: “We’re so out of touch, we’re orbiting Mars!”
August 22nd, 2008 at 6:11 pm
But he earned the heiress’s riches (and our everlasting praise) with his POW stint. And he’s further capitalized on it with a 40-year political career. What could be more American than that?
August 22nd, 2008 at 6:12 pm
If marrying a rich Barbie doll isn’t the American dream, I’m moving.
August 22nd, 2008 at 6:22 pm
And McCain’s policies, from a failure to expand access to higher education to support for lower levels of taxation on estates and investment income, will tend to further exacerbate America’s transformation into a hierarchical class-bound society.
I’ve never understood why things like the capital gains tax are lower than income rates. It seems like it should be the other way around; shouldn’t we encourage people who are working for their income rather than people who are just making money because they already have money? Seems like wealth taxes rather than income taxes are more in line with the traditional American work ethic.
August 22nd, 2008 at 6:43 pm
If marrying a rich Barbie doll isn’t the American dream, I’m moving.
That’s the American fantasy.
August 22nd, 2008 at 6:57 pm
It’s not the *American* Dream it’s *The* Dream.
August 22nd, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Surely the correct way to frame this is not simply that McCain married into inherited money, but that McCain and his ilk want to keep the rest of us down?
The point is not how McCain got his money. (Cindy was, IMHO, a babe, and is still pretty cute, albeit way too skinny; who can blame McCain from grabbing her if he had the chance?).
The point is that GOP policies want to pull up the ladder and prevent anyone else from joining them. If you’re poor, they want to limit your chance to live a healthy life, to get a decent education, to get into a good college, to take the risk of founding a business. From SCHIP to affirmative action to the bankruptcy bill, there is a single consistent narrative along these lines.
August 22nd, 2008 at 7:25 pm
MattY has some interesting friends. Apparently Lazu is the author of something called “How to Get Stupid Black Women Out of Office”, although I might have transcribed the title incorrectly. Someone go check.
As for the only point in the post worth replying to, both the Dems and the GOP favor policies that may lead to the described impact. Both, for instance, support “free” trade as well as the importation of vast numbers of low-wage workers.
August 22nd, 2008 at 7:29 pm
24AheadDotCom has some interesting friends: “ask why whites hate whites so much when a brown or black or yellow would eat that white person alive”.
August 22nd, 2008 at 7:40 pm
i still remember neil cavuto as a young business reporter on a pbs program in the ’80s called “nightly business report.” when i see what a complete propaganda robot he is today, i can never decide whether he was hiding it back then (he seemed like a perfectly pleasant young man) or whether he decided that the incentives in the pundit biz favored taking on the coloration of a propaganda robot….
August 22nd, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Perhaps I’m not grasping the point Matt is trying to make, but it seems that Matt, himself, is trying to promote a class-bound society where people shouldn’t marry someone richer than they are.
Also, is Matt against leaving assets to relatives after someone dies?
August 22nd, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Gass, there are actually several points here, fairly obvious and not difficult to grasp. First, there is no injustice whatsoever in taxing the inheritances of the likes of Cindy Hemsley and John Heinz (to keep it bi-partisan) in such a manner as to meet the ongoing needs of our country. Second, while it’s fine to marry a zillionaire heiress, I don’t know how great that looks on the resume of someone applying for Leader of the Free World. Not dispositive by itself, in McCain’s case or Kerry’s, but surely nothing to brag about, especially if you are running on a campaign of national greatness (to be fair, that’s what McCain was running in 2000; this year, he’s running a standard Republican scorched-earth campaign, so the last contradiction doesn’t strictly hold). And third, anyone in the possession of 10 residences has no business calling anyone else an elitist.
August 22nd, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Actually, I thought the American Dream was to get rich by winning the lottery.
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Cavuto confuses the stereotypical male fantasy of marrying an heiress with the American Dream. It is an easy mistake for a twit to make.
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Whoa, whoa, whoa, waitasecond– I always thought the American dream was to own a nice little house in a nice suburb with a lawn, a white-picket fence, a dog, a cat, a goldfish, 2.2 kids, a spouse, and a car or two in the garage, all of which you are able to support with the earnings from your single more-or-less 9-5 job, and to take the family on a vacation once a year.
