The Hidden History of American Oligarchy

The Hidden History of American Oligarchy

Copyright © 2021 by Thom Hartmann

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First Edition

Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-5230-9158-4

PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-9159-1

IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-9160-7

Digital audio ISBN 978-1-5230-9161-4

2020-1

Book production: Linda Jupiter Productions; Cover design: Wes Youssi, M.80 Design; Interior design: Good Morning Graphics; Edit: Elissa Rabellino; Proofread: Mary Kanable; Index: Paula C. Durbin-Westby

Dedicated to Louise Hartmann, forever.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?

I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us.

It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.

As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

—Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address, 1838

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION: AMERICA SLIDES INTO OLIGARCHY AND DANCES CLOSE TO TYRANNY

PART ONE: THE CRISIS OF OLIGARCHY

Modern Oligarchy Erupts

The Presidency: Trump’s Playbook

A Second American Civil War?

Control the Media

Controlling Congress (Both Federal and State)

Seize the Courts

Inevitable Tyranny

How Oligrachs Seized the GOP

The Oligarchs’ Most Successful Con

The Crisis

PART TWO: HOW OLIGARCHY LED TO THE CIVIL WAR

An Awakened Generation Challenges British Oligarchy

Just Idealists, or Is Democracy in Our Genes?

Revolutionary Principles: Born Equal

Best-Laid Plans for Liberty: Ending American Slavery

New Technology, New Oligarchy

Where Cotton Is King, Cotton Makes Kings

The Oligarchs’ War

PART THREE: HOW OLIGARCHS HUNG ON AFTER THE CIVIL WAR: CONTROLLING FREE COMMONERS

Control and Safety: The Conservatism of Oligarchy

Slavery Is Legal in the United States in 2021

Through Debt, Oligarchs Can Still Own People

Oligarchs Use Medical Debt as an Instrument of Control

Oligarchs Control the Commoners through Illiteracy and Student Debt

Controlling the Commoners: When All Else Fails, Bring in the Police

The Oligarchs’ Biggest Threat: An Educated Middle Class with Leisure

PART FOUR: A THIRD OLIGARCHY RISES WITH THE REAGAN REVOLUTION

Oligarchs Use the 14th Amendment to Get Corporate Personhood

The Supreme Court Sets Up American Oligarchy

“Starve the Beast” and Gut the Republic

Holding Power: Buying Friends on Both Sides of the Aisle

PART FIVE: WHEN OLIGARCHY BECOMES TYRANNY

Lies: The First Step from Oligarchy to Tyranny

Tyrants Modify the Very Language of a Culture

“Deconstruct the State”

Scapegoating to Dilute the Outrage

Scapegoating Race, Religion, Gender

Normalizing Outrageous Behavior

Tyrants Always Corrupt Police

A Tyrant’s Tool: Obedience

Take Militias and Violence Seriously

PART SIX: BREAKING OLIGARCHY, RESTORING DEMOCRACY

Breaking Oligarchy: The Oligarchs’ Media Empire

Breaking Oligarchy: A Free Press

Breaking Oligarchy: Economic Rights for Everybody

Breaking Oligarchy: Tax the Crap Out of the Rich

Breaking Oligarchy: Prosecute Trump and His Henchmen under the Hatch Act

Breaking Oligarchy: Publicly Funded Elections

Breaking Oligarchy: Support the Resistance

Breaking Oligarchy: Restore Election Integrity

Breaking Oligarchy: Build Progressive Institutions Instead of Just Providing Three-Year Grants

Breaking Oligarchy: Help Republicans Reinvent the GOP

Breaking Oligarchy: Rebuild a Progressive Democratic Party

We Now Know . . .

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

This book was written during the spring and summer of 2020, and although it was published in the early spring of 2021, the vagaries of the publishing business didn’t allow for any last-minute edits or changes after the November 3, 2020, elections.

If Donald Trump was reelected or somehow managed to remain president after January 20, 2021, then we must take to the streets. This is most likely democracy’s last stand.

If Joe Biden or another Democrat was elected, we have a lot of work to do.

Many of the holes, cracks, and weaknesses in our republic that Trump exploited were put into place by the Supreme Court in the 1970s and by Congress after 9/11.

The Buckley and Bellotti Supreme Court decisions of the 1970s legalized bribery and political corruption by giving corporations and billionaires the “free speech right” to own politicians and political parties. The Patriot Act and other similar legislation since 9/11 has given the president vast surveillance and police powers that we’ve seen used in authoritarian, strongman governments throughout history.

We must reevaluate, rescind, and replace all of these with legislation that protects the rule of law, circumscribes presidential war-making powers, blocks foreign countries and oligarchs from corrupting our political process, and takes political power away from American oligarchs and returns it to the people.

There’s also the possibility that the next GOP candidate for president will come from, or be one of, the same oligarchs who brought Trump to power and worked to keep him there for a full four years. They will have watched Trump carefully and learned from all the ways he bent and broke our laws and institutions.

Americans must now prepare politically for 2024, and that starts by picking candidates and promoting policies that will beat oligarchy at both the presidential and congressional levels.

But most urgently, the entire country must laser-focus on stripping the oligarchic and fascistic elements that have crept into our republic since the Powell Memo, multiple Supreme Court interventions, and the Patriot Act with the war crimes and torture it has already facilitated.

America is at a turning point, and whether we continue our slide into oligarchy and tyranny or pull back to small-d democratic values will depend, in no small part, on the planning and work we do now, and the candidates and policies we support and put forward two and four years from now.

INTRODUCTION

America Slides into Oligarchy and Dances Close to Tyranny

Democracy is rule of, by, and for the people; oligarchy is rule of, by, and for the rich.

This book details how oligarchs have unsuccessfully tried, twice, to replace democracy in America with oligarchy. Today, they are nearly finished with not only attempting a third time to change the American experiment from a democracy to an oligarchy, but pushing to then transition our nation from oligarchy to outright tyranny. It also lays out the steps necessary to stop and reverse the process, to restore democracy in our republic.

The transition from democracy to oligarchy usually starts with the very wealthy acquiring political power by buying influence with elected officials. They typically justify this with a belief that oligarchy is more stable and less messy than democracy, and that their success demonstrates that a sort of Darwinian process has chosen them to lead.

From there, they begin to so completely control the mechanisms of information (the media) and campaigns (financing campaigns directly, as well as indirectly via third-party groups) that their agenda overwhelms the governing agenda.

In the final stages, oligarchs themselves—or people so tightly aligned with them that they could only be called agents of particular oligarchs—rise up through seemingly democratic processes and take complete or near-complete control of government.

From there, oligarchs typically begin to, as Steve Bannon said was the main goal of the Trump administration, “deconstruct the administrative state,” seizing control over and corrupting every subordinate agency of government, from those responsible for enforcing the laws and the courts, to regulatory agencies, to those controlling the nation’s currency and economy.

America has been badly corrupted by oligarchy several times in our past, most famously when the pre–Civil War South, after the invention of the cotton gin, became a rigidified oligarchy that eventually challenged the power of the nation itself, leading to the deaths of more than 600,000 Americans. The oligarchs lost in that battle, although their legacy remains in an impoverished South and deeply ingrained structural and cultural barriers to Black advancement and supports for white rule.

The second major brush with oligarchy in the United States came toward the end of the 1800s as the industrial revolution spawned a new group of American oligarchs, who in 1920 reached the pinnacle of their power and seized control of much of the federal government. Their removal of the guardrails of democracy led to the Roaring Twenties, when the very rich got much richer and everybody else got poorer, a widespread American fascist movement was birthed (complete with rallies), and the oligarchs’ rule collapsed with the Republican Great Depression.

We are living through America’s third struggle with oligarchy. It began in 1971, when Lewis Powell, himself a proud agent of the tobacco oligarchs, laid out in a famous memo to the US Chamber of Commerce a plan for the various oligarchs of America to stop competing and organize to take over the US government.

By 1980, the plan was in full flower, and by the late 1990s, the oligarchs directly or indirectly controlled a majority of the states, the entire Republican Party, and, at the federal level, well over half of the Democratic Party. By 2005, oligarchic control over the executive branch of our federal government was largely in place, and it was cemented with the Trump administration.

When Donald Trump—himself an oligarch—came to power in January 2017, he and his agents embarked on a campaign to destroy the institutions of America that had been so carefully built up over more than 240 years. They succeeded in damaging and corrupting every single federal regulatory agency and turned the foundational departments within the executive branch into full-fledged agents of the Trump oligarchy.

The Justice Department, whose first head, Edmund Randolph, was one of the authors of the Constitution, was taken over by William Barr, a man who’d engineered two cover-ups for the Reagan/Bush crew back in the 1990s, proving his loyalty to corrupt oligarchy and his disdain for democratic institutions. During his reign, white-collar prosecutions dropped to levels not seen for decades as wealthy corporate criminals skated, while Trump’s financial and political dealings with Russia and sketchy oligarchs were purposely hidden from the American people.[1]

This wasn’t because the American people wanted the Justice Department to serve the oligarchs; it was because the oligarchs wanted it.

The State Department, first led by Thomas Jefferson, ended up in the hands of Mike Pompeo, a corrupt toady of the Koch network, who repeatedly lied and covered up his own crimes in office, as well as Trump’s. The American people didn’t ask for this (or the “criminal justice reform” that made it harder to prosecute corporate CEOs); it was because the oligarchs wanted it.[2]

The Defense Department, first headed (as the War Department) by Henry Knox, who started his military career with the 1776 battles of Lexington and Concord and fought in the Revolutionary War to create America, ended up in the hands of Mark Esper, a former lobbyist for the oligarchs running one of America’s largest defense firms.[3] Average Americans never asked for a defense industry lobbyist to run the Pentagon; the defense industry oligarchs wanted him.

With a lobbyist in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, private prison companies whose political action committees (PACs) and employees donated millions to Trump and the GOP received billions in bloated contracts to house asylum seekers. Americans didn’t ask for this; private prison oligarchs did.[4]

At the Department of the Treasury, Trump put “foreclosure king” Steve Mnuchin in charge, the man who’d thrown more than 36,000 people out of their homes during the Bush Great Recession of 2008 and raised $169 million to get Trump elected. Americans didn’t ask for a grifter banker to be in charge of our economy; the banking oligarchs did. And he delivered to them, repeatedly, passing out a half trillion dollars in taxpayer money to his oligarch buddies, then refusing to tell Congress or the American people who got the money.[5]

Over at the Department of Commerce, Trump put the man who Forbes magazine called “one of the biggest grifters in American history” in charge. Wilbur Ross lied about his wealth, made decisions that helped his own investments, and tried his best to rig the census to diminish Hispanic and Black political power. The people of this country didn’t want a con man running the international end of our economy, but billionaires who made money offshoring jobs were very happy with him.[6]

At the Department of the Interior, responsible for our federal lands and national parks, oil and mining lobbyist David Bernhardt put at least 25 former lobbyists from his industries in charge, along with more than 35 former oil and mining executives. Drilling and mining rights, from sacred Indian lands to offshore marine sanctuaries, were sold off at fire-sale prices.[7] The American people never asked for their parks to be despoiled, but the fossil fuel oligarchs sure did.

The list goes on and on, and by the end of the 2017–2021 Trump term, every single cabinet department and regulatory agency was corrupted and bent to the will of America’s industrial and inherited-wealth oligarchs.

Thousands of years of history tell us that oligarchies are unstable systems. They tend to either collapse from their own internal rot, as happened in 1929 in the United States, or fall to uprisings from their own people or their own overreach, as happened in the United States in the 1860s.

When they don’t collapse, though, they most often morph— usually within a single generation—into tyranny, a form of government that entirely abandons even the pretense of the rule of law and reigns through police-state terror.

And that is the direction in which Trump and the oligarchs he represents have been pushing this country, an effort that continues to this day in multiple venues.

In this book, I lay out what oligarchy is, how it metastasizes, how it has transformed through American history, how the Trump oligarchy was the logical outcome of the Powell Memo and the Reagan presidency, and, most important, how we can stop it now.

If we fail to break up the various parts of the Reagan/Bush/Trump oligarchy, America will degenerate into tyranny.

So much damage has been done to America in the past 40-plus years that stopping tyranny and dismantling oligarchy will be a huge undertaking.

The good news in that regard is that, typically, major shocks bring about rapid and major change. The financial panic of 1770 helped precipitate the American Revolution; the great crash of 1856 brought the Southern oligarchy to a head, leading to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery; the Republican Great Depression of 1930 led straight to the New Deal and major anti-oligarchic reforms.

Much as the shock of the 1929 crash woke America up to the ongoing theft of American democracy by that generation’s oligarchs, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has laid bare how extensively Reaganista oligarchs have looted our nation’s economic system and stolen the wealth of the formerly middle class.

The danger is that such shocks can turn a society in one of several directions. The Great Depression not only empowered Franklin D. Roosevelt; it also helped Adolf Hitler gain and consolidate power. Leadership during a time of crisis is extraordinarily consequential. As is the will of the people.

My previous book, The Hidden History of Monopolies, showed what happens when economic power is concentrated into the hands of a few massive corporations: monopoly. This book exposes what happens when political power is concentrated into the hands of a very few: oligarchy.

And, as in The Hidden History of Monopolies, this book offers a set of political solutions to rein in the oligarchs and restore our democracy. However, before addressing the solutions, we must first understand the history and the nature of the problem.

The first part of this book exposes why oligarchy is a crisis. Following that, we explore America’s revolutionary history of combating oligarchy and how oligarchy has again seized power in America since the 1970s. Part 5 shows how a political system ruled by oligarchs can lead to tyranny. Finally, part 6 shows how oligarchy has been successfully controlled in the past, along with how we can reclaim our democracy today and restore America’s revolutionary guiding principles.

These are grave times, but history tells us that a new America is on the verge of being born. If we act now, we will have a say in the outcome of this birth: brutal tyranny or renewed democracy.

PART ONE

The Crisis of Oligarchy

A lady asked Dr. Franklin, Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy.

A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.

—From the notes of Dr. James McHenry, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention

The COVID-19 outbreak has laid bare the state of oligarchy in America: while millions of Americans face bankruptcy and struggle to pay their mortgage or rent during this pandemic, a handful of oligarchs inside and outside the Trump White House have profiteered while also engineering huge power grabs.

Using the COVID-19 crisis as an excuse, Trump issued an executive order to trash protective regulations that go back as far as the 1800s.

The heads of all agencies shall identify regulatory standards that may inhibit economic recovery and shall consider taking appropriate action . . . to temporarily or permanently rescind, modify, waive, or exempt persons or entities from those requirements, and to consider exercising appropriate temporary enforcement discretion or appropriate temporary extensions of time as provided for in enforceable agreements with respect to those requirements, for the purpose of promoting job creation and economic growth.[1]

Multiple states used the crisis as an excuse to tighten restrictions on women’s right to abortion,[2] while gun manufacturers and Trump-supporting white supremacist militia groups promoted the sale of millions of weapons.[3]

When polls showed that the majority of Republicans, living on a media diet of Fox News and right-wing hate radio, were willing to show up to vote in person, while the majority of Democrats were concerned about getting sick, Trump and the GOP worked as hard as possible to fight voting by mail.[4]

Trump used the crisis to shut down virtually all immigration and refugee settlement from nonwhite countries while increasing the brutality of the treatment of children and families who had previously come to America seeking asylum.[5]

Under cover of helping Americans recover from the economic crisis caused by COVID-19, Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and the GOP engineered a new, $3 trillion giveaway to monopolistic corporations and America’s billionaires, while tossing a few bones to average people. The Fed got into the act, buying trillions in corporate bonds to artificially inflate the stock market in the months leading up to Trump’s reelection effort.[6]

To add insult to injury, Trump, McConnell, and the GOP launched a major effort to undo a century of consumer and worker protections by granting corporations “immunity from liability” to make it nearly impossible to sue them or otherwise hold them accountable for fraud, death, or disease.[7]

Trump also tried to put limits on the media, including social media, and his “enemy of the people” rhetoric led to more than half of Americans losing trust in fact-based news.[8]

Meanwhile, he succeeded in getting the US military (the National Guard, in this case) to attack people peacefully demonstrating in Lafayette Square in Washington, DC, so that he could have a photo op with a staffer’s Bible. While the media focused on the photo-op part of his action, his use of the military to trample on First Amendment rights in an American city is far more alarming.

