The Eclipse of American Democracy, Part Nineteen: Income Inequality Leads to Oligarchy

"In every society known to man," wrote founding father John Adams, "an aristocracy has risen up in the course of time, consisting of a few rich and honorable families who have united with each other against both the people and the first magistrate." Or as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned: "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both." To state the obvious, in any society great wealth will tend to wield great political power, and democracy will weaken as wealth inequality becomes more acute.

Of course that might not be the case if, say, the very wealthy used their political power to reduce income inequality and improve democratic institutions. But that of course seldom happens; the super-rich Koch brothers for example have an enormous influence on the American political scene and are not only very conservative but openly contemptuous of democracy, much less on any checks on the power of wealth to shape national policy. Worse, inequality in the U.S. has risen to levels not seen since the 1920s. The top 1 percent pocket more than 20 percent of the nation's income, and the 400 richest people in the country own more wealth than everyone in the bottom 50 percent.

The power of lobbyists to shape legislation and even their own government oversight has grown to ridiculous levels; corporations commonly write their own laws. Following the Great Recession for example, the Democratic Congress passed the law commonly known as Dodd-Frank to overhaul the financial regulatory system. By 2018 Republicans were back in power, and they of course exempted dozens of U.S. banks from the Dodd–Frank Act's banking regulations. A 2013 article in the New York Times by Eric Lipton and Ben Protess describes how Republicans make a mockery of their responsibilities to conduct oversight and protect public interests:

"The House Financial Services Committee has been a natural target. Not only is it controlled by Republicans, who had opposed Dodd-Frank, but freshmen lawmakers are often appointed to the unusually large committee because it is seen as a helpful base from which they can raise campaign funds."

"One bill that sailed through the House Financial Services Committee this month — over the objections of the Treasury Department — was essentially Citigroup’s, according to e-mails reviewed by The New York Times. The bill would exempt broad swathes of trades from new regulation.

In a sign of Wall Street’s resurgent influence in Washington, Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill. Two crucial paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with other Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word."

What to do? Matt Stoller of the think-tank the Open Markets Institute suggested in the Washington Post: "If we want to restore a democratic culture, we’re going to have to not just raise the pay of public servants, but reduce inequality dramatically. We must attack the problem of a two-tiered society. We must go after the concentration of corporate assets through strong competition and anti-monopoly policy so that we don’t have a society split between billionaires with rights and powerless peasants living with varying degrees of comfort. Basic public goods – quality education, health care, transportation, nutrition — must be available to all without the need to incur huge debts. Private sector CEOs perhaps should be able to have more lavish lifestyles than the rest of us, but it should be a matter of living a fancier version of the same life. No one should go broke if they have a medical problem, not just because that’s a problem in and of itself, but because that is a route to social corruption."

In other words, Stoller thinks the restoration of democracy would be a product of the re-introduction of basic New Deal-style liberalism, redistributing wealth and reining in big business and finance. I agree. For further thoughts on the subject, I'd like to quote at length former White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers writing in The Nation:

"The Greek historian Plutarch is said to have warned that “an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of a Republic.” Yet as the Washington Post pointed out recently, income inequality may be higher at this moment than at any time in the American past.

When I was a young man in Washington in the 1960s, most of the country’s growth accrued to the bottom 90% of households. From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, in fact, income grew at a slightly faster rate at the bottom and middle of American society than at the top. In 2009, economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez explored decades of tax data and found that from 1950 through 1980 the average income of the bottom 90% of Americans had grown, from $ 17,719 to $ 30,941. That represented a 75% increase in 2008 dollars.

Since 1980, the economy has continued to grow impressively, but most of the benefits have migrated to the top. In these years, workers were more productive but received less of the wealth they were helping to create. In the late 1970s, the richest 1% received 9% of total income and held 19% of the nation’s wealth. The share of total income going to that 1% would then rise to more than 23% by 2007, while their share of total wealth would grow to 35%. And that was all before the economic meltdown of 2007-2008.

Even though everyone took a hit during the recession that followed, the top 10% now hold more than three-quarters of the country’s total family wealth.

I know, I know: statistics have a way of causing eyes to glaze over, but these statistics highlight an ugly truth about America: inequality matters. It slows economic growth, undermines health, erodes social cohesion and solidarity, and starves education. In their study The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett found that the most consistent predictor of mental illness, infant mortality, low educational achievement, teenage births, homicides, and incarceration was economic inequality."

I encourage you to read Bill Moyers' article in its entirety. In my next post, this series on the eclipse of American democracy as orchestrated by conservatives and Republican officials comes to a close. Thanks for reading.

