I've always believed that what I term "Family Capitalism"—small and midsize privately-held firms, often in second- and third-tier metropolitan areas, and the families that own them—are an understudied and under-discussed phenomenon in American political discourse.
You can't understand "rural America" (which is often used to refer to pretty much anything that's not a Top 20 city or its immediately adjacent suburbs) without understanding the social pecking order. It helps explain everything from the rise of the Tea Party in 2010 to Trump's takeover of the GOP in 2016. It colors how the states that are generally in the bottom half of GDP per capita and most socioeconomic indicators so often embrace austerity politics and refuse things like Medicaid expansion that could easily improve those metrics. It helps explain why so many rent-seeking middleman sectors of the economy, like car dealerships and real estate agencies, can reliably marshal state government to insulate them from "disruption" by ascendant and big firms like Tesla.
The trope that rich, educated white people are Democrats and poor, uneducated white people are Republicans is one of the great lies of normie political conventional wisdom. So is the idea that the Republican Party is a barbell party consisting of a handful of superrich billionaires (the Kochs, the Mercers, the DeVoses) and a mass of poor rubes "voting against their interests."
Most of Republicans' political power since the end of the Bush Era has been in state legislatures and governors' offices. The Democrats' long overdrawn New Deal Era goodwill finally vanished from the lower rungs of government in the South and Midwest in 2010 and the election cycles that followed. Republicans began racking up trifectas in a broad swath of the country and set to work implementing their governing agenda.
But that agenda wasn't in the service of the Billionaire Class. Most billionaires and most of the companies they control are in large cities and states where Republicans hardly ever enjoy a governing mandate. Matt Bevin and Sam Brownback and Bobby Jindal didn't do what they did for the sake of Bill Gates or Jamie Dimon. They did it for the families who own businesses in their states. Republicans wrap this agenda in talk of helping "small businesses," evoking the image of a husband and wife who own a sandwich shop, or a guy with a three-bay car repair shop that he and his son operate. These aren't small businesses. They're car dealerships, heavy equipment distributors, independent oil, gas and coal producers, plumbing companies, a group of restaurant franchises, and the like. They're incredibly profitable but lack any of the glamor or cachet of a software firm or an investment bank or a consultancy. You don't get a job there with a resume full of Ivy League degrees; you get a job there because you're the youngest generation of family ownership. If you're a competent, driven person, you'll likely become the CEO doing a good job of growing and developing the business further. If you're not, that's okay too—they'll just give you a do-nothing job and you'll go play golf and stay out of the way.
You can see the Gentry in state legislatures—most of which are part time, meaning it is impossible to serve in them without having enough passive income to pay your bills. But you also see them in Congress. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) is one (family plumbing business). Joe Manchin (D-WV) is one (family coal company). Marjorie Taylor-Green (R-GA) is one (family construction company).
These are high-income people. They went to college. They didn't lose their jobs to China or a factory assembly line robot. They have more money than 90%+ of Americans. So how do they get away with insisting they're just put-upon common folks standing up to "the Elites"? Patrick Wyman offers an explanation of this in
The Atlantic this month.
American GentryThe conspicuously consuming celebrities and jet-setting cosmopolitans of popular imagination exist, but they are far outnumbered by a less exalted and less discussed elite group,[..]
They are the people who rule over the small towns that the typical New Yorker or Angeleno might erroneously assume are peopled by nothing but poor, toothless yokels.
Their lives are incredibly comfortable and plush, but they receive none of the cultural capital or clout of a major city's high society.
These folks’ wealth extends into the millions and tens of millions rather than the billions we typically associate with the world-shaping clout of international oligarchs. [..]
Remember all the talk about the partisan divide being heavily informed by openness to experience? The downtrodden underemployed people in rundown houses in a small town in Ohio are never going to move away; they would lose their familial and social connections, which are the only real security they have in their lives. But the people on the nice side of the tracks in that town, the ones who live in grand restored late 19th century houses and are on the board of the regional chamber of commerce, are trapped too. It's where their wealth and their entire justification for their social position derives from. If they sell the family business and move to Chicago or Austin, they'll be a nobody with no legacy.
Because their wealth is rooted in the ownership of physical assets, they tend to be more rooted in their place of origin than the cosmopolitan professionals and entrepreneurs of the major metro areas are. Mobility among major metros, the characteristic jumping from Seattle to Los Angeles to New York to Austin that’s possible for younger lawyers, creatives, and tech folks, is foreign to them. They might really like heading to a vacation home in Bermuda or Maui. They might plan a relatively early retirement to a wealthy enclave in Palm Springs; Scottsdale, Arizona; or Central Florida. Ultimately, however, their money and importance comes from the businesses they own, and those belong in their locality.
Plenty of politicians invoke standing up to the billionaires in society. But if they really want to change things, they need to aim a little lower, at the tens-of-millions-aires.
When we talk about inequality, we skew our perspective by looking at the most visible manifestations of it: penthouses in New York, mansions in Beverly Hills, the lavish wastefulness of hedge-fund billionaires or a misbehaving celebrity. But that’s not who most of the United States’ wealthy elite really are. [...]
The modern Republican-Conservative Political Machine isn't fueled by Fortune 500 corporate PACs. It's fueled by guys in Dayton and Ocala who inherited their dad's business and who donate $10,000 to a state representative and then wrap them around their little finger over drinks at the local golf club.
An enormous number of organizations and institutions are dedicated to advancing the interests of this gentry class: chambers of commerce, exclusive country clubs and housing developments, the American Society of Concrete Contractors, and fruit growers’ associations, just to name a small cross section. Through these organizations and their intimate ties to local and state politics, the gentry class can and usually does wield significant power to shape society to its liking.
