@izzythepush,
This has not always been so. The Roosevelts are a prime example. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. was the eldest son of a moderately affluent Knickerbocker (Dutch) family in New York. He married Martha Stewart Bullock of Georgia, a "society" match. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., their eldest son, became the 26th President of the United States. At the outbreak of the American civil war his wife secured a promise from him that he would not join the army, although his political connections could easily have gotten him a commission. Mrs. Roosevelt was horrified at the thought that her husband would fight her brothers. So Roosevelt got together with other important and wealthy socialites, and they lobbied Congress, and an allotments bill was passed, whereby soldiers could send a part or all of their pay home, and the government would assume the cost rather than deducting it from their pay. He then spent the war traveling around the front lines to visit the well over one hundred New York regiments to convince soldiers to sign up for the allotments.
His son, Theodore, became a Republican not long after his father had died and he had graduated from Harvard. He was considered a radical, and his first effort in the New York Assembly was to reduce and fix the price of fares on the elevated railway in New York City, an important issue to working class men. He saw himself as a member of the party of Lincoln, and his duty as being in the service of the "common man." (They all had feet of clay, of course--he was a typical Lily White racist of that time, calling Margaret Sanger a "race traitor" for advocating the use of birth control by white women.) As president, he became known as the "trust buster," for going after cartels which he considered to be engaged in price-fixing. He desegregated the Federal civil service, precisely because the Republicans were, ostensibly, the party of Lincoln. (Not to worry, though--Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat and hero of the Paris Peace Accords, with his Fourteen Points, instituted segregation again in the Federal bureaucracy after white women complained about being obliged to work in the same offices as black women.) If not perfect, Roosevelt at least had followed the old American tradition that wealth and privilege imposed a responsibility to guard the interests of those who were neither wealthy nor powerful.
Franklin Roosevelt shared a common ancestor with Theodore, Jr. about five generations previously. He married Eleanor Roosevelt, the daughter of Theodore's younger brother. By the time he entered politics, the Republicans were discredited, although no more than the Democrats--both because of "machine" politics. Franklin became a Democrat, and he had the same attitude as his cousin, and his wife's uncle, Theodore. Wealth and privilege imposed a responsibility on his social class, and that responsibility was to all the people of the country. By that time, the idea was losing favor, and many wealthy Americans considered him a "traitor" to his class. FDR, though was related to a great many wealthy and powerful families (even to Winston Churchill, through their mothers--they were seventh cousins once removed), and he never failed to use his influence to advance his agenda.
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Of course, the Roosevelts were arguably the last members of their social class to practice those principles. The Bush family, which based its wealth on a steel mill in Columbus, Ohio, have been linked to German industrialists who helped to finance the rise of the NSDAP. Prescott Bush, father to the first President Bush, and grandfather of the second, was a director of a company the assets of which were seized in 1942 under the trading with the enemy act.
I'll let The Guardian tell that story.. I'm not calling either of the Presidents Bush Nazis, although I'm certain that the conservatives here will want to whine about that. But the attitudes of the Roosevelts and those of the Bush family, are a stark contrast.