Each of these steps moved America deeper into oligarchy and closer to tyranny. Now that this Pandora’s box has been opened, deep structural work is necessary to extract our government from the claws of this nation’s oligarchs.

Modern Oligarchy Erupts

This crisis didn’t start with Donald Trump.

The oligarchs who largely took over America’s political system in the 1980s drew mostly from the Charles and David Koch strain of libertarians. David had run for vice president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980 on a platform of privatizing Social Security, ending Medicare and Medicaid, ending the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and all antipollution efforts, privatizing the US Postal Service and pretty much every other government-provided service, and ending free public schools, all while cutting taxes on billionaires to nearly zero.[9]

As numerous writers have documented (Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right is a great resource), the Koch brothers raised up a network that spanned the country, helping elect politicians in every state house and senate in the country, as well as cementing control over the Republican Party and the US Senate, most recently via their Tea Party.

The result has been that, since 1981, the GOP has opposed virtually every form of government function, government preparation, and government taxation to pay for both.

The Trump administration, dancing to this tune, shut down the two largest groups within the executive branch working on pandemic prevention, preparation, and response, one in the Department of Homeland Security and the other on the National Security Council.[10]

When, on January 20, 2020, the first cases of COVID-19 were diagnosed in South Korea and the United States, the South Korean response was right out of the “Pandemic Playbook” (yes, it was called that) that the Obama administration had left for the incoming Trump team.

Within a week, the South Korean government had brought in 20 companies and commissioned them to invent, manufacture, and deploy virus test kits nationwide. A week later, nationwide testing was underway, and as a result, South Korea’s hospital system never melted down and thousands of lives were saved.[11]

The Trump administration, however, well stocked with people who were alums of Koch-funded groups and programs or regulars on oligarch Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel, chose to do nothing meaningful.

Trump himself went on TV regularly and called the virus a “Democrat hoax” designed to hurt his reelection chances. He and Murdoch’s employees ridiculed the nervous Nellies like Washington governor Jay Inslee (“he’s a snake”) and New York governor Andrew Cuomo (he “has to treat us well, too”), both Democrats, for “hyping” the dangers to the public.[12]

There’s a method to this madness, revealed by British health secretary Matt Hancock and totally consistent with Trump’s actions. And it goes way beyond simply letting thousands die to produce “herd immunity.”[13]

Republican and Libertarian oligarchs believe absolutely in the “magic of the free market.”[14] If there’s a shortage of test kits, that’ll drive up the price of them to where eventually there’s enough money to be made that somebody will jump into the marketplace and start making them to scale. Ditto for ventilators, respirators, and personal protective equipment.

Which is true. At the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

When discussing how a new technology might be brought to market, libertarian theology does a good job of describing the marketplace; when there’s demand, manufacturers will step up to meet it. Sometimes that demand can even be stimulated by innovation and invention.

But Libertarians and Republicans apply this philosophy to government, and in doing that, the oligarchs of the GOP ignore the entire point of government, which is to anticipate and protect its citizens from risk.

We don’t wait to form a fire department until after there’s been a brutal fire that takes out several homes. We don’t wait to assemble an army until after we’re attacked. And we don’t wait for thousands of wrongful death lawsuits to work their way through the courts (the way Libertarians say most issues should be resolved) before we enact and enforce laws to prevent corporations from dumping poisons into our air and water.

Sadly, America’s first billionaire oligarch president and the media oligarchs who supported him thought that the marketplace would solve every problem, and government, as Saint Ronnie loved to say, just “gets in the way.”[15] It’s more important, in their view, for government to “save” the money that would otherwise be spent on regulatory agencies and preparedness so that oligarchs’ taxes won’t go up, but their income will.

America’s oligarchs have used this rationale to hamstring government at the state level since the collapse of Reconstruction, which is why the South is still so poor and dysfunctional. Since 1981, it has been the dominant theme in Washington, DC, as well, impoverishing the rest of America. Most Americans are so poor today, the result of 40 years of Reaganomic neoliberalism, that the loss of just a few paychecks can lead to homelessness.

Had America’s oligarchs not come to power with Reagan and later helped put Trump in the White House, many lives would have been spared. On the other hand, there may not have been as much profit as there was during the frenzy when states were bidding against each other on medical equipment, driving up prices, because the Trump administration chose not to plan or act when the crisis hit us.

The Presidency: Trump’s Playbook

The outcome of this takeover of Congress, the presidency, and the courts is total defense of the oligarchy that has come to control the country.

Oligarchy doesn’t arise out of nothing, and neither do oligarchic tyrants; both require an institutional infrastructure and plenty of people willing to participate in exchange for wealth, status, or power.

As would-be tyrants are lifted to power by oligarchs, they take bite after bite out of existing institutions, twisting and turning them to their own ends. Oligarchs write laws, which are then passed by the politicians they own, that criminalize trivial things like drug use but leave huge loopholes for multi-billion-dollar financial crimes that were once considered serious felonies.

When an oligarch or a person owned by oligarchs becomes president, that person uses the police powers of our government to prosecute those challenging the oligarchy and protect those defending it. These prosecutions and defenses are then ratified by judges put into place by the oligarchy, and the news stories that may reflect poorly on the oligarchs are spun in ways that elide their role in the entire process.

Similarly, as these would-be tyrants rise in political power, some people—Richard Nixon’s former White House counsel John Dean calls them “authoritarian followers”—are so enamored by that power, so desirous of basking in its glow and bragging about access to it, that they’ll do just about anything to stay part of the “in crowd” that the tyrant forms around himself.

This is not a new or novel idea, by the way.

In August 1989, my best friend, Jerry Schneiderman, and I spent the better part of a week sitting in outdoor cafés on the Buda side of the Danube River, eating extraordinary (and cheap!) food, staying in a grand old hotel, and generally exploring Budapest. A few months earlier, there had been massive pro-democracy demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people, demanding that the Soviet Union let Hungary go. The summer we were there, over a quarter million people showed up to hear a speech by 26-year-old Viktor Orbán, a rising politician who would soon be a member of Parliament.[16]

Nine months later, in May 1990, Hungary officially became a democracy and held its first real elections since 1920. In 1999 it joined NATO, and in 2004 it became a member of the European Union.

For 20 years, Hungary was a functioning democracy; today it’s a corrupt oligarchy.

In the 10 short years since he first became prime minister in 2010, Orbán, now fabulously wealthy by Hungarian standards and an oligarch himself,[17] succeeded in transforming his nation’s government from a functioning European democracy into an autocratic regime of single-party-rule.

Orbán took over the Fidesz party, once a conventional “conservative” political party like America’s GOP, with the theme of restoring “Christian” purity[18] and, as one Trump adviser claimed, promising to “make Hungary great again.”[19] His rallies regularly drew tens of thousands.[20]

He campaigned on building a wall across the entirety of Hungary’s southern border to keep out Syrian refugees, a promise he largely kept.[21] His party’s politicians altered the nation’s constitution to legislate what we’d call gerrymandering and voter suppression, ensuring that his party, Fidesz, would win enough of the votes in pretty much every federal election to continue to hold power well into the future.[22] He’s now packed the courts so thoroughly that legal challenges against him and his party go nowhere.[23]

His oligarch-run party has rewritten elementary school textbooks to say that dark-skinned refugees entering the country are a threat because “it can be problematic for different cultures to coexist.”[24] Using this logic, he has locked up thousands of refugee children in cages.[25]

When the Hungarian Helsinki Committee said, “The indefinite detention of many vulnerable migrants, including families with small children, is cruel and inhuman,” Orbán said that the Syrian refugees seeking asylum would, as AFP noted, “pose a security risk and endanger the continent’s Christian culture and identity.”[26] He also said, “Immigration brings increased crime, especially crimes against women, and lets in the virus of terrorism.”[27]

Five years to the week before American white nationalist neo-Nazis rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, and murdered pro-democracy activist Heather Heyer,[28] a group of 700 right-wing “patriots” held a torchlight parade that ended in front of the homes of Hungary’s largest minority group, chanting, “We will set your homes on fire!”[29] Orbán’s police watched without intervening. Earlier, Zsolt Bayer, one of the founders of Orbán’s party, had called the Roma “animals . . . unfit to live among people.” Orbán refused to condemn him or the anti-Roma violence.

He’s handed government contracts to his favored few, elevating an entire new class of pro-Orbán businesspeople who have cemented control over Hungary’s economy, as those who opposed him have lost their businesses, been imprisoned, or fled the country.[30]

Virtually the entire nation’s press is now in the hands of oligarchs and corporations loyal to Orbán, with talk radio and television across the country singing his praises daily.[31] Billboards and social media proclaim his patriotism.[32] His media allies are now reaching out to purchase media across the rest of Europe to spread his right-wing message.[33]

In 2019, Orbán began dismantling the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, replacing or simply firing scientists,[34] while he called climate change “left wing . . . trickery” made up by President Barack Obama.[35]

The world, particularly the European Union, has watched this juggernaut with increasing alarm, and even the EU’s 2015 and 2018 attempts to essentially impeach Orbán backfired,[36] increasing his two reelection margins as his handmaids in the media proclaimed him the victim of a European deep state and meddling Jewish foreigners, particularly George Soros (who, ironically, once paid for a young Orbán to study in Britain).[37]

Although he blasts Soros and his own country’s Jewish leaders with anti-Semitic tropes, he was feted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called him “a true friend of Israel.” Orbán replied, “A Hungarian patriot and a Jewish Israeli patriot will always find something in common.”[38]

During the summer of 2019, in the same month that Trump’s ally Rudy Giuliani said he had a former Ukrainian prosecutor willing to testify that former vice president Joe Biden was corrupt,[39] Donald Trump invited Orbán to the White House for a state visit.[40] Orbán has been one of Trump’s two primary sources of false information about how Ukraine opposed or tried to sabotage Trump’s 2016 campaign. At a rally three months before his White House meeting with President Trump, Orbán condemned countries that accepted refugees for producing “mixed-race nations.”[41]

Orbán continues to ruthlessly use his own nation’s diplomatic and criminal justice systems to aid both domestic and foreign criminal oligarchs, having hired his own local versions of Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo.[42]

In March 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Hungary’s Parliament, dominated by Orbán’s Fidesz party, voted on a sweeping piece of dictatorial legislation.[43] The law passed with a vote of 137–53. Among other actions, it

1. suspends elections and Parliament indefinitely,

2. allows the government to jail for up to five years “anyone who intentionally spreads what the government classifies as misinformation,” and

3. gives Orbán the authority to suspend laws by decree.

Orbán, of course, didn’t write this script. It’s ancient, implied in The Epic of Gilgamesh and stories of some of the Hebrew kings in the Bible. Machiavelli wrote its field manual.

It’s how Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler came to power and held control of their nations.

Today, it’s a playbook being followed by President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, President Vladimir Putin in Russia, President Nicolás Maduro Moros in Venezuela, and others. It echoes how the Greek and Roman republics fell to tyranny, most infamously in the final rule of Augustus that ended the Roman Republic.

A Second American Civil War?

The cover story of the December 2019 edition of The Atlantic, which was founded in the years just before the Civil War, was ominously titled, “How to Stop a Civil War.”[44]

If we are, indeed, on the brink of a second civil war, it’s already being waged as a “cold war,” with the occasional armed skirmish being provoked by the so-called Alt-Right movement, which, as of summer 2020, had murdered hundreds of Americans since Timothy McVeigh inspired the modern “boogaloo” white supremacy era.

And, as in the past, this would be a war where the very, very rich—the oligarchs—pit Americans against each other, dividing us by class, region, race, and religion simply to gain and hold more and more power and wealth.

This is not the first time we’ve faced such a crisis as a nation. Each time, forces of massive accumulated or inherited wealth have nearly succeeded in taking full control of our nation to replace a democracy, where the will of the people is accomplished through their elected representatives, with a form of government where most government functions reinforce the power, wealth, and control of the morbidly rich.

This system of government is among the most ancient, stretching back 7,000 years, and is known to political scientists as oligarchy. Aristotle put it in context: “Tyranny is a kind of monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only; oligarchy has in view the interest of the wealthy; democracy, of the needy.”[45]

For oligarchy to totally take down democracy, only three things are initially needed:

• Control of (or substantial influence over) a critical portion of the media

• Legalization of bribery of public officials, so that oligarchs can achieve majority control of the legislative process

• Control of the most critical parts of the court system so that they can influence legal processes

The fourth element, when the oligarchy is well established and the transition to tyranny begins, is seizure of the executive branch and the formation of a police state, principally using massive surveillance and selective prosecution against those agitating for a return to democracy.

Arnold Toynbee is thought to have said, “When the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable.”[46] Most warriors are in their late teens or early 20s; by the time they’ve died, three more 20-year generations have come of age, suggesting, if Toynbee was right, a four-generation (roughly 80-year) gap between terrible, nation-altering events.

In the era of the 1770s to 1789, foreign-aligned oligarchs controlled what we now call America; believers in democracy fought a war to overthrow that British oligarchy.

Four generations later, in the 1860s, massive wealth was controlled by a few thousand very large plantation oligarchs in the South.[47] The South was politically run as a full-blown oligarchy and police state on the verge of total tyranny (which it had been for Black people from the beginning), while the North was still largely democratic (the “Gilded Age” Northern oligarchs wouldn’t fully emerge for another 30 years).[48]

The Civil War could thus be recast as a war between oligarchy and democracy, where democracy won by a whisker.

Four generations after that, the Republican Great Depression (what they called it until the 1950s) opened the door to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “war” against the “economic royalists” (oligarchs), which succeeded in putting them, at least temporarily, in a box despite their explicit efforts, exposed by Major General Smedley Butler, to overthrow him by force.[49]

Today, four generations after that battle closed with the end of World War II, America’s oligarchs succeeded in getting enough of their guys placed on the Supreme Court to legalize political bribery (in 1976 and 1978 in the Buckley and Bellotti decisions[50]) for the first time in American history. That event opened the door to this generation’s oligarchic control of all three branches of government via the Reagan Revolution and the billionaire takeover of the GOP.

All that was left was to get the populace to support a final transition to full-blown oligarchy, a task undertaken by oligarchs who controlled the media, largely through right-wing hate radio, thousands of right-wing websites, and the efforts of billionaire Rupert Murdoch with Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

As a result, the crisis of oligarchy in America is already upon us; the question is whether it will cement its place, or even morph into tyranny, or whether We, the People will turn it back, as we have done twice before in American history.

Are we approaching the end of the great American experiment in representative democracy? Will our children and grandchildren live under a government of, by, and for the People? Or a nation of, by, and for the monopolists and oligarchs, ultimately enforced by a brutal police state?

To answer these questions, it is essential to understand the basic mechanics of the American government.

There are functionally four branches of government in the American model, three explicitly defined in the Constitution and the fourth protected by the First Amendment. For oligarchy to completely overwhelm and ultimately destroy our democratic republic, turning it into a tyranny, each of these four must be seized by the oligarchs and turned to their service.

The four branches are the legislative, executive, and judicial, followed on by the media, often referred to as the fourth estate. The media have always been the initial pivot point, though, for control of public opinion and, through that, control of the government itself.

Control the Media

The First Amendment specifically prohibits Congress from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,”[51] and the telecommunications laws from the 1920s and 1930s kept most newspapers, cable systems, internet providers, and radio and TV stations locally owned to prevent oligarchs from asserting singular control over information and news across our nation.

That all changed in 1996, when the Telecommunications Act was enthusiastically signed by President Bill Clinton. The Act was the result of tens of millions of dollars of telecom industry lobbying and thus was supported by bought-out majorities of both parties in the House and Senate, passing despite outspoken dissent from Representatives Peter DeFazio, John Conyers, and Jerry Nadler, and Senators John McCain, Robert Byrd, and Bernie Sanders (and a handful of others).[52]

The Act wiped out those protections for local media, turning our nation’s cable systems, internet service providers, newspapers, and radio and TV stations over to a small handful of media oligarchs.

I worked in radio and TV back in the 1960s and early 1970s, first as a DJ (three years) and then doing news (seven years). I started as a weekend DJ at WITL, the country station in Lansing, Michigan, which was owned by three guys (an engineer, a salesman, and a businessman with a radio background) who’d started the station from scratch in the 1950s. From there I went to WVIC, which was owned by a Michigan family. From there I went to WJIM-TV, a station whose call letters were named after the infant son of the family that owned it. I ended up back at WITL for years, doing morning news.

