This is Part 2 of our journey in the series, “Democracy in Crisis: We’ve Been Headed Here for Decades.” A coming overthrow was predictable at least thirty years ago, unless we instituted a major course change. How could we have seen this and how can we save democracy?
To begin understanding this, we must explore some concepts about patterns of history we are following and human behavior, including the trends of all government types. Our Founding Fathers knew these concepts well, and they understood the nature of power and oligarchy. We must too, if we want to save democracy.
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History shows us that democracies are fragile. There will always be a few people who lust for control of government and hate sharing power with the masses, so they will attempt to overthrow a weakened democratic government. For example, in An Overview of Classical Greek History from Mycenae to Alexander, Thomas R. Martin talks about a coup in ancient Athens during 411 BCE that overthrew democracy:
The turmoil in Athenian politics and revenues resulting from the Sicilian defeat opened the way for some influential Athenian men, who had long harbored contempt for the broad-based democracy of their city-state, to stage what amounted to an oligarchic coup d'état. They insisted that a small group of elite leaders could manage Athenian policy better than the democratic assembly.
Coups are nothing new. We need only study history to see the pattern of struggle against oligarchies.
What Is the Trend of All Government Types?
To understand how to create a new government with the best possible chance of surviving, our Founding Fathers and others studied the rise and fall of European governments dating back to ancient times. They saw that all systems of government had involved a power struggle. Samuel Johnson, an English essayist and moralist, wrote about this on April 10, 1753:
Power is always gradually stealing away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilant and consistent; it still contracts to a smaller number, till in time it centers in a single person.
Thus, all the forms of governments instituted among mankind, perpetually tend towards monarchy; and power, however diffused through the whole community, is by negligence or corruption, commotion or distress, reposed at last in the chief magistrate.
Johnson laid out the stages of power consolidation that we are following even today:
- Democracy – power distributed among the people
- Oligarchy – power concentrated in the hands of a few selfish, greedy, and corrupt individuals, not just the rich, who control or influence the many
- Autocracy – rule by a single person
Oligarchy is a form of authoritarianism. As “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” corruption of government grows. When oligarchs are not held accountable, they become ruthless, increasingly preying first on the most vulnerable citizens – people of color, the poor, and others who do not fit their “ideal.” Then, as their power grows, they start preying on the general population more and more.
Because there will always be a few people who lust for more control, democracy will never be safe. Some who are fortunate and attain wealth use it to buy political muscle. Then, they use their influence to change laws and give themselves even more affluence and control, thereby consolidating power among the wealthy.
Power is a zero-sum game — one person’s gain is another’s loss. When the few are allowed to hold most of the power, the rest of the people, naturally, have less to share among themselves.
Wealth is politically powerful; however, it is not a zero-sum game because the government can always print more money, for example.
It’s the power factor of massive wealth that destroys democracies. In fact, immense wealth and the political power it buys have become a danger to the U.S. government and the world. Donald Trump, an autocrat, is a symptom of power consolidation. This common trend of all government types allows us to easily predict the arrival of a tyrant like him. In fact, in 1998, Richard Rorty, author of Achieving Our Country, predicted exactly how we would end up with a strongman, like Trump.
Unless you are among the super-rich in this country, you are, presently, in a struggle for your life. We must unite and demand reforms from our government; otherwise, the oligarchy will take full charge and install another tyrant.
Jefferson’s Warning: Wolves & Sheep of Europe
Our Founding Fathers feared oligarchy, tyrants, and the trend of all governments toward abuse of power. Thomas Jefferson, for example, not only studied the rise and fall of European governments, but he also lived in Europe as a diplomat and saw there were two classes of people: those with wealth and power and those without. He detested the ruthlessness that concentrated power created, which was akin to what we are seeing in America now. The rich Europeans were living off the oppression of the poor, forcing them to pay all of the taxes.
Moreover, for most of history, governments supported “survival of the fittest” or “natural selection” thinking. Just before James Madison and Alexander Hamilton began writing the Constitution in May of 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote a warning letter to Edward Carrington on January 16, 1787 (bolding my own):
Among the [European governments], under pretence of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves & sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe. Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you & I, & Congress & Assemblies, judges & governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
Jefferson’s words are prescient. He warns that if the public becomes “inattentive to the public affairs,” Congress, judges, governors, the wealthy, and others would become “wolves.”
Jefferson believed this so strongly that he even applied the idea to himself and Carrington, saying that they, too, would become ruthless and prey on the rest of the sheep.
Donald Trump and his oligarchs exemplify the ruthlessness that power consolidation creates.
The American Caste System
All governments have the potential for class struggle, but from colonization, the British created a government-sanctioned caste system in America, a man-made social order that ranked the value of certain societal groups.
