Is the Reason Some Wealthy People Oppose Democracy Deeper Than We Think?
By Thom Hartmann for the
An extraordinary investigative report from documented.net tells how morbidly rich families, their companies, and
their personal foundations are funding efforts to limit or restrict democracy
across the United States.
In an article co-published with The Guardian, they noted:
“The advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the powerful conservative think tank based in Washington, spent more than $5m on lobbying in 2021 as it worked to block federal voting rights legislation and advance an ambitious plan to spread its far-right agenda calling for aggressive voter suppression measures in battleground states.”
Their efforts have had substantial success, as you can read in
Documented’s article.
This effort, of course, is not unique to the one think tank they
called out. From Donald Trump all the way down to the lowest Republican county
official, efforts to make it harder for what John Adams called “the rabble” to
vote and otherwise participate in democracy are in full swing across America.
But why? Why are some wealthy people so opposed to expanding
democracy in America?
Most Americans — and lots of editorial writers — are convinced it’s simply because rich folks want to influence legislation to benefit themselves and keep their regulations and taxes down. I proposed a motive like that in yesterday’s Daily Take.
And surely, for some, that’s the largest part of it. But that’s
not the entire story.
I can’t claim (nor would I) to know the exact motives driving the
various wealthy individuals funding efforts to reduce the Black, Hispanic,
senior, and youth vote. But history does suggest that many are trying to
“stabilize” America rather than just pillage her.
They are worried that America is suffering from too much
democracy.
The modern-day backstory to this starts in the early 1950s when
conservative thinker Russell Kirk proposed a startling hypothesis that would
fundamentally change our nation and the world.
The American middle-class at that time was growing more rapidly
than any middle-class had ever grown in the history of the world, both in terms
of the number of people in the middle class, the income of those people, and
the overall wealth that those people were accumulating.
The middle-class was growing in wealth and income back then, in
fact, faster than were the top 1%.
Kirk and colleagues like William F. Buckley postulated that if the
middle-class and minorities became too wealthy, they’d feel the safety and
freedom to throw themselves actively into our political processes, as rich
people had historically done.
That expansion of democracy, they believed, would produce an
absolute collapse of our nation’s social order — producing chaos, riots, and
possibly even the end of the republic.
The first chapter of Kirk’s 1951 book, The
Conservative Mind, is devoted to Edmund Burke,
the British conservative who Thomas Paine visited for two weeks in 1793 on his
way to get arrested in
the French revolution. Paine was so outraged by Burke’s arguments that he wrote
an entire book rebutting them titled The Rights of
Man. It’s still in print (as is Burke).
Burke was defending, among other things, Britain’s restrictions on
democracy, including limits on who could vote or run for office, and the
British maximum wage.
That’s right, maximum wage.
Burke and his contemporaries in the late 1700s believed that if
working-class people made too much money, they’d have enough spare time to use
democratic processes to challenge the social order and collapse the British
kingdom.
Too much democracy, Burke believed, was a dangerous thing: deadly
to nations and a violation of evolution and nature itself.
Summarizing his debate with Paine about the French Revolution,
Burke wrote:
“The occupation of a hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler
[candle maker], cannot be a matter of honour to any person—to say nothing of a
number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to
suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression, if such as
they, either individually or collectively are permitted to rule [by voting]. In
this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.”
That was why Parliament passed a law making it illegal for
employers to pay people over a certain amount, so as to keep
wage-earners right at the edge of poverty throughout their lives.
It was explicitly to avoid too much democracy and preserve the
stability of the kingdom. (For the outcome of this policy, read pretty much any
Dickens novel.)
Picking up on this, Kirk’s followers argued that if the American
middle-class became wealthy enough to have time for political activism, there
would be similarly dire consequences.
Young people would cease to respect their elders, they
warned. Women would stop respecting (and depending on) their husbands.
Minorities would begin making outrageous demands and set the country on fire.
