This article is adapted from the book “Plutocratic Socialism: The Future of Private Property and the Fate of the Middle Class.”
The American constitutional order assumes a populace of property owners, a middle class with virtues that provide the necessary ballast to support our republic. Our founders imagined strong communities, strong families, and independent citizens capable of self-government. They knew if the people degenerated into an insolent plutocracy on the one hand and a disgruntled, insecure, proletarianized mass on the other, the American experiment in self-government would become increasingly fragile and eventually collapse.