I’m going to present this next City Journal story without comment. Please read it and let me know what you think:

Exposing the Elites by Michael Knox Beran

In 1997 George Soros, writing in The Atlantic, declared: “The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.”

The words marked the beginning of a decade and a half of plutocratic progressivism. In July 2003, AFL-CIO political director Steven Rosenthal conferred with some of America’s richest tycoons at El Mirador, Soros’s estate in Southampton, to figure out how to defeat George W. Bush. In August 2004, the president of the Service Employees International Union, Andy Stern—the “most important labor boss in America”—traveled to Aspen to plot strategy in a moneyed conclave that included savings and loan moguls Herbert and Marion Sandler, Progressive Insurance founder Peter Lewis, and businessman John Sperling. Warren Buffett, de facto chairman of the country’s billionaires’ club, endorsed the candidacy of presidential aspirant Barack Obama, while the Democracy Alliance, which Matthew Vadum and James Dellinger dub “Billionaires for Big Government,” bankrolled progressive groups like ACORN and the Center for American Progress.

Is there something novel in these alliances which, Demos scholar David Callahan observes, have brought some of the nation’s most notable elites together during the last decade to make common cause with some of the country’s most progressive leaders? Hardly: pacts between munificent plutocrats and progressive reformers are one of the oldest tricks in oligarchy’s playbook.

More than a century and a half ago, Benjamin Disraeli, affecting to believe that Britain’s Tory elite was “the really democratic party of England,” showed that the well-to-do could more easily maintain their ascendancy if they became paternalist champions of working people. By adopting socially progressive policies, they could “dish the Whigs” and stave off free-market reformers like Richard Cobden and John Bright. In a no less duplicitous spirit, Otto von Bismarck invited Ferdinand Lassalle, founder of the General Union of German Workers, to the Wilhelmstrasse, where the two explored an alliance between Bismarck’s Junker ministry and the working classes. Bismarck did not “promote social reform out of love for the German workers,” historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote. Following, by turns, Marx and Metternich, Bismarck sought to make workers “more subservient” to the Junker-dominated state.

Elites who seek alliances with progressive tribunes are not always feudal aristocrats (like Bismarck) or feudal retainers (like Disraeli). They may, like the Roosevelts, be high bourgeois who have succumbed to the Medici Syndrome. Abandoning, as the Medici did, the tradition of their forebears, who were proud of their market squares, the high bourgeois find commerce vulgar and ape the manners of the nobility.