These stations were all locally owned because telecommunications laws dating all the way back to the 1920s required local ownership. No one entity could simultaneously own a media market’s radio, TV, and newspapers, and no one entity could own large quantities of radio stations around the country.

Not only were all of those stations owned by local folks, but they all had local news operations that were enthusiastic about investigating and outing local corruption, and they provided vital public service when there were local emergencies, be they tornadoes, massive traffic accidents, or toxic industrial spills.

The broadcasting of actual news was required by the FCC through something called the Fairness Doctrine, which required stations to “program in the public interest,” a mandate that the FCC interpreted as requiring both national and local news at least every hour on radio, and at least one hour (split 50/50 local/national) during prime time on TV.

The Fairness Doctrine also required stations that aired “editorials” from the station’s ownership or management to be balanced with “equal time” by an outside source offering an opposing point of view.

The result of these two sets of restrictions was a diversity of viewpoints, basic standards of honesty and fairness for news operations, the strengthening of democracy through an educated and informed electorate, and a local programming focus that served the needs of every community in America.

In 1987, Ronald Reagan ordered the FCC to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine, and in August 2011 it was removed from the FCC’s rules by the Obama administration. The telecommunications laws regarding station ownership and media concentration, from the 1920s through the 1930s and 1940s, were all largely repealed when Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

As a result, unprofitable news became very profitable infotainment, and radio and TV stations no longer had to “pay” for their monopoly use of our public airwaves with “programming in the public interest.”

Clear Channel, a regional owner of a handful of radio stations, went on a buying spree right after Clinton signed that legislation and ended up owning 1,225 stations in 300 cities and towns, dominating the radio markets in 100 of the nation’s 112 major media markets.[53]

Several other big companies jumped into the fray, with one, Cumulus, owning more than 400 stations across the country, including some of the nation’s largest.

None of the stations I worked for in Lansing back in the day are still locally owned; as far as I can tell with an internet search, there’s not a single locally owned station in the entire capital city. And that’s not just true of Lansing, Michigan; locally owned stations are an absolute rarity in today’s America.[54]

The result is that an entire city can have multiple radio stations with few to no local people actually broadcasting live on the air. As Marc Fisher wrote in the Washington Post in 2003, speaking of the death of local news and community-based broadcasting:

Consolidation and cutbacks in local staffing have eliminated many of those functions. The prime example wielded against the industry stems from an accident last year in Minot, N.D., where Clear Channel owns all six commercial stations. When a train derailment in the middle of the night released a frightening cloud of anhydrous ammonia, Minot police sought to notify the citizenry of the crisis. They called KCJB, the station designated as the local emergency broadcaster, but no one was home; the station was being run by computer, automatically passing along Clear Channel programming from another city.[55]

One person died from exposure to the ammonia, and several others were hospitalized.[56]

When Air America started broadcasting in 2004, it was carried on radio stations owned by Clear Channel in cities across the country; after Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital took over Clear Channel, there were only a few stations in the company (now iHeartMedia) still broadcasting progressive shows like mine.

Similarly, a few years back, I met one of the owners of Cumulus in the offices of a US senator, who inquired if the network, which had just purchased Westwood One, the company that syndicated the only progressive lineup in America, would be putting progressive programming on any of their 400-plus stations.

“No way,” the billionaire network owner told us both. He said he’d never put shows on his stations that were “hostile to business” and wanted “to raise my taxes.”

Over lunch at a Talkers magazine convention of radio hosts and owners in the later years of the first decade of the 2000s, I chatted with a senior executive at Salem, a company that made its first money publishing Bibles and religious tracts but then diversified into owning large radio stations in nearly every consequential city in America.

A group of Salem-employee talk hosts, most prominently Dennis Prager and Hugh Hewitt, broadcast daily hard-right-wing shows from coast to coast, and I asked him if he’d consider adding a progressive show like mine.

“Not a chance,” he said. “We’re a Christian company, so we’d never consider a liberal on our airwaves.” When I protested that I was a Christian myself, he said it wasn’t possible for a liberal to be a true follower of Christ.

Thus, in every nook and cranny of America you can tune across your local radio dial and find an oligarch-friendly conservative talk show host of one sort or another; progressives (who actually try to put into action Jesus’ words in Matthew 25 and the Sermon on the Mount) are on the air in only a handful of cities, almost always on locally owned stations.

Our TV markets are similarly concentrated, with the most notorious television monopoly being Sinclair, which owns more than 200 TV stations across the country. Newspapers are similarly concentrated in ownership, with few local papers of any significance surviving, as are the cable TV and internet service providers.

The outcome of all this corporate ownership of media in nearly all forms is that the story line preferred by oligarchs— many of them media oligarchs—is constantly available to Americans, but the voices that would challenge oligarchy and promote democracy are limited to struggling nonprofit entities like the Pacifica Network (radio) and Free Speech TV.

Roughly 90 percent of American media (by viewership, readership, and listenership) is owned by only six companies. A small handful of media executives decide what we’ll see, hear, and read; and although some have a political agenda, in every case their support of their own monopolies in the media world is legally their first priority. That means oligarchy-friendly media.[57]

Meanwhile, oligarch Rupert Murdoch and his sons continue to pump out a steady stream of pro-oligarchy “news” on their Fox News Channel, available to pretty much every cable household in America at no additional cost (MSNBC is often only available with “premium” cable packages at an extra cost, although it rarely challenges the oligarchs, being owned by the largest internet monopoly in the country).

Control of a big enough chunk of the fourth estate, essential to launching and maintaining oligarchy, has largely been accomplished and has been the single greatest factor in the crisis of widespread support for pro-oligarch, anti-democracy policies and politicians.

The next stage may be even more ominous, as on May 29, 2020, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authorized any foreign oligarch (or government, via an oligarch) to own any US media, doing away with a previous 25 percent foreign ownership cap. The elimination of that cap was put into place at the explicit request of Cumulus Media, the second-largest owner of American radio stations and at the time in deep financial trouble, looking for a buyer, but the ruling applies more broadly.[58]

In the 2010 US Supreme Court case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent that the decision “would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders. More pertinently, it would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans.”[59]

He was ridiculed for the statement in the conservative press at the time. President Obama echoed Stevens in his subsequent State of the Union address, saying, “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations— to spend without limit in our elections.” Justice Samuel Alito mouthed “Not true” for the cameras, but, Alito’s denial aside, Stevens’s prediction has fully come true.

While it’s unlikely that Japan is interested in buying 1,000 American radio stations or a TV network like CBS, Russia, China, or even Saudi Arabia (a citizen of which once owned 7 percent of the company that owned Fox News, divested only after 9/11) may well be our next source of “news,” shaping and informing American public opinion on everything from foreign policy to whom we should elect.

Controlling Congress (Both Federal and State)

For rule by the rich, aka oligarchy, to really and truly seize control of a nation, that nation must first legalize bribery of politicians by the oligarchs themselves. We are now fully there in today’s crisis of oligarchy, although through the centuries, America had consistently resisted rich people and corporations’ owning politicians.

One of the most famous stories of our resistance to oligarchy was when the US Senate refused to seat copper baron William A. Clark in 1899 because he’d openly bribed some of Montana’s state legislators to send him to Washington, DC (this was before the Constitution was amended to allow for the direct election of US senators; Clark’s story was one of the events that pushed the nation toward that amendment).[60]

In 1907, at the urging of Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, Congress passed the Tillman Act, which made it a felony for any corporation to contribute anything of value to any campaign or politician running for federal office. Most states adopted similar laws; former House majority leader Tom DeLay, for example, was prosecuted for “money laundering” corporate campaign donations under Texas’s version of the Tillman Act.[61]

Following the Nixon bribery scandals of 1974, Congress passed a number of “good government” laws limiting the ability of oligarchs or their corporations to fund federal politicians, as well as expanding a 1966 law that provided for public financing of presidential elections.[62]

But most all of that crashed and burned in 1976 and 1978 when, in a pair of decisions known as Buckley and Bellotti (Buckley v. Valeo and First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti), the US Supreme Court ruled that when American oligarchs owned politicians, it wasn’t corruption or bribery but, instead, First Amendment–protected “free speech” (Buckley) that was also available to corporations (Bellotti).

Those decisions unleashed a flood of money that in the 1980 election just two years later swept Ronald Reagan into power and kicked off the modern era of American oligarchy.

At the state level, a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was incorporated as a nonprofit in 1975 by conservative oligarchs and the businesses that made them rich. Today it has more than 2,000 state legislators—all but a handful of them Republicans—who meet several times a year with hundreds of corporate lobbyists to take corporate-lobbyist-written “model legislation” that ALEC-funded legislators then introduce into their state legislatures.

Ninety-eight percent of ALEC’s funding comes from “corporations, corporate trade groups, and corporate foundations,” and their oligarch-owned or -influenced state legislators keep a steady stream of pro-oligarchy legislation flowing through state assemblies and statehouses.[63]

While they’ve been operating quietly this way since the 1970s, the organization became well known in early 2012 when George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin and then claimed, as his defense, Florida’s “stand your ground” law, an ALEC-produced piece of legislation written by ALEC-member gun manufacturers.

When, in 2010, the US Supreme Court reaffirmed and expanded on Buckley and Bellotti in its sweeping Citizens United decision, the oligarchic takeover of the US House of Representatives and Senate, and most state legislatures, was complete.

Today, if you’re a billionaire, you can easily get pretty much whatever legislation you want passed, up to and including the $4 trillion transfer of borrowed taxpayer money to the top 1 percent and their corporations during the Trump years through his infamous tax cuts and GOP rigging of coronavirus bailout bills.

But average Americans? What they want is largely ignored by the entire GOP and a sizable minority of elected Democrats. Average Americans, after all, can’t donate millions to politicians’ super PACs or give fat government contracts to politically connected companies.

As researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page documented in 2014, the probability of legislation passing that comports with the desires of the economic bottom 90 percent of us is less than random noise, and has been that way since the Reagan Revolution, while the wishes of oligarchs and their groups like ALEC are routinely passed into law, creating a crisis of governance.[64]

Seize the Courts

America’s court system was conceived by the Framers at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to behave in the spirit of, as James Madison wrote of senators in his Notes, “the impartial umpires & Guardians of justice and general Good,”[65] a phrase that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts echoed in his own Senate confirmation hearings.[66]

But since American oligarchs took Lewis Powell’s 1971 advice to seize control of every branch of American government (along with the media, schools and colleges, etc.), our courts have been largely turned into political institutions. Combined with legalized bribery for legislators and oligarchs’ owning most of our media in all forms, this conversion of our courts from “umpires” into advocates for oligarchs has largely frozen and, in many cases, reversed nearly 100 years of progress in the arenas of human, civil, community, and environmental rights.

This court packing reached its zenith between 2014 and 2020, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal in 2016 to even hold hearings for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland after blocking Obama’s lower court nominees for several years. That obscene and nakedly unconstitutional behavior was followed by McConnell’s introducing a flood of unqualified and nakedly partisan candidates for lower federal courts.

Prior to this era, nominees were typically vetted by the non-partisan American Bar Association, but McConnell changed all that, turning instead to the Federalist Society, which his oligarch patrons had founded and financed.

The Federalist Society was started with a grant from the hard-right Olin Foundation in 1982 in the early years of the Reagan Revolution, and this private, oligarch-founded organization today largely controls the Republican appointment of judges across the nation.[67]

During the Obama presidency, McConnell so effectively blocked Obama’s judicial nominations that today almost 30 percent of all US circuit court judges—with federal lifetime appointments—were put there by Donald Trump after they climbed through the ranks of the Federalist Society.[68] Many are young, rarely over 50, with some in their 30s.[69]

Federalist Society member judges and Federalist Society attorney general William Barr have been very effective at blocking Democratic efforts to uncover corruption within the Trump administration, giving that billionaire oligarch near-total immunity from investigation and prosecution during his term in office.

This isn’t just the effort of the Federalist Society, Trump, or McConnell. It started in 1971 with Lewis Powell’s infamous Memo and led straight to a series of presidential elections stolen by collaboration with foreign governments (Nixon, Reagan, Trump) or outright fraud (George W. Bush, Trump), providing Republican presidents an opportunity to pack the Supreme Court in ways that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

As a result, and because of the doctrine of judicial review that I describe in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, our court system today most often sides with oligarchs over average citizens, multinational corporations over communities, and raw assertions of billionaire power over the ideals of democracy.

Inevitable Tyranny

Oligarchy is very seductive.

For the wealthy and powerful, it’s a safe and generally “soft” way of protecting their positions in society and riches. For their factotums, it ensures job security and a measure of insulation from persecution or prosecution. And for the average citizen, oligarchic forms of government initially seem to offer stability and a strong sense of national identity.

Were these things not the case, oligarchy would not have popped up so many times all over the world with as much persistence and resilience as history demonstrates. We see all of these factors in the oligarchy that evolved between 1810 and 1860 in the American South, and in today’s Republican Party.

White people wearing MAGA hats and cheering on a billionaire oligarch feel their sense of place in society and identity both protected and validated; to threaten the oligarchy is to shake the foundation of their newfound identity. It was no different for Mussolini’s Blackshirts or Hitler’s Brownshirts, all of whom started out as cheering volunteers at rallies. But benign oligarchy is an oxymoron. During a time of crisis (real, imagined, or created), oligarchy is always sold as a way of ensuring safety, stability, and social order, and indeed it always appears that way in the beginning.

But as oligarchies morph into tyrannies, the iron fist beneath that velvet glove emerges with absolute authority, willing to use the police power of the state to torture, imprison, and even execute those who present a serious challenge to it.

How Oligarchs Seized the GOP

Throughout 2009, the first year of the administration of America’s first Black president, the GOP’s white racist base was roiling with rage.

In the preface to The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, I tell the story of how just weeks after Barack Obama’s election, two of my brothers and I went to a gun range in Mason, Michigan, and it was nearly sold out of ammunition.

When I asked why, the guy who was renting me a .40 caliber Ruger but would sell me only 100 rounds of ammunition bluntly told me it was because that N-word who was just elected was going to take away everybody’s guns, and folks were getting ready to take on the coming wave of jackbooted thugs from the ATF.

Fox News and right-wing talk radio were boiling over with hate and fear, and the fossil-fuel oligarchs who’d started a number of causes together with the tobacco industry to fight the Clinton administration knew that their time had come.

Jeff Nesbit, a Republican operative who’d helped start the whole right-wing media machine in 1993 as Bill Clinton was taking office, noted in his biography of the times, Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP, that they’d spent most of the 1990s building infrastructure.[70]

They planted, he wrote, deep roots in colleges and universities across the nation “to support it intellectually.”

They opened offices—“policy networks”—in every state in the union, each with a different name and ostensibly separate and independent funding (although it was all largely coming from a single integrated source) to influence the state’s political systems.

A “national coordinating group” was in place to “enforce discipline” across the states.

A “propaganda arm” was built at both the individual state and national levels “that could bring tightly controlled messaging and narratives . . . in a way that looked like independent journalism.”

From ALEC to the Sam Adams Alliance to the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity to the State Policy Network, all were up, running, fully staffed, and well-funded.

All they needed now were millions of people to show up in the streets to grab headlines, influence legislators, and finally and forever take over the Republican Party. The presidency of Barack Obama—“that Black man in the White House”—provided the perfect catalyst.

The Tea Party, first created in the ’90s, was relaunched with a small army of rented buses, paid PR flacks, and millions in “earned media” (cost-free news coverage) across the networks.

They railed against Obama’s “socialist” Affordable Care Act with slogans like “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”

They demanded removal of laws protecting communities from being poisoned by mine runoff and the smokestacks of oil refineries, claiming that “regulations are blocking progress!”

They proclaimed that the acronym for their movement was “Taxed Enough Already!”

And they took over the GOP, paving the way for an oligarch, Donald Trump, to ascend to the nation’s highest office.

The Oligarchs’ Most Successful Con

More than 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to “do what is right” during the last years of the Eisenhower administration, straight through John F. Kennedy’s time in office, and into the early years of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.[71]

Today, only 17 percent of Americans trust their government. It’s so bad that armed protesters have showed up nationwide to protest the “tyranny” of having to wear masks during a pandemic . . . and have been cheered on by the president of the United States and major news outlets.

