He is increasingly seen as lacklustre, weak and beholden to various competing monied interests.
In a hunt for ancestors, monied New Yorkers also joined the Genealogical Society.As depicted by Mr Beckert, gilded-age New York suggests that, in one respect, Alexis de Tocqueville judged too soon.
Eton gibes might just work as knockabout humour; but Mr Brown doesn't seem to be joking.On the face of it, targeting the monied looks more promising.
For all the excitement among marketers who have finally noticed a vast untapped demographic of hip, monied consumers, Boomers "have faced significant economic and lifestyle challenges, particularly in the aftermath of the 2007-2009 recession", points out a report prepared by marketing trade magazine Ad Age.
In each case only the most privileged may apply but, as far as the two alternatives are concerned, the owner is not just monied but also highly discerning.
But they do enable minorities — usually conservative, mostly monied minorities — to systematically thwart the will of the majority.
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the class-bound societies of Western Europe were dominated by a landed and monied elite that owned much of the land and the wealth.
The U.S. monied elite has outstripped its counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic, and wealth has become even more concentrated in the United States than it is in Europe.
Months after Al Gore's defeat in 2000, Terry McAuliffe, then the Democratic Party chief, urged Democrats to steer clear of gun control, warning of the "devastating impact on elections" wrought by the gun lobby's monied campaign attacks.
Around midnight on a recent Wednesday, the black-lacquered bar indeed had a soigné, monied feel, partly because of the overflow from a Whitney Museum event nearby.
The group, whose protests are in their second week, is calling for an end to the "monied corruption of our democracy" in the U.S. and is borrowing a page from the Arab Spring uprisings that overturned several regimes earlier this year.