Class, race, and gender are intertwined. Many who are higher up in the power and wealth structure use the American system to justify a different treatment and living standard for those people who rank below them in the social order. Rich White men — wealthy oligarchs — own the top level, while Black and indigenous people struggle at the bottom. Everyone else falls somewhere in between. And in a caste system like this, it’s nearly impossible to move from a lower station to a higher one, especially since the middle class is almost gone now.
Women fall below men in the U.S. power hierarchy. While other democracies have had women serve as presidents or prime ministers, America has yet to do so. Even White women rank below White men in this country. Why? Because the abuse of power includes misogyny and racism — and both thrive in the U.S.
American Democracy Nearly Died in the Past
We must look at our past — to a time when democracy nearly died, to see the similarities and also the solutions, which offer us hope and a path forward.
The Gilded Age (Circa 1870 to 1896)
The Industrial Revolution — which had barely gotten started when our Constitution was written — brought numerous changes, including the ability to grow obscene wealth quickly at the expense of the American people. In 1888, Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th President of the United States from 1877 to 1881, wrote in his diary,
The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.
Named for Mark Twain’s 1873 book, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, a novel that satirized greed, lust for materialism, and corruption, it was an era of great wealth and great poverty. Nell Irvin Painter, an historian, said, “Gilded is not golden. Gilded has the sense of a patina covering something else. It’s the shiny exterior and the rot underneath.”
Because corporate oligarchs — robber barons — owned the U.S. government, they used the government to create laws benefiting themselves. Of course, they desired the freedom to become as prosperous and powerful as they could at the expense of the American people. Accordingly, they rigged the U.S. economy to work toward these ends, defining whose freedom and prosperity were important and for whom the government worked. Such is the nature of power and oligarchy.
When oligarchs own the government, they increase oppression, especially of a nation’s most vulnerable people. (The slaveowners were oligarchs.) Like today, Gilded-Age oligarchs possessed a “profits-at-all-costs” mentality. As a result, laissez-faire capitalism ruled, meaning the government took a hands-off stance and did little to protect the American people from power accumulation, rampant corruption, the exploitation of workers, and racism.
It was during the Gilded Age that Black civil rights advances, which followed the Civil War in the Reconstruction era (1865-1877), came to an end. Then, the Jim Crow Era of oppression, intimidation, and terrorism by White supremacists emerged stronger than ever, lasting until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The corrupt and greedy among us took advantage of race and child labor, paid workers low wages, and provided them with few benefits. People were forced to work extreme hours. They were sold unsafe food and medications. Women were denied the right to vote. Wars were even started to increase the profits and power of oligarchs. They also instituted other oppressive measures — all justified by their “survival of the fittest” thinking.
While millions of Americans died for lack of healthcare and safety nets, the oligarchs felt blameless. After all, they were profiting and succeeding in their efforts to “decrease the surplus population,” just as Scrooge desired in A Christmas Carol.
The Progressive Era (Circa 1896-1916)
Moral outrage over poor living and working conditions and blatant corruption eventually turned into civil unrest and action, which gave rise to the Progressive Era — a period of widespread social activism and political reform in America. Key groups of people created or joined movements to organize and fight back against the oligarchy and the main problems of the Gilded Age.
Because journalists and writers (known as “muckrakers”) exposed corruption in industry and at the local, state, and national level of government, angry Americans took to combatting immorality. In addition to demanding government regulations of industry, Americans started thinking outside the box to take their power back from crooked politicians. Ballot initiatives, referendums, and recalls of politicians took hold as well as a direct primary election that allowed citizens to nominate their own candidates. The Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, required that all senators be elected by the people (they were formerly appointed by state legislatures).
As progressives worked to improve working and living conditions, President Theodore Roosevelt became the head of the movement, taking office in 1901.
History.com says of this period:
Although Roosevelt supported corporate America, he also felt there should be federal controls in place to keep excessive corporate greed in check and prevent individuals from making obscene amounts of money off the backs of immigrants and the lower class.
Helped by the [muckrakers] and the White House, the Progressive Era ushered in many reforms that helped shift away power from robber barons, such as:
- trust busting
- labor reform
- women’s suffrage
- birth control
- formation of trade unions
- increased conservation efforts
- food and medicine regulations
- tax reform
- civil rights
- election reform
- fair labor standards
These reforms returned power to the American people by breaking up monopolies (the basis for fascism) and creating a middle class that made life better for millions.
The Progressive Era, which saved American democracy from a premature death, came to an end with the start of America’s involvement in World War I.
The Great Depression & the New Deal
It wasn’t long before the oligarchs started concentrating their power once again after WWI and the Spanish Flu (1918-1919) pandemic. As a result, inequality again began to rise in the Roaring Twenties and progressed until the stock market crash of 1929. In the widespread misery of the Great Depression era, which offers many parallels to our situation today, Republican President Herbert Hoover bailed out big business leaving Main Street to fend for itself.
Then, Franklin D. Roosevelt won in a presidential landslide in 1932. Back then, presidents didn’t take office until March 4, which prolonged the misery for Americans who had to wait for the new President to take control of the situation and give them some relief.