This is no accident; it’s the result of a decades-long campaign by some of America’s richest families to tear apart the governing fabric of our nation, kicked off by their man, Ronald Reagan, proudly proclaiming at his January 20, 1981, inauguration, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Put yourself in the place of a man who inherited a multimillion-dollar fossil fuel empire from his now-deceased father, a situation akin to the “heroic” brother and sister who inherited a railroad from their dad in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged.

• If you don’t have to pay to dispose of cancer-causing by-products from your refineries but can simply vent them into the air, you make more money.

• If you can cut wages and threaten employees because they don’t have a union, you make more money.

• If you can run a pipeline across sacred Indian land atop a major national aquifer with minimal safety oversight, you make more money.

• If you can hide your money from the IRS because the agency has had its budget slashed so badly that it can no longer do expensive audits of morbidly rich people, you can keep more of the money you’ve made.

• If you can get the government to cut social programs and public education, thus lowering your taxes, you can keep more of the money you’ve made.

So how do you pull this off, when every one of these things hurts average Americans?

Easy. Just embark on a 40-year-long campaign, through think tanks, right-wing media, and massive PR efforts to convince average Americans that government is the cause of, not the solution to, their problems.

Convince working-class Americans that gutting government is a good thing that will ultimately help them in some mystical, magical way through the incredible “invisible hand” of the marketplace.

Tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell launched the movement to do just this with his infamous Memo in 1971, and billionaires have funded and promoted politicians who jump onboard the “government is evil” bandwagon ever since. And it’s largely worked, if the “trust in government” statistics compiled by the Pew Center from 1958 to today are accurate.

A decade or so ago, I was up late one night watching Bloomberg News on a hotel TV. The American host was interviewing a very, very wealthy German businessman at some sort of conference in Singapore. Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the businessman what tax rate he was “suffering under” in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, “A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included.”

“How can you handle that?” asked the host, incredulous.

The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.

A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.

The reporter went for a third try. “Why don’t you lead a revolt against those high taxes?” he asked, his tone implying that the businessman was badly in need of some good old American rebellion-making.

The German businessman paused for a long moment, then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer. He stared at the man for another long moment, and then, in the tone of voice that an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, he said simply, “I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country.”

There are a few wealthy Americans who understand this. But the billionaires who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation if it makes them a few extra bucks.

They’ve funded and facilitated movements like the Tea Party and the Boogaloo Bois; media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart; and activist organizations like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC. They throw piles of money at Republican politicians, so long as those politicians never stray far from the “deregulate, cut, denigrate” line about American government.

The Crisis

When, in 2015, I asked former president Jimmy Carter what he thought the consequences were of Supreme Court decisions like Buckley and Citizens United that made all this possible, he replied,

It [the Citizens United decision] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and Congress members.[72]

So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over. . . . The incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody who’s already in Congress has a lot more to sell to an avid contributor than somebody who’s just a challenger.

That same year, then–Vice President Joe Biden said, “You have to go where the money is. Now, where the money is, there’s almost always implicitly some string attached. . . . It’s awful hard to take a whole lot of money from a group you know has a particular position, then you conclude they’re wrong [and] vote no.”[73]

As former vice president Al Gore wrote in his 2013 book The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change, “American democracy has been hacked. The United States Congress . . . is now incapable of passing laws without permission from the corporate lobbies and other special interests that control their campaign finances.”[74]

And, in 2015, campaigning for the Republican nomination for president, Donald Trump candidly said during the August 6 debate, “I gave to many people, before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me.”[75]

As noted earlier, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page demonstrated that the United States ceased to be a functioning democracy by classical definitions sometime during the Reagan years and has been, as Jimmy Carter said, an oligarchy (my term, not theirs: they call it “economic-elite domination”) since then.[76]

The difference between now and the 1860s is that the oligarchic control is no longer regional; it’s national.

The Koch oligarchy machine, for example, has branches in every state and pretty much every county. Oligarchy-supporting media are ubiquitous. And now Very Serious People are talking about the possibility of a second civil war.

But it won’t just be a war of white supremacists and Trump cultists against the rest of us, as is generally thought; it will be a war between those comfortable with oligarchy (indeed, embracing it, as it promises them safety and stability) versus those who believe in democracy.[77]

In literature, story structure from the time when Aristotle explicitly identified it to today follows a predictable arc. The lead character experiences an event that throws his life out of balance, referred to as the inciting incident.

This is followed by repeated—and repeatedly unsuccessful—attempts by our hero to get his life back to normalcy. Each, instead, pushes him further and further away from where he started, with a series of progressive complications making things worse and worse.

Finally, the lead character is faced with a terrible choice, a crisis that he knows will forever change his life. To address this choice—the most consequential of his life—he must reach deep inside himself for meaning, inspiration, and a connection to his true values.

Whether it’s Luke Skywalker or Captain Ahab, he knows his life will never be the same, and, indeed, when he makes his terrible choice, he becomes a different, new person.

America has arrived at that crisis point, and we must make a choice. This crisis goes way beyond simply electing a particular president or having control of Congress; the very nature of our republic has been under continuous oligarch assault since the Reagan Revolution, reaching a head in the Trump administration.

This time, we will either succumb to oligarchy and flip or limp into tyranny, or we will reject oligarchy and return to the principles of democracy and pluralism on which this country was founded.

Will we be a nation that provides for the needs of our people, or continue to shovel our nation’s wealth to the top 1 percent?

Will we, like every other advanced democracy, recognize high-quality education and health care as rights, or continue to hold them as privileges enjoyed by only the wealthy few?

Will we hand the levers of democratic power to all our citizens, or keep them in a small number of wealthy and overwhelmingly white hands?

Will we once again become, to the world, that shining “city on a hill” that John Winthrop spoke of in 1630, or will we continue to deteriorate through our present oligarchy into fullblown tyranny?[78]

This is a crisis point for our nation as real and critical as those we hit in 1776, 1861, and 1932. In each of those three cases, the oligarchs lost the battle. This time they could win.

PART TWO

How Oligarchy Led to the Civil War

America’s revolutionary Founders first rose up explicitly against the British oligarchy when they destroyed over a million dollars’ worth of the East India Company’s tea in 1773 in a protest over the British giving the Company a huge tax break. Their dream was that oligarchy would never again cement itself in North America.

But as the Founding generation was dying out in the early 1800s, oligarchy once again got a foothold, this time in the American South. Although it was intertwined with slavery, a technological revolution—the invention of the cotton gin— was what actually made it possible because the cotton gin radically increased the value of both cotton-growing land and enslaved people.

The story is fascinating, unknown and hidden to most Americans, and a cautionary tale for us today as technology brings so many changes to our political landscape.

An Awakened Generation Challenges British Oligarchy

The year before John Adams edited the Declaration of Independence that Thomas Jefferson had written, Adams published, under the pen name of Novanglus, a series of essays in Boston newspapers. The first was in 1774, and in it he laid out the principles that the American revolutionaries had taken from the European Enlightenment’s greatest thinkers.[1]

“These are what are called revolution principles,” Adams wrote in Volume IV of The Works of John Adams, which included Novanglus. “They are the principles of Aristotle and Plato, of Livy and Cicero, and Sidney, Harrington, and Locke; the principles of nature and eternal reason.” Referring to the Boston Tea Party and the revolutionary spirit across the land, Adams quoted and paraphrased Locke at length.[2]

There were some loyalists and conservatives who believed that the British royalty and their stooges in the colonies, Adams wrote, “act contrary to their trust, when they only make use of their due [royal] prerogative.”

But even though he was to stumble as president with his 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, which ruptured his relationship with then–Vice President Jefferson, in 1775 Adams was fully a man of the Enlightenment, and John Locke was his lodestar.

“To this Mr. Locke answers,” Adams wrote, “that the people, however, is to judge of all that; because nobody can better judge whether his trustee or deputy acts well, and according to the trust reposed in him, than he who deputed him.” In other words, the people are sovereign. They are in charge. They are the ones who put the leaders into power, and the leaders only make legitimate decisions and “acts” so long as the citizens who “deputed” them give their consent.

In 1689, John Locke wrote in chapter 2, “Of the State of Nature,” of his Second Treatise of Government a clear—and radical—definition of the natural state of humankind. In an era when serfs and vassals were owned by their lords, slaves were owned by their masters, and everybody was ultimately owned by their king or the pope, Locke explicitly said that nature intended people to be free.

To understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.[3]

This core Enlightenment concept led straight to Jefferson’s writing in the Declaration of Independence that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that when “[g]overnment becomes destructive of these ends,” it was an absolute “Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

The 17th-century European revolution in political thought (and numerous actual revolts, as well) led directly to the 18th-century revolution by the colonists against the Crown and its oligarchic arm, the British East India Company. But it wasn’t just 13 colonies breaking away from their motherland; this was a revolution that had happened in the minds of Americans long before anybody took up a musket.

The creation of the American democratic republic was unique in the history of the past two millennia because it was the first nation whose founding was totally grounded in the Lockean principles of the Enlightenment.

It wasn’t just a change in government; it was a transformation in thinking, in beliefs, in worldview, in how human relations were understood.

In a letter to Hezekiah Niles on February 13, 1818, an aging John Adams tried his best to amplify that point for posterity. “The American Revolution was not a common event,” he wrote.[4] He then asked rhetorically, “But what do We mean by the American Revolution? Do We mean the American war?” Not a chance, Adams concluded.

“The Revolution was effected before the War commenced,” he wrote. “The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People. A Change in their Religious Sentiments of their Duties and Obligations.”

And it was vitally important, he believed, that the philosophical basis of the Revolution—“That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that governments are only truly righteous when they’re run by the “consent of the governed”—be made clear for all future generations. Adams wrote,

This radical Change in the Principles, Opinions Sentiments and Affection of the People, was the real American Revolution.

By what means, this great and important Alteration in the religious, Moral, political, and Social Character of the People of thirteen Colonies, all distinct, unconnected and independent of each other, was begun, pursued and accomplished, it is surely interesting to Humanity to investigate, and perpetuate to Posterity.

Two years before he died, Jefferson summed it up in a letter to Major John Cartwright on June 5, 1824, saying that he and his revolutionary peers—once they fully understood and believed in the principles of natural law and democracy as laid out by the Enlightenment thinkers—no longer felt bound by the old rules of royalty and theocracy. America was to be a truly unique experiment in the history of the world.

“Our Revolution commenced on more favorable ground,” he wrote.[5] “It presented us an Album on which we were free to write what we pleased. We had no occasion to search into musty records, to hunt up Royal parchments, or to investigate the laws & institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry. We appealed to those of nature, and found them engraved on our hearts.”

Thus began the modern world’s first major battle—joined by men and women willing to sacrifice their very lives— against an oligarchy that was behaving, in North America, as a tyranny.

Just Idealists, or Is Democracy in Our Genes?

In the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote that “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” compelled America’s Founders to reject British oligarchy and embrace democracy.

But was he right? Is nature actually democratic?

Biologists Tim Roper and L. Conradt at the School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, England, studied this issue in animals.[6]

We’ve always assumed that the alpha or leader animal of the herd or group makes the decision, and the others follow, like the human kings and queens of old. The leader knows best, we believe: he or she is prepared for that genetically by generations of Darwinian natural selection.

But it turns out there’s a system for voting among animals, from honeybees to primates, that we’ve just never noticed because we weren’t looking for it. “Many authors have assumed despotism without testing [for democracy],” Conradt and Roper wrote in a Nature article about the study, “because the feasibility of democracy, which requires the ability to vote and to count votes, is not immediately obvious in non-humans.”[7]

Stepping into this vacuum of knowledge, the two scientists decided to create a testable model that “compares the synchronization costs of despotic and democratic groups.”

Conradt and Roper discovered that when a single leader (what they call a despot) or a small group of leaders (the animal equivalent of an oligarchy) makes the choices, the swings into extremes of behavior tend to be greater and more dangerous to the long-term survival of the group. Because in a despotic model the overall needs of the entire group are measured only by the leader’s needs, wrong decisions would be made often enough to put the survival of the group at risk.

With democratic decision-making, however, the overall knowledge and wisdom of the entire group, as well as the needs of the entire group, come into play. The outcome is less likely to harm anybody, and the group’s probability of survival is enhanced.

“Democratic decisions are more beneficial primarily because they tend to produce less extreme decisions,” they noted in the abstract to their paper.

Britain’s leading mass-circulation science journal, New Scientist, looked at how Conradt and Roper’s model played out in the natural world. They examined the behavior of a herd of red deer, which are social animals with alpha leaders.

What they found was startling: Red deer always behave democratically. When more than half of the animals were pointing at a particular watering hole, for example, the entire group would then move in that direction.

“In the case of real red deer,” James Randerson noted, “the animals do indeed vote with their feet by standing up. Likewise, with groups of African buffalo, individuals decide where to go by pointing in their preferred direction. The group takes the average and heads that way.”[8]

This explains in part the flock, swarm, and school nature of birds, gnats, and fish. With each wingbeat or fin motion, each member is “voting” for the direction in which the flock, swarm, or school should move; when the 51 percent threshold is hit, the entire group moves as if telepathically synchronized.

Tim Roper told me, “Quite a lot of people have said, ‘My gorillas do that,’ or ‘My animals do that.’ On an informal, anecdotal basis, it [the article] seems to have triggered an ‘Oh, yes, that’s quite true’ reaction in field workers.”

I asked him if his theory that animals—and, by inference, humans in their “natural state”—operate democratically contradicted Darwin.

He was emphatic. “I don’t think it is [at variance with Darwin]. . . . So the point about this model is that democratic decision-making is best for all the individuals in the group, as opposed to following a leader, a dominant individual. So we see it as an individual selection model, and so it’s not incompatible with Darwin at all.”

Democracy, it turns out, is the norm in the animal kingdom, for the simple reason that it confers the greatest likelihood that the group will survive and prosper.

Even the Lord of the Flies model in William Golding’s novel, echoing Thomas Hobbes’s “nasty, brutish and short” worldview of human nature, has now been thoroughly debunked. Rutger Bregman, in his book Humankind: A Hopeful History, wrote, “I learned what an unhappy individual [Golding] had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression.”[9] Golding had made the mistake of projecting his own dysfunction on the rest of humankind.

Instead, Bregman documents how an actual group of young men who were marooned for almost two years on a remote desert island formed a democratic, egalitarian, and cooperative type of society. This, he suggests (much like Conradt and Roper), is the natural state of humanity. “It’s time we told a different kind of story,” he says in Humankind.

Modern scientific evidence has now repeatedly proven that the thinkers of the Enlightenment, particularly Locke, Rousseau, and Jefferson, were right that democracy is part and parcel of nature, and at the core of what we call human nature.

Revolutionary Principles: Born Equal

At the Constitutional Convention, delegates repeatedly argued that as the US population grew, the need for the labor of enslaved human beings would vanish. Many of them freed their slaves over the decades, Ben Franklin joined an abolition society, and others like Washington freed their slaves in their wills.

The children who would grow up to reject England’s oligarchy had come into a world populated and powered by enslaved people and were taught to believe not only that it was OK, but that it was God’s will that white people own enslaved Black and Native people.

The accepted “science” of their day was purely white supremacy. And slavery was in the Bible: after all, hadn’t Paul instructed Christians to be good to their slaves, but he never talked about freeing them?

However, much like the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, and today’s millennial generation’s “wokeness” about issues of race, gender identity, and capitalism (among other things), the fire of the Enlightenment set ablaze young people’s minds in the 1760s.

An entire generation felt an urgency to embrace a new form of governance, never before tried, where every man would be free. (The freedom of women took longer, but the suffrage movement was very much alive in the 1770s too, and for the same reasons; John Adams’s wife, Abigail, was among the activists.)

As Thomas Paine, an ardent abolitionist and the man whom many credited for helping start the Revolution, wrote of the time, “A new era for politics is struck—a new method of thinking hath arisen.”[10]

The “father of the Constitution,” James Madison, in Federalist, no. 14, wrote of his generation, “They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society. They reared the fabrics of governments which have no model on the face of the globe.”[11]

And they did this by holding to, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist, No. 31, “primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend.”[12] The first among these was that every person should be free.

