Bringing The ‘Ring’ Back In: The Politics of Booty Capitalism

This blog accompanies Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer’s Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era article
Bringing The “Ring” Back In: The Politics Of Booty Capitalism

We live in an age of great political fortunes. It is hardly the first. During the 1860s and 1870s, party politics was an enticing way for the ambitious to get rich quick.

“Ring” rule was the popular Gilded Age term of art. The notion implied that a small group of partisan officeholders had encircled a political or financial institution to extract, and share among themselves, whatever profits might be wrung.

Newspapers were filled with alleged conspiracies like the Tweed Ring, Gold Ring, Gas Ring, Whiskey Ring, Bank Ring, Canal Ring, and so on. None of these were minor episodes. They represented battles for control over the linchpins of modern political economy.

For example, the Tweed Ring brought New York City, the country’s commercial and financial hub, to the precipice of disaster. Fallout from the Gold Ring and Whiskey Ring drew scrutiny to circles around then-president Ulysses S. Grant. The Bank Ring out west entailed a protracted struggle over the Nevada Comstock Lode, the largest silver strike in U.S. history.

“Ring” talk emerged with the collision of mass politics and high-flying capitalism. Critics noted that career politicians were prominent among a sudden crop of “new rich.” These political fortunes were highly contested because the property in question was often of public origin (via taxpayer money or by leveraging public authority). Private benefits, however grand, were distributed among select partisans largely beyond public view.

Recent trends suggest that the “ring” is a form of governance that recurs in American political development, rather than being confined to any single historical period. Two current examples are Paul Manafort’s millions extracted from Ukraine during the Yanukovych government, and the Trump Organization’s relationship to the American presidency.

Paul Manafort’s career began in the 1980s as part of the conservative turn during the Reagan era. Manafort later globalized the services of his politically influential consulting firm. After striking it rich in Ukraine (a “black ledger” seized by protesters detailed tens of millions of dollars in payments), he returned to American politics during the 2016 election as a way to “get whole” with jilted foreign business partners.

Donald Trump is the first billionaire to bring the full weight of a business empire directly into electoral politics. His 2016 presidential campaign became a major client of the Trump Organization. Since taking office, Donald J. Trump has opened a luxury hotel down the street from the White House, with both operations run by family members. The novel approach circulates payments from party committees, lobbyists, and federal agencies through luxury properties owned by the family business.

Central to any comparison with the Gilded Age is how entrepreneurs find ways to pay themselves through the party-state linkage, and thus, to accumulate wealth through electoral politics.

Most importantly, the return of “ring” governance evokes a historical dilemma. Is it legitimate to accumulate wealth from politics? After all, the courts and many in the public today regard private property as inviolable, regardless of its provenance. How we seek to answer this question is tied to the very meaning and substance of democracy.

 

Read Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer’s full article

Read all articles in the Special Issue: A Second Gilded Age?

 


Main image: Shutterstock ID: 238811329 ‘This is not the New York Stock Exchange, it is the patronage exchange, called U.S. Senate’. Print satirizing the machine politics of the Gilded Age. Color lithograph, 1881

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