“It is generally recognized,” Richard Hofstadter wrote in his classic The American Political Tradition, “that American politics has involved, among other things, a series of conflicts between special interests – between landed capital and financial or industrial capital, between old and new enterprises, large and small property… The fierceness of the political struggles has often been misleading; for the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major parties has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise.”