Matt is broadcasting some kind of evil Republican version of the American dream– bad, Matt, bad!!!
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:37 pm
The American aspiration is to be rich enough to buy your dream home. No one fantasizes about being so wealthy they lose track of how many homes they own. Stop trying to change this to “but he’s rich, and Obama is much less rich, and Obama is the American dream, and it is so gosh darned unfair.” There’s a simple narrative here, and rich-bashing isn’t it.
It’s not the 7/8 homes, it’s the “I’ll have my staff get back to you on the number of homes.”
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Click through pseudonymous in nc’s link. It’s good, but it doesn’t quite give you everything you need to know (probably because the paper didn’t want to get sued or bombed – as happened the last time a newspaper poked too hard behind the scenes of the Arizona liquor distribution biz).
Jim Hensley (Cyndi’s dad) was the long-time protege and essentially, business heir of Kemper Marley. You haven’t heard of Kemper Marley because you probably haven’t been connected in Arizona anytime in the past 60 years. Hensley even did a year stretch in the slam for Marley in 1948.
Ok, so who’s Kemper Marley? Marley was the Chicago Outfit’s WASP face to their liquor distribution activities (and plenty of other businesses) in Arizona / Nevada for roughly 50 years. Marley was Gus Greenbaum’s right-hand in his bookmaking wire service in the 30s (when the Chicago Outfit took over James Ragan’s operation through introducing Ragan to a friendly shotgun). Marley was probably talking directly to Paul Ricca and Tony Joey Batters Accardo (the heads of the Outfit) for more than 30 years, particularly after Ricca had Greenbaum’s head cut off in Phoenix in 1958.
We’re not talking moonshiners in the hills, or even a guy with a speedboat. We’re talking that Marley and Hensley were the public face of perhaps the most powerful mob bosses in the world at the time.
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:00 pm
McCain’s great-great-grandfather owned 52 slaves!!!!
There is building a family’s wealth the old-fashioned way and then there is the McCain way — owning a plantation in Mississippi.
Hmmm. Gee. Wonder where the first presidential debate is … let’s see … Oxford, Miss. … hmmm … on almost the very spot where James Meredith tried to matriculate almost exactly 46 years to the day of the debate.
Can’t imagine the national press corps would want to sully McCain’s family image by dredging up this old business.
August 23rd, 2008 at 12:29 am
burritoboy: you might want to avoid hat-tipping anti-Irish bigots.
August 23rd, 2008 at 12:34 am
Funny, I though the American dream was the security and comfort of middle-class life. Not the kind of dream where everyone dreams they’ll have 7 houses, but almost no one ever does, but the kind of dream that was and still is pretty accessible in the U.S.
August 23rd, 2008 at 12:44 am
burritoboy: I was very restrained in my link text. Let’s just say that mob control of booze in the post-prohibition years could be described as an “old fashioned” way to make money.
The irony here: for all the talk about Obama and Chicago, the mob’s connections with Arizona business and politics go way back. All part of the new frontier in the libertarian west.
August 23rd, 2008 at 1:00 am
LOL. Pity RebrandedThicko, whose work/reward ratio over all these years of blogwhoring is far less than any honest navvy. He still hasn’t worked out who just might be offended by a plastic paddy shut-in who accuses his neighbor’s goldfish of working for the Mexican government. Go and cry in the corner with Pat Buchanan and the other third-gen ladder-pulling, green-Guinness shit-tips, then get a fucking life.
August 23rd, 2008 at 1:03 am
Regarding Ms. Lazu, it didn’t take long for the red-baiting to start on the conservative blogs: http://chickenhawkexpress.blogspot.com/2008/06/some-background-on-oil-change.html
August 23rd, 2008 at 4:24 am
I appreciate Matt’s examination of this housegate thing from all different angles. Too many other commentators don’t yet seem to recognize that housegate is macaca.
August 23rd, 2008 at 4:50 am
What you should be asking is why hitting McCain for his seven houses is bashing the American Dream, but hitting Obama for his success is not.
I don’t see where Obama gets off judging McCain as selfish or greedy, just look at what each does with his own money: McCain adopts a child from the 3rd world and raises it as his own, Obama can’t even be bothered to lend financial help to his own half-brother trapped in the 3rd world.
