Conclusion: Underdogs and Bullies
We instinctively favor the underdog in every circumstance. We boo Bluto and cheer when Popeye, having downed his trusty can of spinach, knocks the brute into orbit. If Goliath had defeated David the story would have ended there, but Goliath's defeat by the puny David created a legend that has persisted for thousands of years. In its early history, Israel was widely perceived as a small, embattled nation surrounded on all sides by large and aggressive enemies. But Israel's very success in war after war—to say nothing of having the United States in its corner—has caused this perception to change. Israel is now widely perceived around the world as the neighborhood bully—a serious political problem for the Israelis. And then there is the United States itself. Worldwide we are feared and loathed not for what we stand for or the policies we advocate. We are hated simply because we are bigger and stronger than anyone else—indeed, stronger than everyone else combined.
And this is as it should be. We can imagine a world in which we instinctively cheered for the powerful as they smashed the powerless into dust, but it is not a world most of us would like to live in. Nazi Germany was such a world—Germans still embittered by the terms imposed on them at the end of World War I cheered Hitler when he overran Poland and Czechoslovakia, and all too many Germans applauded when the Nazis hunted down and murdered Jews, even then a small, persecuted minority in Germany.
Like America itself, wealthy families will never be perceived as underdogs whose interests need to be protected. Whenever politicians can't think of principled reasons to oppose a policy or program, they can always denounce it as a sop to the rich. This is simply a fact of life and it will never change—indeed, we ought to hope it never changes, because the world that such a change would presuppose would be a world that would be anathema to most of us.
Still, the trouble with our instinctive reaction in favor of the underdog is that it sometimes interferes with cogent thought. Because we sympathize with the struggles of the American poor, because we extol the middle class as the backbone of America, we can easily forget that it is not these groups that distinguish America from other nations, or that account for its success. The poor, after all, are everywhere, and every developed society has at its center a solid middle class whose interests must be protected.
What distinguishes America is the presence, in very large and ever-growing numbers, of the rich. It is the prevalence of the rich—as a demonstration to the poor31 and middle class that wealth is achievable—that distinguishes us from other free market democracies and that has enabled us to grow to a position of such astonishing dominance. And it is the creative use of the private capital of wealthy families that encourages the creation and supports the implementation of American ideas—the ideas that mainly fuel the drive toward a better world.
It is possible, of course, that America will prove to have been an experiment gone wrong, “the only nation that has gone from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization,” as Clemenceau put it. It is possible, indeed, that civilized behavior will one day prove to be associated entirely with gentleness, with an insistence that every problem can and must be peacefully decided. Until that day arrives, however, civilization will persist only because America's veneer of gentleness and its commitment to peace remains underlain by a hard core of steel, an adamantine resolve.
The role of private wealth in a democratic republic is and always will be a fragile one. But so long as the holders of that wealth accumulate it fairly and use it creatively, America will continue to be the wonder of the world, and, alone among all the countries of that world, the one indispensable nation.