But there’s another story buried under this one, of which most Americans are not even vaguely aware.

It’s the story of the rise of a powerful oligarchy in the South in the years between 1820 and 1860, an oligarchy that seized control of the government of almost every slave state and then twisted those states away from a democratic republican form of government into something entirely different, more closely resembling feudal Europe 500 years earlier.

It was a repudiation of the values expressed by the Founders and Framers, put into place just as the idealist members of the Founding Generation were old and dying.

In the process, these new Southern oligarchs not only doubled down on enslaving people of African ancestry but also impoverished their own white people, denying them education and a decent standard of living, while creating an oligarchic and politically criminal legacy that exists in those states to this day.

The Founders signed the Declaration of Independence that put the country on the road to the elimination of slavery with the words that “all men are created equal.”

Twenty-five of the 55 Framers who wrote the Constitution were slaveholders, and many if not most of them expected slavery to die out in the next two or three generations. Based on the writings they left, they were proud that they’d begun the epic process of such a large change in American society after centuries of oligarchy and legal chattel slavery.

But none of the men who signed the Constitution could have imagined that a seemingly minor technological innovation—the invention of the cotton gin—would produce a violent oligarchy enforced by a police state across the South that would one day reach out to try to crush democracy itself in the North.

Best-Laid Plans for Liberty: Ending American Slavery

When you read through James Madison’s notes on the Constitutional Convention, it’s striking how not one single member—even from the Southern states—stood up to argue that slavery was a good thing.

No doubt, all were deeply marinated in white supremacy and many were open advocates of that cause, but the spirit of the time, at the least, prevented them from promoting those views in the context of the new country about to be born.

The only outlier was South Carolina’s Charles Pinckney, a plantation and slave owner, who argued that slaves were present in the Bible and the Roman Republic, and if the Constitution outlawed the practice, his state and Georgia probably would not sign the document. It kicked off a debate that he quickly backed away from.

In large part, these Southern politicians were unwilling to defend slavery because they didn’t have the political power to stand up to the emerging generation of idealists, particularly those from the border states and the North, where there were large and active abolition movements.

Even Patrick Henry, Virginia’s largest slaveholder, expounded at length in numerous venues during that era about the evils of slavery and the absolute need for America to gradually and “safely” eliminate the practice.

When they spoke of the issue, the representatives from the Southern states largely argued against economic disruption or claimed their own right to hang on—at least temporarily—to an economic and political system into which they, themselves, had been born.

But the majority of the Constitution’s Framers were not slaveholders, and they (and some of the slaveholders) were ready to move on from slavery and toward a more egalitarian nation.

On August 8, 1787, the assembled delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia took up Article IV, Section 2, of the Constitution. The Southern states were a generation away from sliding into oligarchic control (more on that in a moment) but still considered slavery central to their economies.

When a discussion of taxing exports that were the product of slavery (mostly cotton) came up, Gouverneur Morris of New York used the moment to point out how slavery had a terrible effect on local government, local economy, and the standard of life for all the white people of a slave state except the plantation owners.

James Madison (a Virginia slave owner) took notes on Morris’s speech, capturing the essence of his remarks. “He never would concur in upholding domestic slavery,” Madison wrote of Morris.

It was a nefarious institution—It was the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed. Compare the free regions of the Middle States, where a rich & noble cultivation marks the prosperity & happiness of the people, with the misery & poverty which overspread the barren wastes of [Virginia, Maryland, and] the other States having slaves. (Travel thro’ ye whole Continent & you behold the prospect continually varying with the appearance & disappearance of slavery. The moment you leave [the Eastern states and enter New York], the effects of the institution become visible; Passing thro’ the Jerseys, and entering [Pennsylvania], every criterion of superior improvement witnesses the change. Proceed [Southwardly], & every step you take [through the] great regions of slaves, presents a desert increasing with ye increasing proportion of these wretched beings.) . . .

The vassalage of the poor has ever been the favorite offspring of Aristocracy.[13]

Madison cited Connecticut’s Roger Sherman: “He observed, that the abolition of slavery seemed to be going on in the United States, and that the good sense of the several States would probably by degrees complete it.”[14]

Virginia’s George Mason, himself a slaveholder, rose to say, “Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. . . . They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. . . . By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.”

Oliver Ellsworth was emphatic. “As population increases, poor laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless. Slavery, in time, will not be a speck in our country.”

William Patterson said, “[W]here slavery exists, the republican theory becomes still more fallacious.”[15]

And, indeed, the sentiment against slavery was widespread across the colonies.

The year after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Vermont—which was then a sovereign nation— modified its constitution to ban slavery.

Pennsylvania passed a law initiating the emancipation of slaves in that state in 1780.

New Hampshire and Massachusetts followed Vermont’s lead in 1783, although by court rulings in both states, and the process spread down the Eastern seaboard to New York and New Jersey by the turn of the century.

As that era’s abolition movement spread southward, it achieved tidal wave proportions during the Founders’ lifetimes.

Delaware slave owners freed their slaves “in such large numbers that it amounted to a near abolition,” wrote Thomas G. West in Vindicating the Founders. “By the end of Jefferson’s presidency 75 percent of Delaware blacks were free; in Maryland, free blacks numbered a substantial 23 percent.”[16]

Little did the Founding generation realize that all of their anti-oligarchy egalitarian principles and high-minded discussions of ending slavery would be destroyed by the merger of technology and oligarchy.

New Technology, New Oligarchy

Just as the agricultural revolution birthed humanity’s first documented oligarchies, the invention of the cotton gin and its widespread use by 1820 birthed the first American oligarchy, one that eventually rose up and challenged democracy in a bloody Civil War.

From the century of the American Revolution until the early 1800s, the main sources of power that fueled America were twofold: wood and human labor.

In the north, that labor was often supplied by European convicts or indentured European immigrants who committed to a certain number of years of free labor in exchange for transportation from Europe, or simply by poor immigrants willing to do pretty much any job for very low pay. We see something like this today with the startling number of people in America who are homeless and working a full-time job or several part-time jobs.

As transatlantic commerce exploded through the late 1700s and early 1800s, the increasing numbers of ships brought with them a dramatic decrease in the cost of the trip for a new immigrant from Europe to America.

More and more people could avoid an indenture and simply pay their own way, so during this period, indentured servitude in the North pretty much faded away, replaced in some areas by prison labor but most often replaced by cheap immigrant labor.

In the South, these forms of labor existed, but on the plantations where the only way to pick and clean cotton was with fingers and hands, the labor was mostly supplied by enslaved people of African ancestry.

Then came a technological change that had as much impact on the South as Gutenberg’s printing press did on Europe centuries before. It transformed the economics of the South from a hardscrabble existence into one of opulence and great wealth in a very few hands; changed the culture of the South from one that was apologetic for slavery into one that openly called it a good thing that should spread across the rest of the nation and around the world; and changed the politics of the South from a mostly democratic republic into an openly tyrannical oligarchy.

Where Cotton Is King, Cotton Makes Kings

Cotton could be a reliably profitable crop for the Southern plantation owners; it was easy to grow, it could be stored for years if necessary, and there was worldwide demand for it. Its biggest problem was the seeds.

What we call cotton is a fibrous part of the “fruit” of the cotton plant. After the flower is pollinated, the seeds form and mature in a pod or boll along with a protective superstructure of thin fibers that we call cotton.

Picking cotton is work that in the period from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War was never automated, so it required a fair amount of human labor. Far more difficult, though, was the process of disentangling the cotton seeds from the cotton fibers that surrounded them. It could take an entire day for a person to clean a single pound of cotton by hand.

In 1794, Eli Whitney figured out how to make a drum into which raw cotton could be dumped, then spun with hundreds of tiny hooks that would pull the cotton fibers out through a mesh. The mesh was too fine for the seeds to pass through, so as the drum turned, the cotton accumulated outside it, leaving behind in the drum nothing but seeds.

Whitney wrote to his father, “One man and a horse will do more than fifty men with the old machines. . . . Tis generally said by those who know anything about it, that I shall make a Fortune by it.”[17]

His “cotton gin” (“gin” was short for “engine”) took the South by storm in the first two decades of the 1800s. Its biggest impact, though, was on the fate of enslaved people and the fate of democracy in the South.

Now that one machine could clean as much cotton as fifty people, every cotton plantation faced the possibility that it could produce 50 times as much cotton (and profit), if only it had 50 times as much land to grow the cotton on and 50 times as many people to pick it.

The wealthiest among the Southern oligarchs began to buy up small farms and plantations the way big agricultural corporations would later buy out American Midwestern farmers when Reagan stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly laws in the early 1980s.

The smaller farmers who couldn’t afford a cotton gin were faced with financial ruin from their giant competitors, and they didn’t have Willie Nelson to sing “Farm Aid” fundraising concerts to help them buy equipment to compete. Like Midwestern farmers in the 1980s, the smaller Southern cotton farmers either sold out or were bankrupted and driven off their land; many became tenant farmers on what had previously been their own property.

Illinois’s Representative John Farnsworth noted the trend in his 1864 speech on the floor of the US House of Representatives:

[With t]he invention of the cotton-gin, the cultivation of cotton made it profitable to raise men and women for the southern market. The price of slaves was enhanced; from being worth $250 they went up to $1,200 and $1,300.

Then the greed for power took possession of the slave-holders, and the avarice of these men overleaped itself and they became clamorous for the extension of slavery. The bounds were too narrow for them. They became ambitious of a nation that should be founded upon “the cornerstone of slavery.”

Then it was, Mr. Speaker, that the slave power got the control of the Government, of the executive, legislative, and judicial departments. Then it was that they got possession of the high places of society. They took possession of the churches. They took possession of the lands. Then it became criminal for a man to open his lips in denunciation of the evil and sin of slaveholding.

Then followed . . . the attempt to expel John Quincy Adams; the throttling of the right to petition; suppressing the freedom of the press; the suppression of the freedom of the mails; all these things followed the taking possession of the Government and lands by the slave power, until we were the slaves of slaves, being chained to the car of this slave Juggernaut. . . .

Then came the conventions of the rival political parties, in which they declared that the agitation of this vexed question should cease. But it would not cease, for the slave power was still clamoring for more, more, more!

Then came the [Dred Scott] decision of the Supreme Court. Why, sir, the spirit of slavery took possession of that court and instigated the palsied arm of a judge upon the brink of the grave to attempt to snatch the charter of human liberty from the throne of the Almighty.[18]

The Southern oligarchs were on the rise.

The Oligarchs’ War

By the 1830s, with the recent death of nearly every member of the Founding generation and the rise of plantation oligarch Andrew Jackson’s vice president, John C. Calhoun, and his nullification crisis, the South was firmly in the economic, political, and social hands of a small number of uber-wealthy plantation-based oligarchs made fabulously rich by the invention of the cotton gin.

In 1913, looking back on the 1787 Constitutional Convention, historian Henry Leffmann wrote,

Some of the members of the Convention doubtless believed that the question [of slavery] would settle itself thru the evolution of labor conditions. Ellsworth, of Connecticut, said, “Let us not intermeddle. As the population increases, poor laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless.” This result might have been attained much earlier than it was if the cotton-gin had not been invented.[19]

As Forrest A. Nabors wrote in his brilliant book From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction,

A new generation of rulers reshaped the South around their new ruling principle. . . . The development of Southern oligarchy portended the rupture of the union, regardless of the ties that bound them together, because no ties, physical, legal, or otherwise, can overcome the difference between fundamentally opposed types of political regimes.[20]

And it was the technological revolution that Eli Whitney had birthed that gave them the wealth and power to try to pull it off. Wisconsin senator Timothy Howe laid it out in an 1864 speech on the floor of the US House of Representatives:

If the cotton-gin had not been invented, slaveholding would not have been profitable. If slaveholding had not been profitable, slaveholders would not have been rich. If slaveholders had not been rich, they would not have been arrogant. If they had not been arrogant, four hundred thousand slaveholders would not have presumed to challenge dominion over twenty million freemen.

Slavery without the cotton-gin would have been a monster wrong, but it would not have been dangerous to the Republic. The cotton-gin without slavery would have been of twice the value it has been and still would not have been dangerous to anyone. Together they have proved fatal to the peace of the nation.[21]

On December 18, 1860, Tennessee senator Andrew Johnson (soon to be vice president and then president) said on the floor of the Senate, speaking in favor of the right of the Southern states to secede, “When the Union was formed, twelve of the thirteen States were slaveholding; and if the cotton gin had not been invented, there would not probably today have been an African slave in North America.”[22]

Even the Canadians commented on the transformation of the South from a democratic republic to an oligarchy in the years after the cotton gin’s invention, having received no small number of slaves via the Underground Railroad.

Member of the Canadian Legislative Assembly (and, later, of Parliament) Christopher Dunkin of Brome, Quebec, stated in the months before the end of the Civil War in 1865,

If, indeed, Louisiana had not been purchased, if the cotton-gin had not been invented—the two unforeseen events which so encouraged the growth of cotton and therefore of slavery—if it had not been for these, what I may call extraneous events, which could not be expected to enter into the minds of the framers of that Constitution, it probably would not have received the shock that it has received.[23]

Historian Forrest Nabors extensively cites (and informed me of) Representative John Farnsworth of Illinois, as well as Senator Timothy Howe of Wisconsin, who argued that the oligarchy in the South had become so strong that they weren’t just trying to be left alone in the lead-up to the Civil War— they actually wanted to dominate the North.

“Such, then, I find to be the cause and the purpose of the rebellion,” said Howe. “It was not to secure toleration for slavery within the seceding States, but to compel the adoption of slavery by the nation.”[24] In other words, the Confederacy rose up not simply to preserve Southern oligarchy, but to extend that oligarchy to the rest of the United States.

PART THREE

How Oligarchs Hung On after the Civil War: Controlling Free Commoners

Although Lincoln defeated the Southern oligarchy in the Civil War, after the Compromise of 1877, which settled the disputed 1876 Hayes-Tilden presidential election, led to the end of Reconstruction, the oligarchy in the South refused to die, persisting to this day.

When modern Southern oligarchs could no longer use slavery and slave patrols to enforce their social order, they simply turned to debt and the Ku Klux Klan, with a heavy dose of brutal racialized policing thrown in. In the years since the Reagan Revolution, the process has gone nationwide.

First, they constructed an intellectual framework, starting in 1951 with the work of Russell Kirk, to justify maintaining oligarchy using these systems. They called it “conservativism,” and it became the official religion of the Republican Party in 1964 when Barry Goldwater was the first modern GOP candidate to espouse this type of thinking.

Second, they reconfigured or started enforcing laws that criminalized debt, allowing them to threaten with prison people who refused to work for the oligarchs on their terms. They institutionalized this into a system called debt peonage, which, although outlawed in the early 20th century, exists to this day, particularly in the old South and parts of the new West.

Third, as medical costs exploded over the past 40 years, today’s American oligarchs have used that medical debt to force millions of Americans into peonage every year.

Finally, while some Americans escaped medical debt peonage through bankruptcy, President George W. Bush and the GOP pushed through Congress laws making it a crime to not pay student debt—unlike every other form of debt except taxes—and forbidding the use of bankruptcy to evade student debt peonage.

Throughout this process, conservatives promulgated laws hypercriminalizing drug possession and use, and directed enforcement of them specifically against anti-war and racial justice activists, and against people of color more generally.

This has provided a solid foundation on which the post-Reagan oligarchs have built their castles of unimaginable wealth, while keeping average Americans in peonage.

Control and Safety: The Conservatism of Oligarchy

Oligarchy is almost never presented to the people by its real name and face. Instead, elaborate rationales are constructed to justify the existence of oligarchs and the system of oligarchy.

Two of the first three types of oligarchic systems that modern (the past 7,000 years) civilization experienced were warlord kingdoms and theocracies.

In a warlord kingdom, the king seized and maintained power by military might and the willingness to enforce his rule by using shocking levels of violence.

Long after the kings and queens needed naked brutality to rule, they redefined their legitimacy by saying that they ruled because God wanted them to. The coins of Great Britain to this day often bear the letters “D G REG,” which stand for the Latin “Dei Gratia Regina,” or “By the Grace of God, [she is the] Queen.”

Although the Jewish world left theocracy behind millennia ago (with multiple warnings against it in the Bible), and Hindus and Buddhists abandoned it centuries ago (outside of some local governments), Christian and Muslim theocracies endure to this day in the form of Vatican City and multiple Middle Eastern governments.

