As Nancy MacLean, Heather Cox Richardson and other scholars have shown, one of the main tensions in American society is the relationship between democracy, property and the value of human life. Should capital and profit reign over all other considerations? Or should the United States be a social democracy where human rights have primacy over profits and property rights? 

From before the founding to the present, America has been a racialized society structured around the dominance of white people over nonwhite people, and for much of that history Black people were defined as human property. So these debates about "freedom" and "rights" can often be reduced to a basic question: How much power, wealth and control should a small minority of rich white men hold over everyone else?"

In an interview last year with Yale News, political scientist Jacob Hackerexplored how Republicans have built an implausible coalition rooted in "plutocratic populism," combining "organized money and organized outrage to win elections, tilt the playing field in their favor, and govern for the top 1%." In order to draw voters to support economic polices that were beloved by "big donors and big corporations but unpopular among voters, and even many Republicans," the party created an "infrastructure of outrage," notably the NRA, the Christian right and the right-wing propaganda media. 

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There's an obvious contradiction at work here, Hacker notes, but to this point Republicans have managed to conceal that from their own voters:

[T]he steep rise in inequality after 1980 created a sort of conservative dilemma for Republicans in the United States. Essentially, there's a growing tension between those at the top and the rest of society. It's a tension between the goals of the plutocrats — the richest people, big business, and the organizations they create to influence policy — and the ideas that Republicans need to articulate to attract ordinary voters.

In particular, Republicans have become increasingly reliant on white working-class voters. These are [Lee] Atwater's populists. But to do so, Republicans basically divorce their economic policies from their electoral strategies. Those strategies rest more and more on radicalizing voters and getting them to see electoral politics as "us versus them" identity wars. They use racial imagery, demonize government and Democrats, and basically create a kind of tribal identity around whiteness, conservative Christianity, rurality, gun ownership, and the like. The goal is to shift the focus from the growing economic divide and instead incite outrage that reliably gets their voters to the polls but doesn't challenge the party's plutocratic aims.

-Chauncey Devaga in Salon.com 

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