Tentative Response: Anti-Federalists and the Financial Oligarchy in America

When reading the selections of anti-federalist correspondences assigned for today, what struck me the most about them was their prescience concerning the possibility of the American government, due to the concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy, to slouch towards oligarchy.  In “Brutus’” letter, he asks "What security therefore can there be for the people, when their liberties and property are at the disposal of so few men?  It will literally be a government in the hands of the few to oppress and plunder the many...it, like all others of a similar nature, will be managed by influence and corruption, and that the period is not far distant, when this will be the case" (21).  There are many different ways in which this statement has come to fruition today, from the election of an incompetent businessman to the country’s highest office to the systemic disenfranchisement of black voters, but the one that stands out to me the most is the influence of Wall Street on American politics.  Although most neoliberals are all for stopping the Dakota Access Pipeline, a project largely funded by a massive influx of capital from America’s biggest banks, this support only thinly conceals a deep hypocrisy.  Hillary Clinton, the neoliberal heroine herself, has long standing and complex ties with large financial institutions like Goldman Sachs that have long been known for their attempts to extend their cultural hegemony into the political system, whether through funding certain candidates or more direct methods of intervention.  What I find particularly interesting about this financial influence in the American system, however, is not even its stranglehold on the government and preclusion of equal representation by perpetuation of the same oligarchy reference in Brutus’ writing; rather, I’m interested in how this financial hegemony extends beyond the government and targets the young, neoliberal populations of universities who are being groomed for leadership, often in a civic context.  In “Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street,” Karen Ho discusses the nefarious ways in which the finance sector permeates campus culture at elite schools, steering self-proclaimed neoliberal students towards the very institutions that they claim to ideologically oppose.  As Ho points out, “many of [Princeton’s] undergraduates join the financial realm every year, creating a kind of lighthearted, self-deprecating joke about Philosophy majors becoming I-bankers and once-hopeful novelists heading to Wall Street” (Ho 44).  This phenomenon is a crucial cultural application of the type of hegemony outlined by the anti-federalists, as it shows that power continues to be funneled into the hands of the elite through elaborate processes of indoctrination and edification, and that this phenomenon extends far beyond our government.