August 23rd, 2008 at 7:12 am
Fox is playing Calvin-ball, as usual. No one said anything about “the American Dream” – but McCain and his enablers have had plenty to say about being “elite”.
August 23rd, 2008 at 8:21 am
Isn’t the real distinction between Obama and McCain on the whole wealth issue that Obama made his money honestly by his own hand while McCain, who was pretty much a failure in life, married into his money and became the kept man of a rich and powerful family that uses him as their man in Washington? Oh, and did I say that John McCain is a failure and a wimp and his wife wears the pants in the family?
August 23rd, 2008 at 9:23 am
Three McCain Points to those who mention Obama’s distant relatives in Kenya! You get two points docked for lack of originality, as that’s obviously the rebuttal being circulated from both paid trolls and paid troll wannabees.
August 23rd, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Matt, before you get too “ain’t-it-a-shame” over Malia Lazu’s descent onto Fox, weren’t you on the network in January?
see: <a href=”you“>
August 23rd, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Tony Soprano is the “American Dream”. A cowardly, parasitic mediocrity like John McCain is Mao Zedong’s Dream.
August 23rd, 2008 at 1:42 pm
It’s not that him having 7 houses is so terrible. It’s that he’s not the ordinary guy he’s trying to show himself to be. He’s lost in is own variety of elitism in which he’s rich enough to not have to even think or remember for himself.
August 23rd, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Blue Says:
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:00 pm
McCain’s great-great-grandfather owned 52 slaves!!!!
OK Blu–which one of his 8 g.g.Grandfathers?—Have you checked your own g.g.Grandfathers—(maybe you should check you g.g.Grandmothers)
August 23rd, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Re: McCain’s great-great-grandfather owned 52 slaves!!!!
So what? My great-grandfather was the town drunk, and he beat his pregnant wife to death. I would certainly hope if I ran for public office no one would see fit to dredge that ancient tale up. No one is responsible for the sins of their ancestors, certainly not ancestors who were long dead when they were born. All of us probably have some real SOBs back in the family trees.
August 23rd, 2008 at 4:40 pm
YankeeFrankee
Hmmm?–US Sen., refused release to stay with his fellow prisoners, presidential candidate–quite a failure!——-(what’s ur success storey?)
Oh, the distinction is that Obama has supporters like you!
August 23rd, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Matthew Yglesias
—-”that’s traditionally been understood as the dream of getting rich through hard work”.
——Re-read our history, it is just “geting rich”, however you can—read our history—standard oil, ford, gm, RR’s, cotton, slaves, immigrant workers, gold rush, timber, fish, —we have a ‘rich history’, read it!
BYW are you a church?
August 23rd, 2008 at 6:39 pm
kth, unless I missed it, McCain doesn’t seem to be bragging about being rich.
Concerning his campaign calling Obama an elitist, I think elitism has more to do with snobbery than wealth.
August 24th, 2008 at 10:50 am
The elitism charge is simply a club that sneering Republicans will use against any Democrat. The genius of Obama is that he is for the first time properly and effectively mocking out of touch aristocrats for employing it. Learning to toss the rubes a few bones by pretending to like pork rinds is not the same as being a man of the people.
August 25th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Matt, you forgot Rule #1 of high quality journalism:
It’s okay to imply anything as long as you phrase it as a question.
Is Obama a terrorist? I don’t know, I’m just asking a question, are you against questions? What, are you a communist? Not that I’m saying you are, I’m just asking the question…
communist.
March 1st, 2009 at 7:47 am
viagra
Very interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!
March 1st, 2009 at 8:55 pm
cialis
I bookmarked this site. Thank you for good job!
March 2nd, 2009 at 7:02 am
levitraIt is the coolest site,keep so!
March 13th, 2009 at 1:51 am
Very interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!
March 22nd, 2009 at 6:53 am
tramadol
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
April 2nd, 2009 at 6:38 am
Great site. Good info
buy cheap viagra
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:53 am
Very interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!
cheap brand pfizer viagra
April 9th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
I bookmarked this site, Thank you for good job! viagra
April 14th, 2009 at 10:23 am
Incredible site!
viagra