The third oligarchic system is one in which the rich rule—a true, modern oligarchy—regardless of their lineage or religion.

Imposing oligarchy of this sort on a democratic republic is trickier than conquering a people with violence or convincing them that their ruler hears the voice of a god; it takes the actual consent of the governed—at least at first. And that involves some very sophisticated recalibration of people’s way of thinking about government and wealth.

As Lewis Powell pointed out in his 1971 Memo, it required building think tanks to influence the public dialogue, building or buying a massive media machine, getting “liberal” stories and histories out of primary school textbooks and courses, and capturing university political science and economics departments.

In 1951, a 35-year-old writer named Russell Kirk shook the conservative world in America with a lengthy tome titled The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. Kirk’s book, updated in 1960, 1972, and 1985, captured the imagination of the Republican intelligentsia, including Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr.

Quoting at length from Sir Edmund Burke, who famously wrote that if “hairdressers and candle-makers” were allowed to vote, it would do “violence” to a society, Kirk argued that modern American society was on the verge of collapse because of liberalism and secularism.

It was an opinion not held by many of our Founders; Thomas Paine wrote his entire book The Rights of Man as a rebuttal to Burke’s conservative principles, and the two fought fiercely during the two weeks that Paine stayed at Burke’s estate while on his way to getting arrested in Paris during the French Revolution.

Paine was the first to propose what we now call Social Security (so much so that the Social Security Administration reprints Paine’s Agrarian Justice in its entirety on its website[1]). His book The Age of Reason argued for agnosticism and a complete separation between church and state.

But Burke considered Paine’s ideas naive and unworkable, rejecting the notion that the mass of people could govern themselves. Oligarchy was necessary, argued Burke, or chaos would ensue.

Kirk echoed Burke, writing that “civilized society requires orders and classes,” because “ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom.”[2]

Kirk, like so many white movement conservatives, also saw a racial hierarchy.

In a column in the March 9, 1965, edition of the National Review, he extended that logic overseas, writing that the US Supreme Court’s decisions on equal rights among races, such as Brown v. Board of Education, “will work mischief—much injuring, rather than fulfilling, the responsible democracy for which Tocqueville hoped.”

He added that in South Africa, “this degradation of the democratic dogma, if applied, would bring anarchy and the collapse of civilization.” It was, according to Kirk, “the ‘European’ element [which makes] South Africa the only ‘modern’ and prosperous African country.”[3]

Kirk later quoted at length the royalist poet T. S. Eliot, who argued that by rejecting the rigid strictures of conservative Christianity, we would be “destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.”[4] Those “barbarian nomads” were very real to Kirk, Buckley, Goldwater, Nixon, and other conservatives who subscribed to his views and carried them forward into, ultimately, the Reagan Revolution.

Slavery Is Legal in the United States in 2021

Popular belief holds that the 13th Amendment, passed just a few weeks before Christmas in 1865, ended slavery in the United States.

It didn’t.

Instead, it merely limited slavery to one particular slice of our population, and, as a result, humans are held today in actual slavery in this country.

The 13th Amendment says, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The “except” was a huge loophole and explains why America has more people in prison than any other country on earth, at over 2.1 million prisoners, far more than twice those held by the entire European Union, which has roughly 100 million more citizens than the United States.[5]

Additionally, another 7 million Americans are under some form of “correctional supervision” today, meaning they can be pushed back into slave labor often for the smallest infraction.

America imprisons about 430 out of every 100,000 of our people.[6] For comparison, Japan imprisons 39, Iceland 37, Finland 53, Norway 60, Sweden 61, the Netherlands 63, Germany and Denmark 71 each, and the UK 77.[7]

It explains why multiple billion-dollar companies have jumped into the for-profit prison business. Prison labor— modern-day slave labor, illegal in every other developed country in the world—is, like the slave labor of old, incredibly profitable, whether those imprisoned slaves are making furniture, assembling electronics, or picking cotton.[8]

We also have tens of millions of “disposable” people, including people of color and poor whites, who act as a sort of economic and political shock absorber for US companies and politicians. When the periodic recessions that afflict the American economy happen every six to nine years or so, these are the people who are first to be laid off, and when recoveries start, they are the last to be hired. As such, they buffer middle- and upper-income Americans, overwhelmingly white, from the shocks of the cycles of our particularly brutal form of laissez-faire capitalism.

These two systems keep the money flowing to American oligarchs while preventing an uprising among the somewhat more privileged portion of the white middle class.

Through Debt, Oligarchs Can Still Own People

Two thousand years ago, Publilius Syrus wrote, “Debt is the slavery of the free.” A bit over a century ago, Ambrose Bierce defined debt as “an ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.”

The lesson hasn’t been lost on modern American oligarchs. If labor unions and workers’ cooperatives represent the most empowered form of labor, they’re also the most intolerable to oligarchy. On the other hand, slavery and debt represent the other end of the spectrum, being most desirable to an oligarchic system.

After slavery’s collapse in the wake of the Civil War, a new form of indenture called debt peonage was rolled out in the South, one that ensnared both Blacks and poor whites and was particularly effective against the illiterate and poorly educated. This practice was also extensive in the coal mines of West Virginia, Tennessee, northern Georgia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania from the mid-19th century right through the late 20th century.

Across America’s South and Midwest it still exists, particularly for those farmers who lost their farms to the massive waves of corporate ag mergers in the 1980s after Reagan threw in with the corporate agriculture oligarchs.

Between Reagan’s 1980 election and 1985, over a third of Nebraska farmers were on the edge of losing their farms, with loan delinquency increasing by nearly 400 percent during that time. Small local banks that had lent to farmers were going broke at a rate not seen since the Great Depression, then being bought out of bankruptcy by big New York banks (who were simultaneously funding the big ag companies).

One Nebraska farmer, Arthur Kirk, of Cairo, Nebraska, confronted the sheriff who had come on behalf of a bank to repossess his land in 1984; he was shot to death by police.[9]

There’s a long history here.

Way back in 1872, the Supreme Court, in Slaughter House Cases, heard arguments that a geographic ban on Louisiana slaughterhouses forced butchers into “involuntary servitude,” prohibited by the 13th Amendment.[10] While the butchers lost the case, Justice Stephen Field, in his dissent, argued to expand the definition of “servitude” to include “peonage,” a position that the Court later largely adopted in Samuel M. Clyatt v. US[11] (1905) and Bailey v. Alabama[12] (1911).

That did not, however, end the practice, particularly in the Southern states.

In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt began to highlight the problem of debt peonage across the Southern states and in the nation’s new territories; this led to a law explicitly outlawing the practice.

That same year, two bounty hunters captured two men who were in debt to a Florida company, the company having hired the bounty hunters to bring them back—which they did. The “debt peons”—as the Court referred to them—complained, and the bounty hunters were arrested. The case ended up before the US Supreme Court in 1904.

In upholding the anti-peonage law in the case of Clyatt v. US, Justice David Brewer wrote,

What is peonage? It may be defined as a status or condition of compulsory service, based upon the indebtedness of the peon to the master. The basal fact is indebtedness. . . . This was the cord by which they seemed bound to their master’s service. . . . Peonage is sometimes classified as voluntary or involuntary; but this implies simply a difference in the mode of origin, but none in the character of the servitude.[13]

Nonetheless, in 1904, peonage was still very much alive and well.

In an article published that year in the Negro Voice newspaper titled “Peonage, or the New Slavery,” African American intellectual Charles Chesnutt wrote, “Under the renting system, the crop mortgage laws leave the laborer but little more than a slave to the soil, while at the worst the Southern labor system presents peonage, or the new slavery. The old habit of making the Negro work for the white people for their board and clothes has in large measure survived.”[14]

Throughout American history, and despite all of our efforts to forge “a more perfect union,” America’s oligarchs have proved resilient, transforming again and again: from owning slaves in the 18th century to indebting peons in the 19th century; from hiring desperate wage laborers in the 20th century to contracting freelance “gig economy” workers in the 21st century.

Oligarchs Use Medical Debt as an Instrument of Control

The United States banned involuntary debt peonage, but new forms of legal debt peonage have emerged.

Today in Mississippi, if you’re in debt, you can be sentenced to a “restitution center,” where people sleep six to a room in an old converted motel (now outfitted with razor-wire fences), being driven daily to jobs at fast-food restaurants or on farms.[15] When you’ve earned enough to pay off your debt, plus $11 a day for your room and board, you can leave. Some never do.

In 2019, Pro Publica launched an extensive examination of the problem of modern-day debt peonage (my phrase, not theirs) in Kansas, a system using functional debtors’ prisons, expanded and endorsed by courts in state after state. About half of the people who’d ended up in jail for missing court dates or not paying their debts owed money because they had gotten sick or been in an accident and were being sued by a doctor or hospital.

An earlier ProPublica study looked at the same thing in Utah, where the payday loan industry is unregulated and payday lenders charge as much as 2,607 percent annual interest, with an average of around 652 percent.

Most of the people in Utah threatened with prison owed money to these lenders, who, with 417 retail outlets statewide, are more numerous than “the number of McDonald’s, 7-Eleven, Burger King and Subway stores combined.”[16]

Debt is a national scourge. With the Federal Reserve citing its own study that found most Americans couldn’t handle an unexpected $500 expense, it’s no surprise that an ACLU investigation of 26 states found that every year, tens of thousands of people have arrest warrants issued against them in exclusively debt-related cases.[17] The Fed study found, “One-fifth of adults had major, unexpected medical bills to pay in the prior year. One-fourth of adults skipped necessary medical care in 2018 because they were unable to afford the cost.”[18]

Fertile ground for an $11-billion-a-year debt-collection industry.

In the study of Kansas, ProPublica investigative reporter Lizzie Presser documented the raw human misery of this “industry.”

One woman recalled how, at four months pregnant, she had reported a money order scam to her local sheriff’s office only to discover that she had a warrant; she was arrested on the spot. A radiologist had sued her over a $230 bill, and she’d missed one hearing too many. Another woman said she watched, a decade ago, as a deputy came to the door for her diabetic aunt and took her to jail in her final years of life. Now here she was, dealing with her own debt, trying to head off the same fate.[19]

The focus of Presser’s article was a 41-year-old man named Tres Biggs, who’d been arrested “more than once” for failing to promptly pay medical bills. “His court dates had begun after his son developed leukemia,” Presser wrote, “and they’d picked up when his wife started having seizures.” The judge in the Coffeyville, Kansas, courthouse had no law degree, and he granted every arrest warrant requested by the collection agency’s lawyer, who got a cut of not only the collections but the bail as well.[20]

Democrats have been fighting these practices for years at both the federal and state levels. Their efforts in Republican-controlled states are almost always frustrated, just as with their efforts in the US Congress.

More than 530,000 Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2018 because of medical debt, while more than a quarter million GoFundMe sites were set up that year to help people pay medical bills. The bottom 80 percent of Americans live in terror of getting seriously sick or injured; they may never recover financially, sometimes ending up homeless or in jail.

No other developed country in the world has these numbers: the total of people who filed for bankruptcy or went online asking for money because of medical bills in Canada, England, France, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, and the Netherlands combined was zero. As Olga Khazan wrote in The Atlantic, “Medical debt is a uniquely American phenomenon, a burden that would be unfathomable in many other developed countries.”[21]

America is the only developed country in the world where hundreds of thousands of people declare bankruptcy every year because of medical debt.[22]

Every year, American billionaires and entire industries that made them rich spend millions to convince Americans that America’s health care system is the best in the world. Yet Americans know that if they get sick, their entire lives and livelihoods could be destroyed by medical debt.

And the crisis of COVID-19 has dragged tens of millions of formerly middle-class Americans into this brutal system that’s been largely enforced against the working poor ever since the 1978 Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp. Supreme Court decision, which let multistate banks ignore state usury (maximum interest rate) laws.[23] This not only provoked an explosion in credit card rates but, along with Reagan-era deregulation of the financial industry, spawned the modern predatory payday loan industry, which was virtually unknown before the Reagan Revolution.[24]

The biggest enemy of oligarchy is a well-educated working class or middle class that has some amount of economic independence, no longer in fear of getting sick or being kicked out of college for protesting. That requires free college, free medical care, and reasonable lending rates, things that every other developed country in the world has. Only in the post–Reagan Revolution oligarchy of the United States are they lacking, because of the political and economic power of each of these industries.

Oligarchies find debt one of the easiest ways to control their citizens, particularly where there are laws that criminalize failure to pay. But medical debt is not the only way that oligarchies retain power.

Oligarchs Control the Commoners through Illiteracy and Student Debt

Just before the Civil War, Hinton Rowan Helper published a powerful book condemning the Southern oligarchy, titled The Impending Crisis of the South. When it was published in 1857, it was immediately banned in the South; three men in Alabama were hanged for possessing copies of the book, and book distributors in multiple Southern states were arrested and thrown into prison.

Speaking of the conditions of poor whites in those states, Helper wrote,

Poor whites may hear with fear and trembling but not speak. They must be as mum as dumb brutes, and stand in awe of their august superiors or be crushed with stern rebukes, cruel oppressions or downright violence. If they dare to think for themselves, their thoughts must be forever concealed.

The expression of any sentiment at all conflicting with the gospel of slavery dooms them at once in the community in which they live. . . .

Never were the poorer classes of a people, and those classes so largely in the majority, and all inhabiting the same country, so basely duped, so adroitly swindled, or so damnably outraged.[25]

Helper, instead of arguing the morality of slavery, went after its economic practicality and its impact on white people in the pre–Civil War South. He found both wanting.

Page after page of statistics in Helper’s book show that the slave states, from 1790 to 1857, had grown more slowly than the Northern states in both population and wealth; that their economies were far more anemic; and that their poor white populations were far worse off economically and educationally than their peers in the North.

In Pennsylvania, in 1850, the annual income of public schools amounted to $1,348,249, [but with a similar population,] South Carolina, in the same year, [spent] only $200,000; in [Pennsylvania] there were 393 libraries other than private, in [South Carolina] only 26; in Pennsylvania 310 newspapers and periodicals were published . . .; in South Carolina only 46 newspapers and periodicals were published.[26]

Another author, William H. Skaggs, was born the year the Civil War started, 1861, and was well known in Alabama politics until his death in 1947. Unusual for a politically active white man of the South, he was outspoken in his critique of the political and economic systems of that region, particularly in his 1924 book The Southern Oligarchy, which traces the economic and political life of the South from the rise of Senator and then Vice President John C. Calhoun in the 1820s to Skaggs’s day in the early 1920s.[27]

“The invention of the Whitney [cotton] gin was followed by a change of political creed and a new code of ethics in the South,” Skaggs wrote. The slave oligarchy was a landed aristocracy.

This aristocracy not only directed all governmental policies, but it also ruled with an iron hand in the commercial and financial affairs of the Southern states. It was not only imperious in fixing the social status in the South, but its power was absolute in a country where the whole civic and economic system was built on the institution of slavery. This imperialism was not only undemocratic in theory and practice, but it was not even republican in form.[28]

The Peabody Fund was the most active organization in the United States in 1920 working to upgrade education in the South. Its manager, Dr. J. L. M. Curry, was outspoken about the problem of Southern oligarchs wanting to keep their young uneducated and therefore unlikely to politically challenge the oligarchy. He informed Skaggs,

It must be borne in mind that under the ancient [slavery] regime no public-school system providing universal education existed in the South. There was no system adequate even to the education at public expense of white youth. . . .

Population was sparse, roads were bad, schoolhouses did not exist, there was an absolute want of acquaintance with the machinery of public schools, no sufficient supply of competent teachers was to be had, and weighing down all spirit of hopeful progress was the dreary poverty of the taxpayer.[29]

The result, as Daniel J. Sully (the leader of the “bull campaign” on the New York Cotton Exchange) wrote in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1909, was that people of all races in the South were “in practical servitude.” He added, “It is a tragedy of contemporary life that they . . . are themselves absolutely subservient and the poorest paid toilers in the United States. Intellectually the cotton-growers are surrounded and coerced by factors which have no other purpose than to keep them in this benighted vassalage.”[30]

That benighted vassalage continues to this day, with spending for primary education in Northern states running from $15,000 to $20,000 per pupil in Wyoming, Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, Alaska, and New York, to a spread of between $7,000 and $8,000 per pupil in Mississippi, North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida.[31]

It’s the same with higher education in the South today. Between 2008 and 2016, Louisiana cut its higher education budget by 39 percent, leading to massive tuition increases. Seven Southern states followed, with some of the largest higher education budget cuts in the nation.[32]

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association reported that during that 2008–2016 period, “Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina, Alabama, and Virginia each decreased spending on public colleges and universities by at least 10 percent.”[33]

As tuition costs exploded across the South, the ability of poor and working-class people of any race to climb the economic and social ladder through education collapsed. And those who did try to raise themselves through college often fell deeply into debt.

