Near the end of every period of excess, in American political history, figures associated with the old regime flip. They turn on their old ideas and embrace new ones.
One of my favorite examples is from back in the 1960s. Frank Sinatra sang what became the Kennedy theme song, "High Hopes" and appeared, not just on campaign stops, but at the White House. The embrace of Camelot by the swing era was important in giving the Kennedys an aura of "cool" that played well in Middle America.
This shifted during the decade. Like other members of their generation Sinatra and other "Rat Pack" members (most notoriously Sammy Davis Jr., above, with friend) came to embrace the Republicans. And so did their audience. This shift in attitudes, among voters then in their 40s and 50s, was crucial in building the conservative coalition which still holds power today.
Now, flash forward 40 years.
At the start of this decade Bill Gates represented, to many people, the triumph of Proprietary Software in politics. Many Microsoft executives gave heavily to the Bush campaign. A successful anti-trust suit against the company was quietly dropped.
Now the rich and famous are going the other way, with Gates again as the headliner. How long will he be satisfied giving his $3 billion each year to good works while governments do everything they can to take things the other way? How long will Warren Buffett be happy with those unhappy returns?
Laugh if you will at Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (above, cuter than but not as rich as Gates and Buffett), but what they wound up doing with the birth of their child Shiloh was jiu jitsu of a kind seldom seen. They went to Namibia, focused the attention of celebrity journalists on the country, then sold picture rights and donated that money to causes in that area of the world. They used the press to press their case, for Africa and its people, not for themselves.
My word for all this is satiation. Many of our richest and most famous chafe at the limits of their own avarice. They wonder if there’s something more. And they find it, in doing good work, in contributing to the world’s forward progress.
In the last decade magazines like Forbes could ridicule this away, essentially shaming those who embraced social activism from their perches in high society as pretentious wannabes, either engaging in publicity stunts or slumming.
But they weren’t. And they aren’t. The correct term is noblesse oblige, and it was a powerful force in the history of 20th century progressivism. It turned the Rockefeller family from a synonym of greed early in the century into a synonym for liberalism in its latter half. This is why early baseball players and Hollywood celebrities felt affinity for the downtrodden. They had been raised above and felt a keen sense of obligation.
Thus does history change. More important, thus does politics change.