Few Americans realize how close we came to losing democracy during the Great Depression. Walter Lippmann, a reporter and political commentator, “famously noted” the conditions before and after FDR’s first 100 days in office and the difference the New Deal made:
At the end of February, we were a congeries of disorderly panic-stricken mobs and factions. In the hundred days from March to June we became again an organized nation confident of our power to provide for our own security and to control our own destiny.
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal saved democracy from fascist and communist control. Most people today are familiar with some of the programs that originated in the New Deal, such as Social Security. However, its underlying force was the countervailing (offsetting) of corporate power against the reforms that had been designed to protect the people. These protections included various social programs, wealth taxes, regulations against corruption and fraud, strengthened unions, and more.
However, to get the New Deal passed, legislators made concessions. Jim Crow laws, which mandated racial segregation, culminated in the National Housing Act of 1934 which—on the surface—aimed to improve housing conditions, make home ownership more accessible, and reduce the foreclosure rate during the Great Depression. In practice, however, the Act kept people of color out of White communities and denied them affordable housing. And because Black families were limited as to where they could live, work, educate their children, and more, this policy resulted in urban decay and created immense gaps in wealth, education, healthcare, and so much more.
The Great Society Reforms
The most recent of the great reform initiatives that strengthened democracy arose from the demands of the people in the 1950s and 1960s. President Lyndon Johnson created the Great Society reforms in the 1960s. Among its most well-known initiatives are the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, and Medicaid. However, the reforms were much broader. They addressed education, urban problems, rural poverty, healthcare, welfare, the arts and cultural institutions, transportation, consumer protection, housing, rural development, and labor. The main goals of the Great Society were to put an end to poverty and racial injustice, reduce crime, and improve the environment.
The Rise of Oligarchy Post WWII & the Attack of Enlightenment Principles
Why are we seemingly back in the Gilded Age again?
History doesn’t always progress linearly. It sometimes regresses because the people’s vigilance is cyclical. It takes major crises for the people to wake up and realize that their government is broken. Only then are they sufficiently motivated and willing to turn their outrage into action. Unfortunately, time and time again, once the government reforms are implemented, the people go back to being spectators.
Since the Civil Rights era, we haven’t had massive grassroots activism to push major reforms. Only one cause, like healthcare, every decade or two, has been taken up. Since the mid 1970s, there has been too little action from the people to protect themselves from power steals. For 40+ years, oligarchs have been busy destroying the gains made in the New Deal and Great Society reforms.
Backlash to the New Deal & Civil Rights
As oligarchs’ have gained power in the past few decades, they set their sights on ever loftier goals. As is typical when oligarchs gain more power, more and more human rights begin to disappear, such as the already hard-won rights for people of color and women’s rights to control their own bodies.
Supreme Court Bar judge James Dannenberg gives us a warning of where we are headed in his March 2020 resignation letter to Chief Justice John Roberts.
It is clear to me that your Court is willfully hurtling back to the cruel days of Lochner and even Plessy. The only constitutional freedoms ultimately recognized may soon be limited to those useful to wealthy, Republican, White, straight, Christian, and armed males— and the corporations they control. This is wrong. Period. This is not America.
Lochner (1905) refers to a desire for oligarchs to set their own working environments including the length of hours demanded of workers and the lack of protections from terrible working conditions. Plessy (1896) refers to the segregation of Black people. Both are examples of Gilded-Age thinking.
The Backlash to the Age of Enlightenment
Most troubling, we are not just going back to the cruelty of the Gilded Age. Anti-democracy oligarchs today are working toward a whole new, very dystopian world order.
The oligarchs in power today actually intend to overturn the principles that gave us our representative democracy. We are presently headed for a scenario like existed in feudalistic Europe, exactly what Thomas Jefferson warned of.
Feudalistic Europe used the notion of the divine right of kings as a basis for their authority. Monarchies viewed their absolute power as God’s mandate, believing they were “chosen” to rule over everyone else. It’s no surprise that many far-right Christians today have come to view Trump as God’s “Chosen,” even giving him the mandate to rule America in a White Christian nationalist theocracy.
While these old ideas about monarchies and the Church were alive when the colonists were settling in America, beliefs at that time were also changing. The Age of Enlightenment (a.k.a. Age of Reason), with its roots in Renaissance humanism, swept Europe and undermined the authority of the monarchy, as well as some of the power of the Catholic Church.
Our Founders based the Declaration of Independence and our governance on Enlightenment principles. The article “Enlightenment and German Idealism” explains the movement:
The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on reason as the primary source of knowledge and advanced ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government and separation of church and state.
Today’s oligarchs are leading us all the way back to a pre-Enlightenment thinking! To prevent this, we must, for one thing, initiate major reforms to help the American people, like we did in the past.
Coming Up…
In the next article of this series, we will continue to examine how we got in this mess by exploring the dominant ideology and narrative that oligarchs are using today to control people and gain more power.
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