In 2005, the Bush administration and Congress made it illegal for students to declare bankruptcy on their student loans. With virtually no risk anymore, the student lending industry then exploded from being a peripheral part of routine banking to a major industry spending millions on lobbying annually.

In the late 1970s, just before the Reagan Revolution, the average American college student who borrowed for his or her education took on $883 of debt per year.[34] By 2016, average college student debt in the United States was $37,102, with over two million students owing more than $100,000.[35]

Student debt—unknown in the rest of the developed world—has put people entering college after the Reagan Revolution into such debt that they’re postponing buying houses, putting off starting families or businesses, and radically limited in their life’s choices.

Want to stop workers from organizing? Terrify them with the threat of taking away their health insurance.

Want to stop students from protesting? Terrify them with being thrown out of school while still carrying massive debt.

The conservative banking oligarchs who kicked off this process during the Reagan Revolution, amplified by George W. Bush in 2005, succeeded in creating two generations so indebted—in a way they could never legally escape—that, like those in the South for over 200 years, they are afraid to revolt and instead, more often than not, meekly submit to the voices of authority.

Controlling the Commoners: When All Else Fails, Bring in the Police

As The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment describes, the Second Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights in part to assure concerned power brokers in the South that they would be able to keep the slave patrols that maintained their police state, and therefore continue to hold and run their profitable slavery-based empires even if the official international slave trade with the United States ended in 1808.

The governing strategy of a police state is today used extensively in authoritarian countries like China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore. State surveillance is ubiquitous, and numerous “small” crimes carry with them sentencing guidelines that range from a tiny fine to many years in prison. This flexibility lets the state use these small crimes as a huge cudgel against individuals who may speak out or rebel against those police states.

An example that most Americans are familiar with is the drug laws that were put in place during and after the Nixon administration declared their “War on Drugs,” an effort that went into hyperdrive during the Reagan Revolution and is only now slowly disintegrating.

When I was in high school, one of my best friends was arrested for possessing marijuana. He was given a two-year prison sentence and when he got out was virtually unrecognizable in terms of his personality and outlook. A happy antiwar protester had become a shell-shocked 20-something who struggled with severe PTSD the rest of his life, unable to deal even with going to college.

In 2016, Dan Baum was working on a book and writing an article for Harper’s about drug prohibition. He was the first reporter to track down the original architect of Nixon’s War on Drugs, John Ehrlichman, who’d been Nixon’s senior domestic policy adviser. Baum found Ehrlichman working at an engineering firm in Atlanta, wearing “a mountain-man beard that extended to the middle of his chest.”

“I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions,” Baum wrote in the Harper’s article, “that he impatiently waved away.”

“You want to know what this was really all about?” Ehrlichman asked Baum. Then, without waiting for an answer, he continued:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. 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.[36]

While the counterculture and antiwar movements eventually died out, their mostly white members getting jobs and merging into the general middle-class blur, African Americans couldn’t just change the color of their skin the way I could cut my shoulder-length hair and put on a suit. It wasn’t until the technological breakthroughs of the internet and camera-equipped smartphones combined in the 2010s that most white people in America learned at a visceral, undeniable level that the police-state war on Black people had never ended.

The oligarchs who own and run most of America had all kept it very much alive, as both a campaign tactic and a way to punish activists, through the Reagan, Bush, Bush, and Trump administrations. Even Bill Clinton got in on the act.

And it was all about weaponizing race—specifically, white racism against African Americans—as a way to rally the Republican base. Back when young Donald Trump was working for his dad marking “C” for “colored” on rental applications, Republican politicians were also ruthlessly exploiting America’s racial divisions.

For example, it was widely recognized that Nixon’s “silent majority” was a reference to white people, and Reagan’s first official presidential campaign speech was at a county fair near the Philadelphia, Mississippi (population 7,500), site where three civil rights workers (Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner) were brutally murdered in June 1964.[37] The story of the murders was told in the Oscar-winning movie Mississippi Burning.[38]

Reagan often referred to Black inner cities as “jungles,” joked publicly about Africans and cannibalism, and, referring to housing discrimination, said, “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.”[39]

George W. Bush was less willing to used naked racism to campaign, but in the 2000 election, which put him in the White House, his brother, then–Florida governor Jeb Bush, directed a program executed by Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris that removed the names and voting eligibility of 57,700 registered Black voters in that state.[40]

Bush won the election by fewer than 600 votes, and a recount a year later by a consortium of newspapers found that Al Gore had actually won the election in Florida (and won nationally by more than a half million votes; Bush won the Electoral College only because of his brother’s scam in Florida).

Trump reverted back to Reagan’s strategy of openly courting the white supremacist vote. His son and campaign surrogate, Donald Trump Jr., gave his first speech on behalf of his father’s campaign at the same county fair in Mississippi, presenting a similar “states’ rights” argument as Reagan’s to a similarly all-white crowd.

“It’s sort of amazing to be on this very stage where Ronald Reagan talked so many years ago,” Trump Jr. said, adding, in a defense of the Southern tradition of segregation and the Confederate battle flag of the Southern oligarchy, “I believe in traditions . . . leaving some of the traditions the way they are in this country; there’s nothing wrong with some tradition.”[41]

Police murders of underclass people—poor whites, Native Americans, Hispanics, and, particularly, African Americans— have long been an instrument of state terror used to prop up oligarchy.

After George Floyd was killed by four cops in May 2020, America rose up in protest, a movement that started specifically around the police murders of Black people, then morphed into a broader objection to fascistic policing techniques and Trump’s advocacy of brutality as a form of governance. It brought some changes, but the system is largely intact nationwide.

Police-state tactics continue to be used against Black people, Hispanics (particularly the undocumented), Native Americans, and Muslims, with Trump even building camps to imprison asylum seekers and their children.

The Oligarchs’ Biggest Threat: An Educated Middle Class with Leisure

In 1962 and 1963, President Kennedy (and particularly his brother Robert) began talking loudly about doing something about segregation and poverty. By 1965, LBJ had pushed through Congress both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Just the year before, the Beatles had performed to huge crowds in 23 cities from New York to San Francisco. When the band was told that their Florida venue, the Gator Bowl, was segregated, they refused to play until the state backed down. John Lennon famously said, “We never play to segregated audiences, and we aren’t going to start now. I’d sooner lose our appearance money.”[42] They also canceled their reservations in the segregated George Washington Hotel in Jacksonville, provoking outrage across the South.

In 1961, the birth control pill was first approved by the FDA, and by 1965 it was used widely. Women, for the first time in history, could have sex without worrying about pregnancy, and the diseases associated with sex—gonorrhea and syphilis—were easily treated by first-line antibiotics.

Few had ever heard of herpes, chlamydia, or other STDs; sex was safe and fun (and AIDS wasn’t even on the horizon). And women who didn’t worry about pregnancy wanted to get into the workplace and pursue meaningful jobs and careers.

It was, as Russell Kirk predicted, “the world of woman free and miserable.”[43]

As a result, by 1967 women were in revolt over their status; they couldn’t open a credit card account without a man’s signature (until 1972), were relegated in newspaper help-wanted ads to the “Women Wanted” section with nothing but low-paying jobs, and were discriminated against in both the workplace and college admissions to keep slots open for “breadwinner” men.

African Americans were similarly revolting against centuries of oppression and the legacies of Jim Crow, with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. recently martyred and cities burning in the wake of his murder. And while Black churches were centers of African American organizing, white people across the nation were rejecting religion in numbers that hadn’t been seen since the Revolutionary War era.

Russell Kirk had written that “the arrogant secularism of modern thought is destroying everything beautiful in our literature and philosophy,” and the gradual defections had become a stampede. Even religion was under siege.[44]

White male college students were rising up as the Vietnam War was consuming young lives by the tens of thousands. College campuses were aflame or under siege by 1967, with National Guard troops firing live ammunition, murdering four and wounding nine students at Kent State in 1970.

It was exactly what Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., and Barry Goldwater had warned the nation about. The formerly oppressed were rising up. Something had to be done.

The American middle class and their offspring had finally grown too large, too rich, too fearless, and too demanding. Unless something drastic happened, it could only end in disaster for America’s oligarchs and their allies in the ruling class.

PART FOUR

A Third Oligarchy Rises with the Reagan Revolution

Oligarchy is “rule by the rich.”

In 1776, Americans declared war—literally—on British oligarchy.

By the 1820s, the first American-made oligarchy had rooted itself in the American South, made rich by the cotton gin and slavery, and was finally defeated in the Civil War.

From the 1880s to 1929, a second (albeit weaker) oligarchy emerged with the industrial revolution making a new group of oligarchs wealthy; this second American oligarchy was finally taken down by the Republican Great Depression and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The third American oligarchy was established with the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s after Lewis Powell brought together America’s uber-rich, and the Supreme Court that Nixon had put him on gave them the legal right to bribe and own politicians with the Buckley and Bellotti cases in 1976 and 1978.

As we’ll discuss in the next section, this most recent American oligarchy began morphing into outright tyranny with the Trump presidency.

This is the story of how it came about.

Oligarchs Use the 14th Amendment to Get Corporate Personhood

The rise of real corporate power in America—the power to swing elections and buy politicians—hit its largest milestone in the Supreme Court in 1886, and the intrigue and lies that brought it about are astonishing.

By the 1880s, as the oligarchs of the Old South were in crisis and working hard to institute Jim Crow laws and policies, a new group of oligarchs were taking over the financial and business centers of the East and West Coasts. Railroads had been transcontinental for a generation, and the industrial revolution was exploding across the nation.

Dynastic and monopolistic companies arose that made a small handful of men richer than any person before in the history of the world.

• John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil controlled 90 percent of America’s oil;[1]

• Andrew Carnegie’s personal empire was producing more steel every year than the entire country of Great Britain (the world’s number two producer);[2]

• the DuPont family had become fabulously rich through a virtual monopoly on chemicals, nitroglycerin, and dynamite;[3]

• J. P. Morgan controlled railroads and banks;[4] and

• Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould were multi-billionaires by today’s standards through owning railroads and shipping companies.[5]

President Grover Cleveland, the only Democrat elected president between the Civil War and 1912, looked at that business landscape and said in his 1888 State of the Union address,

We discover that the fortunes realized by our manufacturers are no longer solely the reward of sturdy industry and enlightened foresight, . . . [but] are largely built upon undue exactions from the masses of our people. The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor.

As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.[6]

And it was, indeed, the corporate form that had enabled the very richest of that era’s oligarchs to amass and hang on to their fortunes.

But they wanted more.

Corporations in the 1880s were still typically limited to a lifespan of fewer than 50 years (and as little as 20 years in some states). They were prohibited in most states from getting involved in politics (although these laws were often ignored).

Every year or two, in every state, each corporation had to prove to the secretary of state where it had been incorporated that it was “operating in the public interest” first and foremost, and it would be dissolved if found not to be doing so; thousands of corporations a year were dissolved by the states for this crime.

Perhaps most galling to America’s oligarchs, each state had a patchwork quilt of laws and rules under which corporations had to operate, and in some cases, even counties and cities taxed corporations and regulated corporate behavior. This was intolerable, and the robber barons decided to do something about it.

I tell the entire story at length in my book Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People”—and How You Can Fight Back, but here’s what happened in short form.

Back in that day, the members of the Supreme Court met for only a few months a year in Washington, DC. The rest of the year, each presided over a different circuit court, a practice referred to as “riding the circuit.”

Stephen J. Field was the SCOTUS member from California, so he presided over the Ninth Circuit, which included that state, while John Chandler Bancroft Davis, the Clerk of the Supreme Court, held down the fort in DC, which made his position as clerk more powerful than any of the individual justices.

Several of the railroad oligarchs had reached out to Field and offered to help him run for president of the United States if he’d help them gain federal immunity from much of the state interference they were chafing from; he was sympathetic, being a believer himself in oligarchy. (In 1894, he helped strike down the Income Tax Law that Congress had passed, writing that income taxes were “a war of the poor against the rich.”)[7]

Others among the railroad robber barons were well known to Davis, who was both the uber-wealthy son of a former governor of Massachusetts and the former president of a smaller East Coast railroad.

Ironically, the tool that the oligarchs intended to use to gain federal immunity from many state and local laws was at the core of the abolition of slavery.

After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was written to grant legal due process rights to formerly enslaved persons, saying in part,

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.[8]

Notice the word “person” in that text. Until 1886, it meant people, like you and me. No more.

For centuries, lawyers and legal scholars had recognized two types of “persons” under the law: human beings were called “natural persons”; corporations of all sorts, nonprofits, and governments were “artificial persons.” (They had to have some sort of “personhood” so they could enter into contracts, sue and be sued, own property, and pay taxes.)

In the Ninth Circuit, Justice Field began, in 1884, to kick a series of a half-dozen or so tax disputes up to himself and his colleagues on the Supreme Court; they were known as the “California railroad tax cases.” Each case had to do with railroads doing business in multiple counties and/or states fighting paying their property taxes in the highest-tax jurisdictions, saying that because they were “artificial persons” and because different counties had different tax rates, they weren’t being subject to “equal protection of the laws.” Every county, they said, should have the same tax rates if they were to truly have “equal protection of the laws.”

The most famous of the cases was heard in the fall of 1885, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. Field had explicitly agreed with the railroads that they were artificial persons, that the 14th Amendment didn’t say “natural persons” and therefore applied to them as much as to any human, and so their corporations should have the same full personhood rights as did humans.

In the arguments, Santa Clara County’s lawyer, Delphin Delmas, argued that since a corporation couldn’t fall in love, get married, or even die and have a funeral, the entire idea was absurd. The chief justice, Morrison Remick Waite, agreed, and the majority of the Court rejected the railroad’s argument and ordered the railroad to pay its property taxes to the county.

But that wasn’t the end of it. After the Court’s session was over and the justices were again scattered across the country, Davis wrote a headnote—an explanatory few pages for lawyers that summarized the case but had no legal standing—saying that the chief justice had asserted corporate personhood during the arguments. Waite later protested that he had been quoted out of context, but he was badly ailing at the time and died of heart failure the year after Davis’s revised history of the case was published.

Even though the 1886 Court never said that corporations were persons (in fact, they ruled the opposite in the actual decision), America’s largest corporations quoted Davis’s headnote and asserted that it had established corporate personhood for them; and after Waite’s death, subsequent courts adopted that argument. This was the foundation of the 1978 Bellotti and 2010 Citizens United decisions, among hundreds of others, which gave corporations virtually unlimited personhood rights to influence politicians and elections.

It’s why Mitt Romney believed he was telling a basic legal and business truth when he said, “Corporations are people, my friend.”[9]

The 19th-century railroad oligarchs had bought off the Supreme Court’s clerk and a Supreme Court justice, and to this day, billionaires and giant corporations use that decision to amplify and sustain oligarchy.

The Supreme Court Sets Up American Oligarchy

If you were looking for a date when our modern American oligarchy started, it would be January 30, 1976. It was a clear day in Washington, DC, the temperature well above freezing with a light wind.

When the Supreme Court handed down their decision in the case of Buckley v. Valeo, the New York Times noted in a front page article, “Campaign finance law in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and 32 other states will require drastic revision in the wake of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision that struck down nearly all limits on campaign spending by candidates for Federal office.”[10]

It was the first of a cascade of decisions that reached their peak in 2010 with Citizens United v. FEC.

From 1789, when the Constitution was ratified and we officially became a republic, until 1976, when the Supreme Court decided to strike down thousands of state and federal laws put in place over a century or more to hold back oligarchy, the federal government had never before interfered in the right of states to regulate money in their elections. In 1907, in fact, the federal government itself had made it a felony for any corporation to give money to candidates for federal office with the Tillman Act.

