February 5, 2016 --

The Wall Street Journal began its lead editorial, February 2 by suggesting that the victory of Sen. Ted Cruz over Donald J. Trump in the Iowa caucuses rendered talk of an "American political revolution" an exaggeration. Perhaps not.

Cruz and Trump got some 51% of the vote. Sen. Marco Rubio, perhaps now the great hope of the establishment, came in third with some 23%. Seems to LPR that the anti-establishment vote more than doubled t he establishment vote in Iowa on February 1.

Is this, at long last, the presidential election year when attention will be paid the insight of James Madison, in Federalist No. 57 that there are, indeed, people seeking the "ambitious sacrifice of the many to the aggrandizement of the few?"

More than 16 years ago, Boston College Professor Alan Wolfe, director of the Center for Religion and American Public Life, wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times, "The New Politics of Inequality." Wolfe noted that during the decade of the 1990's the gap between rich and poor widened and continues to grow ever wider. He wondered, however, that Americans, who traditionally did not care about income disparity, are about to pay attention.

The professor, who, as LPR read it, took a non-partisan view of wealth inequality, was a bit premature anticipating an public response to the inequality. It should be instructive to the current Democrat presidential candidates that Wolfe indicated that the gap between the wealthy and the working class widened during the presidency of Bill Clinton.

Today, one can only infer from the campaign rhetoric of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, that the inequality has widened even more throughout the Obama presidency. In brief this is not a partisan issue. Is it an institutional issue?

For all the talk from Sen. Sanders about a "political revolution," LPR continues to suggest that the solution is found in Federalist No. 57. First, lets drop the term establishment for "anti-democratic aggrandizers." Tucker Carlson, writing in Politico -- "Donald Trump is Shocking, Vulgar and Right: sees the Trump phenomenon as a revolt against the political insiders whose primary interest is to maintain themselves in the extraordinary comfort in which them have placed themselves and choose to continue, without concern for the public interest. E.E. Schattschneider, in "The Semisovereign People," suggested that the American people will accept economic adversity that impacts across the board. He wondered, as an example, how the people would respond if automobiles were available only to the wealthy. LPR sees true political revolution --upending of the social order -- as occurring when the great mass of the people have had enough getting hammered by the anti-democratic aggrandizers.

Professor Wolfe wrote, concluding his September 1999 op-ed: "Now Republicans might find that voters would like a privileged candidate courageous enough to shame the rich for their greed." Unless the anti-democratic aggrandizers regain their political footing with the New Hampshire primary and those to follow, the Republicans this election year might have a candidate to lead a revolution to oust the aggrandizing class from political power, based not on the theories of Karl Marx, but on the democratic vision of James Madison.