The estate tax is good. It acts as a modest brake on the growth of inherited wealth and the power of private dynasties, and brings money into the public coffers to boot.

That didn’t used to be very controversial. Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson were proponents of inheritance taxes, as were the nineteenth-century steel baron Andrew Carnegie and the right-wing economist James Buchanan. For roughly two hundred years, outside a fringe of reactionary plutocrats, there was broad accord on the question of the estate tax. Even conservative philosophers and statesmen found it difficult to defend letting economic elites pass on large bequests to heirs unfettered.

Then something seemed to change. In the last two decades, the Republican Party began to make a show of its opposition to the estate tax. This about face is one sign, among many, of how far the GOP and American democracy generally have gone off the rails. The Republican Party now represents something unique: untethered to any intelligible political philosophy, it’s increasingly guided by nothing but a hatred for the Left and a blind devotion to the billionaire class.