When Kirk laid this out in 1951, only a few conservative
intellectuals took him seriously.
Skeptics of multiracial egalitarian democracy like William F.
Buckley and Barry Goldwater were electrified by his writings and line of
thinking, but Republicans like then-President Dwight Eisenhower said of people
like Kirk and his wealthy supporters:
“Their
numbers are negligible and they are stupid.“
And then came the 1960s.
— In 1961, the birth control pill was legalized and by 1964 was in
widespread use; this helped kick off the Women’s Liberation Movement, as women,
now in control of their reproductive capacity, demanded equality in the
workplace. Bra burning became a thing, at least in pop culture lore.
— By 1967, young people on college campuses were also in revolt;
the object of their anger was an illegal war in Vietnam. Along with national
protest, draft card burning was also a thing.
— The labor movement was feeling it’s oats: strikes spread across
America throughout the 1960s from farm workers in California to steel workers
in Pennsylvania. In the one year of 1970 alone, over 3 million workers walked out in
5,716 strikes.
— And throughout that decade African Americans were demanding an
end to police violence and an expansion of Civil and Voting Rights. In response
to several brutal and well-publicized instances of police violence against
Black people in the late 1960s, riots broke out and several of our cities were
on fire.
These four movements all hitting America at the same time got the
attention of Republicans who had previously ignored or even ridiculed Kirk’s
1950s warnings about the dangers of the middle class and minorities embracing
democracy.
Suddenly, he seemed like a prophet. And the GOP turned on a dime.
The Republican/Conservative “solution” to the “national crisis”
these movements represented was put into place with the election of 1980: the
project of the Reagan Revolution was to dial back democracy while taking the
middle class down a peg, and thus end the protests and social
instability.
Their goal was, at its core, to save America from itself.
The plan was to declare war on labor unions so wages could slide
down or at least remain frozen for a few decades; end free college across the
nation so students would study in fear rather than be willing to protest; and
increase the penalties Nixon had already put on drugs so they could use those
laws against hippy antiwar protesters and Black people demanding participation
in democracy.
As Nixon‘s right hand man, John
Ehrlichman, told reporter Dan Baum:
“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon
campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the
antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying?
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war
or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and
Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those
communities.
“We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their
meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we
were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
While it looks from the outside like the singular mission of the
Reagan Revolution was simply to help rich people and giant corporations get
richer and more powerful (and that’s certainly been the effect), the ideologues
driving the movement also thought they were restoring stability to the United
States, both socially, economically, and — most important — politically.
The middle class was out of control by the late 1960s, they
believed, and something had to be done. There was too much democracy, and it
was tearing America apart.
Looking back at the “solutions” England used around the time of
the American Revolution (and for 1000 years before) and advocated by Edmund
Burke and other conservative thinkers throughout history, Republicans saw a
remedy to the crisis. As a bonus, it had the side effect of helping their
biggest donors and thus boosting their political war-chests.
If working people, women, minorities, and students were a bit more
desperate about their economic situations, these conservative thinkers
asserted, then they’d be less likely to organize, protest, strike, or even
vote. The unevenness, the instability, the turbulence of democracy in
the 1960s would be calmed.
— To accomplish this, Reagan massively cut taxes on rich people
and raised taxes on working-class people 11 times.
— He put a tax on Social Security income and unemployment benefits
and put in a mechanism to track and tax tips income, all of which had
previously been tax-free but were exclusively needed and used by working-class
people.
— He ended the deductibility of credit-card, car-loan and student-debt interest,
overwhelmingly claimed by working-class people. At the same time, he cut the
top tax bracket for millionaires and multimillionaires from 74% to 27%. (There
were no billionaires in America then, in large part because of FDR’s previous
tax policies; the modern explosion of billionaires followed Reagan’s massive
tax cuts for the rich.)
