Sam the Ghastly Arriviste

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I think you're falling for a typically devious piece of Gamgee propaganda, Lalwendë.

Clearly the established squirearchy of the Shire was a barrier to the attainment of Sam's overriding ambition to become nothing less than president for life, with unlimited authority, a vast publicly funded expense account and several lucrative lecture tours. Subtly he works to insinuate himself into the good graces of the more disreputable elements of the gentry, scraping a classical education where he can along the way so that he can observe closely how they behave and ape them where necessary. But he carefully cultivates his working-class salt-of-the-earth act as well so that he can switch between them depending on his audience.

After winning fame in a rather obvious way largely off the back of Frodo's great sacrifice and using his part in the war to scrape up popular votes, he can take advantage of the exhaustion and extinction of the House of Baggins, and the escapist descent into self-serving decadence of the traumatised Took and Brandybuck clans to establish himself as 'the people's hero'. This enables him to further his interests among the Shire's business community whilst still appearing to be an honest son of the soil. By parroting the empty rhetoric of social justice to remove the traditional checks on his mayoral power and simultaneously ingratiating himself with entrepreneurs like Gimli and celebrities like Aragorn, he can quietly turn the Shire into his own private fiefdom, appointing his cronies to positions of authority, selling titles he has bankrupted to anyone with enough mithril and abusing his position to acquire property he can barely afford. He exploits his not inconsiderable gift for ingenuousness to increase social division and reduce upward mobility whilst being hailed as a champion of social reform. In short, following an ugly career of upper-middle-class opportunism and exploitation and calling it meritocratic.

Eventually, having bled the Shire dry, banned pipeweed and put proper 1420 out of the reach of all but the super-rich, he can retire to his sun-kissed Valinorean tax-haven to avoid his own draconian financial policies, while playing on his connexion with the genuine hero Frodo to infiltrate polite Valinorean society and spread his faux-democratic poison there as well. Never underestimate how far you can go by playing on inverted snobbery.