The US has always been an oligarchy, although you can say that about every other government in the world, too. Still, on the whole, we've been better than most.

About a century ago, Teddy Roosevelt realized this, the greed of his class was actually crippling the nation, and he fought for reforms to moderate this trend, even though he was not exactly a Liberal by today's standards. Throughout the 20th century, American politics has been a struggle between two visions of government: a Republic essentially controlled by the industrial and merchant class, and a true representative democracy. Its been the same since the post-colonial period of great plantations and small town and regional merchants and farms up to the beginning of the industrial transformation of America in the mid 19th century. The Revolutionary War was fought primarily because American merchants and planters were tired of excessive British taxation. The Civil War was a turf dispute between two competing models of oligarchic economic organization: Northern industrial development vs Southern slave-based plantation agriculture.

A generation after Teddy, the second Roosevelt introduced a more robust form of progressive government, one which transformed America, and which was not opposed particularly by the oligarchs because Post-war America was so economically successful. We were rich, there was enough to go around for everybody. This equilibrium was starting to unravel by the 60s, when the spending brought on by Cold War militarization and the Great Society reminded the oligarchy that they were the ones expected to pay for the new democracy. Civil Rights (an issue left over from a century earlier) provided the means to enlist the working poor whites and the petit bourgeosie under the banners of plutocracy. American Conservatism as we know it first organized on modern lines, and developed its current iconography and rhetoric about the mid-sixties.

How this struggle will finally resolve itself in the 21st century is anyone's guess. We probably won't live to see it, Bowz. But the whole world is watching.