— He declared war on labor unions, crushed PATCO in less than a
week, and over the next decade the result of his war on labor was that union
membership went from about a third of the American non-government workforce
when he came into office to around 10% today.
— He brought a young
lawyer named John Roberts into the White House to work out ways to overturn the
1973 Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision. His VP brought in his son,
George W., to build bridges between the GOP and the most fanatical branches of
evangelical Christianity, who opposed both women’s rights and the Civil Rights
movement.
— He and Bush also husbanded the moribund 1947 General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trades (GATT, which let Clinton help create the WTO) and NAFTA,
which opened a floodgate for American companies to move manufacturing overseas,
leaving American workers underemployed while cutting corporate donor’s labor
costs and union membership.
And, sure enough, it worked.
— Reagan’s doubling-down on the War on Drugs shattered Black
communities and our prison population became the largest in the world, both as
a percentage of our population and in absolute numbers.
— His War on Labor cut average inflation-adjusted minimum and
median wages by more over a couple of decades than anybody had seen since the
Republican Great Depression of the 1930s.
— And his War on Students jacked up the cost of education so high
that an entire generation is today so saddled with more than $1.7 trillion in
student debt that many aren’t willing to jeopardize their future by “acting up”
on campuses.
The key to selling all this to the American people was the idea
that the US shouldn’t protect the rights of workers, subsidize education, or
enforce Civil Rights laws because, Republicans said, government itself is a
remote, dangerous and incompetent power that can legally use guns to enforce
its will.
As Reagan told us in his first inaugural, democracy was not the
solution to our problems, but democracy — government — instead was the
problem itself.
He ridiculed the once-noble idea of service to one’s country
and joked that there were really no good people left in government because
if they were smart or competent they’d be working in the private sector for a
lot more money.
He told us that the nine most frightening words in the English
language were:
“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, wealthy people associated with
Kirk’s and Reagan’s Republicans built a massive infrastructure of think tanks
and media outlets to promote and amplify this message about the dangers of too
much democracy.
As the reporting from documented.net
indicates, they’re working at it with as much enthusiasm today as ever.
It so completely swept America that by the 1990s even President
Bill Clinton was repeating things like, “The era of big government is over,”
and “This is the end of welfare as we know it.” Limbaugh, Hannity and other
right-wing radio talkers were getting millions a year in subsidies from groups like
the Heritage Foundation, the group documented.net wrote about
yesterday.
Fox News today carries on the tradition, warning almost daily
about the danger of “people in the streets” or political movements like
anti-fascism and BLM.
When you look at the long arc of post-Agricultural Revolution
human history you discover that Burke was right when he claimed that oligarchy
— rule by the rich — has been the norm, not the exception.
And it’s generally provided at least a modicum of stability:
feudal Europe changed so little for over a thousand years that we simply refer
to that era as the Dark Ages followed by the Middle Ages without detail. It’s
all kind of black-and-white fuzzy in our mind’s eye.
Popes, kings, queens, pharaohs, emperors: none allowed democracy
because all knew it was both a threat to their wealth and power but also
because, they asserted, it would render their nations unstable.
These historic leaders — and their modern day “strongman” versions
emerging in former democracies like Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Egypt, The
Philippines, and Russia — are the model for many of today’s conservatives. And
not just because they were rich.
Understanding this history gives us clues to how we can revive
democracy in America. Step one is to help people realize that instability, like
labor pains before birth, is not a bad thing for a democracy but most
frequently is a sign of emerging and positive political and social advances.
Hopefully one day soon our vision of an all-inclusive democracy —
the original promise of America, to quote historian Harvey Kaye —
will be realized. But first we’re going to have to get past the millions of
dollars mobilized by democracy’s skeptics.
I believe it’s possible. But it’s going to take all of us getting
involved to make it happen. As both Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama were fond
of saying: “Democracy is not a spectator sport.”
Tag, we’re it.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of Neoliberalism and more than 30+ other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute and his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.