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The Eclipse of American Democracy, Part Eighteen: Shut Up and Pray? No, This Land is Your Land

In Part Fifteen of this series, I discussed how American politics in the late 20th century came to be dominated by the anti-government philosophies of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. But the cynicism of American conservatives goes a lot deeper than just believing that government cannot help solve our problems. In fact, they frequently express the idea (as have reactionaries throughout human history) that major societal problem cannot be solved at all, that human misery is just the natural the order of things until such time as God chooses to intervene.

Monarchs have always claimed to rule by divine right. You don't like what the King is doing? Too bad. He's God's personal appointee. The rich are supposed to be rich, and the poor supposed to be poor. Don't question it. Many people know the first verse of the 19th century Anglican hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.

But fewer remember verse 3:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.

But ideas like these wouldn't take hold in America, would they? The land where no man is king, and everyone can be wealthy? Don't be too sure. Woody Guthrie wrote the radical folk song, This Your Land is Your Land, in part in response to his annoyance with the song God Bless America. The last verse of This Your Land is Your Land is:

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple,
by the relief office I saw my people.
As they stood hungry,
I stood there wondering if God blessed America for me.

Woody was suggesting that hungry Americans do something about the problems of the Great Depression and not just leave it up God to help them. I thought about this recently when White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway responded to the public discussion of the tragic Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, in which 50 people were killed and 50 others injured.

From Jillian Edevane of Newsweek: "[The media] must insert themselves. I must speak. I must say something," (Conway) said, referring to journalists and pundits. "No, you don’t. You can actually shut up and pray for people and wait for the authorities to make their judgments."

This is a post that might have belonged to the beginning of this series - a discussion of the basic differences between progressives and conservatives in how they think about collective action and problem solving. There's a reason why after a mass shooting Conway and those like her hope that the media and the public will shut and pray, and wait for "the authorities" to do something about the problem. It's because in America, if the authorities are Republicans, they will do nothing and the violence will continue.

The contrast between the response in New Zealand to the mosque shootings compared to the response to similar massacres in the United States could not be more stark. Within three days of the events at Christchurch, the government had placed a ban on semi-automatic weapons and announced a far-ranging government inquiry into events surrounding the attack. Compare that to the Republican response to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting that left 59 dead and hundreds more injured. From Benjamin Hart of New York Magazine,

"Leading the charge on Tuesday was South Dakota senator John Thune, who said in an interview with NBC News that, given the fact that there’s no way to stop a mass shooting from happening in an "open society," citizens’ best hope to avoid being violently killed is to … duck. "I think people are going to have to take steps in their own lives to take precautions to protect themselves. And in situations like that, you know, try to stay safe. As somebody said — get small.""

Learning to duck isn't a solution to gun violence any more than prayer was a solution to the Great Depression. And to give credit to Woody Guthrie one more time, he was also had something to say about the Trumps. From the New York Times:

"More than a half-century ago, the folk singer Woody Guthrie signed a lease in an apartment complex in Brooklyn. He soon had bitter words for his landlord: Donald J. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump."

"Mr. Guthrie, in writings uncovered by a scholar working on a book, invoked "Old Man Trump" while suggesting that blacks were unwelcome as tenants in the Trump apartment complex, near Coney Island."

""He thought that Fred Trump was one who stirs up racial hate, and implicitly profits from it," the scholar, Will Kaufman, a professor of American literature and culture at the University of Central Lancashire in Britain, said in an interview."

"In December 1950, Mr. Guthrie signed a lease at the Beach Haven apartment complex, Mr. Kaufman wrote in his piece. Soon, Mr. Guthrie was "lamenting the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white neighborhood," he wrote, with words like these:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project

Mr. Guthrie even reworked his song "I Ain’t Got No Home" into a critique of Fred Trump, according to Mr. Kaufman:

Beach Haven ain’t my home!
I just can’t pay this rent!
My money’s down the drain!
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!

Mr. Guthrie died in 1967, and in the 1970s, the Justice Department sued the Trumps, accusing them of discriminating against blacks. (A settlement was eventually reached; at the time, Trump Management noted the agreement did not constitute an admission of guilt.)

A spokeswoman for Donald Trump declined to comment on Mr. Guthrie’s writings."

If you're unfamiliar with just how much Donald Trump is a chip off the old block, consider what historians have to say about his father as a developer in New York City, "Every single Coney Island project that Fred Trump was involved in, from the 1940s throughout the 1960s, was touched by scandal, misappropriation of public funds, and political cronyism. The Beach Haven, Shore Haven, and Trump Village projects all led to allegations of impropriety and discrimination. There were federal hearings and investigations into Trump’s business practices, allegations of defrauding veterans in rental agreements, and charges of racism. Trump’s display of greed and avarice was unusual for a major developer. Unlike (sometime partner) Robert Moses, who was known as the master builder, Trump was more of a master manipulator. Federal laws had to be changed to prevent the kind of nefarious schemes that Trump excelled in."

Good night, and good luck.

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