Frank Rich: The Rabbit Ragu Democrats

IN the annals of American excess, there often arrives a moment when those with too much money, too much clout and too much hubris just can’t stop themselves from tempting the fates. They throw an over-the-top party in public, or parade their wealth and power before the press, and the next thing you know their world, and sometimes ours, has crashed.

In the go-go Reagan 1980s, the junk bond king Michael Milken bedazzled investors with lavish Predators’ Balls in Beverly Hills. Sure enough, he and Wall Street would end the decade in ruin. Back East, the financier Saul Steinberg celebrated his 50th birthday in 1989 with a $1 million party in the Hamptons. “Honey, if this moment were a stock, I’d short it,” he said when toasting his wife. He would soon suffer a stroke and see his company go bankrupt.

Steinberg sold his vast New York apartment to the private equity titan Stephen Schwarzman. In February 2007, Schwarzman marked his 60th birthday with a highly visible multimillion-dollar bacchanal in the Park Avenue Armory. Though Schwarzman hasn’t suffered much since — he is tied for 50th on the new Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans — his bash presaged the bust to come. He became, as James Stewart wrote in The New Yorker, “the designated villain of an era on Wall Street — an era of rapacious capitalists and heedless self-indulgence.”