Buckley struck down most of those laws in 1976, despite the objections of Justice Byron White, who said that money in politics posed “a mortal danger against which effective preventive and curative steps must be taken.”

Two years later, in a decision authored in part by Lewis Powell, the justices extended the “you may spend whatever you want to influence elections” logic to corporations, citing the 1886 Santa Clara headnote in their First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti decision.

Prior to Buckley, candidates for office had a huge incentive to do at least the bare minimum necessary to meet the needs of their voters; elections turned on performance as much as ideology. But by Reagan’s 1980 election, all that was necessary was that candidates and incumbents say they were doing what voters wanted, because big donors and campaigns themselves could simply amplify the candidates’ words ad infinitum via purchased media.

Politics turned from “the art of the possible” to “the art of the con,” at least for those politicians and parties willing to sell themselves to the highest bidder. Probably the best examples of this were Reagan’s twin assertions that ridding workers of the right to unionize would lead to better wages and benefits, and that if taxes on the very wealthy and big corporations were radically reduced, it would make working-class people wealthier.

Both were demonstrable lies, with centuries of evidence proving them false. George H. W. Bush, in the 1980 Republican primary, even called Reagan’s claims “voodoo economics,” saying, “It just isn’t gonna work,” although after Reagan picked him as VP, he was reduced to stammering on national TV that he’d never said such a thing.[11]

Union leaders, meanwhile, warned their workers that once the unions were reduced in power, wages would begin to fall and Republican “free trade” agreements would ship millions of unionized jobs overseas. Nixon had opened the door to China, and the G. H. W. Bush administration negotiated the NAFTA deal with Mexico. Think tanks getting massive infusions from the scions of banking and oil fortunes poured out the propaganda, though, and it took 30 years or more before most working-class Americans figured out that they’d been screwed back in 1981.

In 1992, Bill Clinton assured Americans that deregulating banks would make people’s savings safer, that gutting the social safety net and “ending welfare as we know it” would benefit poor people in depressed parts of the country, and that NAFTA would open the door to millions of new tech jobs to replace all those dirty factory jobs that would go to Mexico and, later, to China.

By 2008, voters were starting to get wise to the game and rejected Senator John McCain’s argument that more tax cuts and fewer unions would revive the economy; voters went instead for “hope and change.” After Barack Obama took office, he had only 74 working days during his entire presidency with a filibuster-proof Senate through which he could pass legislation.

Nonetheless, he got the Affordable Care Act and dozens of less notable but important pieces of legislation passed, particularly the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which, to date, has recovered over $12 billion stolen from average Americans by big banks.[12]

Donald Trump, riding a long-shot candidacy, apparently got the memo. He’d been a Democrat his entire life, because that party largely controlled New York. As such, he knew that most Americans were sick of the trade deals that were sending jobs overseas, and that some of the loss of unionized factory and construction jobs could be blamed as much on brown-skinned people coming illegally from south of the border as on China.

Combining the two topics, along with a good dose of white supremacist rhetoric to reach out to Reagan’s original coalition, and throwing a bone to the religious right that he’d protect their tax-exempt status even if they broke the law (which he vowed to change) by politicking from the pulpit, he picked up enough votes in Midwestern states ravaged by NAFTA to help him beat Hillary Clinton, whose husband had signed that despised trade deal.[13]

The argument for oligarchic control is the same argument that’s been made by conservatives throughout history, from Thomas Hobbes to Sir Edmund Burke to Warren Harding and Donald Trump:

With us in charge, we will keep you safe and happy, and you really don’t need to concern yourself with the complicated work of governance. You don’t want to tear down or shake up the system: having very wealthy people control the government has always led to the greatest level of stability and peace—look how stable Europe was for a thousand years when royal families and their landed gentry ruled. We’re the ones chosen by God or a brilliant DNA lineage to lead. Just go shopping and leave things to us.

This led us from the oligarch-friendly President Reagan to the conversion, in 1992, of the Democratic Party via the Democratic Leadership Council to become oligarch friendly itself (a legacy it’s today struggling to undo). In 2016, such oligarchs as Robert Mercer and Charles Koch finally, directly and indirectly, put an oligarch, Donald Trump, in the White House.

“Starve the Beast” and Gut the Republic

One of the most successful ways in which the oligarchs, using their think tanks and media, have convinced Americans that government is bad and government functions should be privatized and run by oligarchs is through a strategy that the Reagan administration first articulated and was described in the Wall Street Journal in 1985.[14] It was called “starve the beast,” and essentially it follows a simple three-step process.

First, Republicans promote the idea that taxes are too high and are strangling the ability of rich people and their companies to stimulate the economy, which, they say, would raise every working person’s pay and benefits. On this promise, they pass massive corporate, individual, and capital gains tax cuts.

Second, they point out that there’s now a huge deficit (because of the tax cut) and declare that it’s vital to “cut waste, fraud, and abuse” out of the system—and so they cut staffing to agencies like the EPA, IRS, and Social Security Administration.

When Trump came into the White House, Social Security Administration staffing was already 10 percent below what it had been in 2011, and because of previous staffing cuts, the agency had a backlog of more than 1.1 million disability claims. Wait times were running over two years.

So, of course, the good Republicans in the Trump administration proposed that as many as 15,000 of the Social Security Administration’s 62,000 employees now qualified for early retirement and could leave work with a nice parachute anytime they wanted to.

As Government Executive magazine reported in August 2017, “About 15,000 of SSA’s 62,000 employees meet” the criteria for early retirement. “President Trump through executive order and the Office of Management and Budget through subsequent guidance directed agencies to develop plans to trim their workforces. . . . SSA joins the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department in offering separation incentives this year.”[15]

The predictable result of this chipping away at the federal workforce was a collapse in customer service and regulatory oversight. As wait times for meetings with Social Security and Medicare workers lengthened, the third part of the plan kicked in: Once the government agency is successfully hobbled—the beast is starved—roll out an alternative where some crony friend of the politicians can make money off of what was previously a government-only service.

Trump did this with Obamacare during the sign-up period in late 2018, cutting access to the website, dialing back promotion of the program, and adding complexities and hoops that would discourage people from signing up for government-subsidized health insurance. And, sure enough, enrollment dropped.

Another area where “starve the beast” has successfully been used is the IRS, which is now so severely understaffed that they’ve largely stopped auditing rich people’s returns, realizing Leona Helmsley’s declaration that “only the little people pay taxes.”[16] They’ve also starved the Veterans Administration, where a new privatization scheme is further cutting VA funds by redistributing them to for-profit health care institutions owned by American oligarchs.[17]

Billionaire oligarch Betsy DeVos, the US secretary of education, and other oligarchs in the so-called school choice movement have been promoting private, for-profit schools for decades as a way to “reinvent” public education. After all, if you’re going to enforce oligarchy, you really need to do what they did in the Old South: not have any functional public schools, and have private schools that cater to the wealthy.

While most studies show that when a for-profit entity is skimming money off the top of a school, it doesn’t work as well as when all the funds go to teaching students, DeVos and her acolytes continued with the work of taking down our public school system and replacing it with another profit center for her billionaire peers.

Most important for the oligarchy, though, it pushes poorly performing students into the remnants of public schools, ghettoizing them, while providing a good education to children of privilege.

President George W. Bush went after the US Postal Service in a similar manner with the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006. The Postal Service had been accumulating surpluses and proposed to use some of that money to convert its fleet of postal carrier vehicles—the largest vehicle fleet in the United States—from gas to electric and hydrogen-powered. This was intolerable to the fossil fuel billionaires who largely owned the GOP.

So oil company CEO Bush’s 2006 law required the Postal Service—and the Postal Service alone—to set aside $5 billion every year to keep in a trust fund to pay for the health care expenses of people who would retire in 75 years. No other company or government agency had ever been required to set aside monies to pay for people who, in most cases, weren’t even born yet; it was a naked attempt to drain cash from the Postal Service to stop the modernization of its fleet and to starve the postal beast to set it up for privatization.[18]

Had the Postal Service not publicly announced its goals in 2006, it would have revolutionized transportation in the United States, setting a standard for moving the entire country’s fleet of cars away from gas and diesel.

According to the April 12, 2007, Postal Bulletin,

USPS participated in a White House event promoting alternate-fuel technology, demonstrating the technology behind two zero-emissions mail-delivery vehicles—a hydrogen fuel-cell minivan and an electric two-ton truck. The Postal Service has been collecting and analyzing data from a General Motors HydroGen3 hydrogen fuel-cell minivan delivering mail in the Washington, DC, area since 2005 and one delivering in Irvine, CA, since. Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles emit just pure water and are twice as energy efficient as internal combustion engine vehicles.[19]

With the Postal Service being thrown from profitability into a decade of beast-starving “losses” (if it could use its $5 billion a year, it would still be profitable), the plan to move away from fossil fuels was put on hold.

And in 2020, with the coronavirus leading to more deliveries of all sorts, and with states opening up absentee and mail-in voting, Donald Trump tried refusing to “bail out” the starved USPS, likely in an effort to reduce voter turnout in November 2020.[20]

Privatization of prisons, schools, Medicare (via Medicare Advantage, which is privatized Medicare), and student loans has wreaked damage in all of those areas . . . and in every case has followed the Reagan line of “starve the beast,” vastly enriching America’s oligarchs while weakening our democratic system.

Holding Power: Buying Friends on Both Sides of the Aisle

In 1911, Italian sociologist Robert Michels, who originated what’s known as “the iron law of oligarchy,” wrote that any organization—including every political party—would devolve into oligarchy when it reached a size large enough to both maintain and require a permanent managerial class.

Those who ran the organization would, over time, shift their loyalties from the needs of the members of the organization toward enriching themselves, in terms of both wealth and power, and maintaining the organizational stability necessary to ensure their continued tenure.

Michels laid it all out in his book Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. In progressive political parties, he said, the way the oligarchs would hold power would be to give the people what they wanted, while in conservative parties they’d gain and hold power by demonizing minorities and lying to the voters.

[T]his principle may be summed up in the terms of [Roman Senator] Curtius, who said that the conservative cannot gain his ends with the aid of a small and select body of troops, but must control the masses and rule through the masses. The conservative spirit of the master-caste, however deeply rooted it may be, is forced to assume, at least during times of election, a specious democratic mask.[21]

Following Bill Clinton’s “New Democrat” playbook, President Obama handed hundreds of billions more in profits to the oligarchs of the big health insurance companies with his Affordable Care Act of 2010. While Obamacare helped millions get access to health care, it also brought the Democratic establishment into an even closer embrace with the insurance oligarchs.

Between Clinton’s and Obama’s moves to bring big money into the party, it became as dangerous for Democratic politicians to attack big corporate media, banking, or insurance companies as it was for Republicans to mention global warming or stopping pollution.

Both parties, by 2015, had once again become exactly what Robert Michels had predicted in his 1911 book: rigidified institutions that pretended to serve the people but, in fact, served the oligarchs that provided the money to keep them well funded and in power.

Harking back to the 1980 election, when America’s oligarchs funded a B-list movie actor long shot for president, the GOP decided to take a chance on a reality TV star who was quite willing to openly use white supremacist rhetoric, deny science, and borrow popular talking points from the Democratic Party.

Republicans stood by while Trump promised voters that he was the only candidate who wouldn’t cut Social Security; that he would tax the rich, including himself; that he would replace Obamacare with a program that covered everybody and did so for less money; that bankers were killers who were robbing Americans blind; and that he would bring back those factories and jobs that Clinton had sent to China and Mexico.

The GOP oligarchs knew they were all lies (and that Clinton’s NAFTA had been negotiated by Reagan and Bush Sr.), and thus knew that Trump, while branded as an outsider the way Reagan had been marketed, also wasn’t an actual threat to the oligarchy within the GOP. To the contrary: even though (like Reagan) he’d been a Democrat most of his life, he was (also like Reagan) quite comfortable serving the GOP’s oligarchs in pretty much every way possible.

While it may sound fatalistic to say, as Michels did in 1911 and this analysis seems to show, that the oligarchs in a political party will never truly be overthrown, the history of the 1930s and the 1960s shows us a more important lesson.

Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson both took on their own party’s oligarchic structures as well as the overall oligarchic structure of the nation’s business and political establishment, and FDR even bragged, “I welcome their hatred.”[22]

But both also worked within those parties to seize a moment of crisis to bring about true and lasting change that served the people more than the oligarchy. In that regard, they contributed to the continuing survival of the fragment of democracy still alive in America.

PART FIVE

When Oligarchy Becomes Tyranny

Because oligarchy concentrates political power in a fashion similar to how monopolies concentrate economic power, it produces political systems that are ripe for a transition into tyranny.

Americans tend to have a rather cartoonish notion of tyranny, thinking that it’s a system only put into place by easily identified evil people and is violently imposed on society.

In truth, as noted in the earlier story of Viktor Orbán, tyranny comes incrementally until it hits a tipping point where it can no longer be defied. Then, like a virus ripping through a nation, it overwhelms everything and can’t be stopped without massive death and destruction.

Prior to that tipping point, tyranny is always unwittingly assisted by people in government and the media who think they’re doing the best they can, given the circumstances. If they notice the emergence of a possibly tyrannical system, they usually discount it with the belief that the emerging tyrant will be stymied “once everybody figures out what’s going on.”

Meanwhile, the emerging tyrant is building alliances with oligarchs, collecting blackmail and dirt on potential opponents, and publicly punishing any who may stray from his side. He also uses that time to push institutional limits to find out how far he can go and where he may encounter opposition. A clear example of this in recent times was when Trump used federalized National Guard forces against peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park, Washington, DC, in June 2020. He pushed the military until they started to push back.

These men (almost always men) are generally authoritarian leader types, as defined by Bob Altemeyer in his 2007 book The Authoritarians, and their initial base is made up of authoritarian follower types, who constitute 10 to 20 percent of the population.

Milton Mayer was a reporter in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s who traveled to Germany to interview “average Germans” who hadn’t joined Hitler’s party or participated in the war or Germany’s atrocities. In his book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933–45, he told the story of how Hitler lifted Germany out of the worst depression in living history, built the autobahn, and rebuilt German industry after World War I. As Time magazine documented in 1937, when Hitler was their “Man of the Year,” he was the most popular politician on earth at the time.

“Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany,” Mayer wrote, “not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted—or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.”[1]

Lies: The First Step from Oligarchy to Tyranny

Oligarchy itself is based on a lie, specifically Thomas Hobbes’s theory that concentrated power strengthens society and is more enduring than democracy. This lie violates an entire body of natural science that shows democracy, not oligarchy, is how most animal societies are organized and is the most ancient form of human society.

But as oligarchy morphs into tyranny, and entire new edifices of governance come into being, a foundation of lies is necessary to bring people to support the emerging tyranny. Most often those lies have to do with “keeping you safe.” Hitler, for example, used this after the Reichstag was burned, saying that it was an act committed by communists with the help of Jews, and everything else from that point forward rested on that foundational lie.

Here, Donald Trump’s 2016 lies that formed the basis of his candidacy were anchored in his assertion that people with darker skin than his and his followers’ were murderers, rapists, and generally stupid and untrustworthy. On that foundation, he built concentration camps in America that invoked the Japanese internment camps of the 1940s and imposed brutal punishments on children brought to this country as refugees.

These types of foundational lies are the most common first step toward tyranny: for a person to seize and hold power based on “keeping you safe,” he or she must first establish that the people being kept safe from are evil, less than fully human, and an other. Atop the othering foundational lies, tyrants or would-be tyrants build entire superstructures and structures of lies, often ones that are easily rebutted. The lies then come fast and furious, until people are exhausted, and out of hundreds of types of lies a few become accepted as truths.

A college professor in Germany whom Milton Mayer befriended and wrote about in his book They Thought They Were Free laid it out: “To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop.” He added that once the lies were normalized and accepted, it was a short step to changes in governmental policy, as we saw during Trump’s reign.

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, “regretted,” that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these “little measures” that no “patriotic German” could resent must someday lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.[2]

Tyrants Modify the Very Language of a Culture

In 1990, Newt Gingrich pioneered a transformation in the way the conservative vassals of America’s oligarchs would use political power. Instead of talking about policies, philosophy, and ideas, they would simply label liberals as, essentially, evil and themselves as good.

It dramatically simplified office holding, paving the way for all-in oligarchs like Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, and their toadies like Bill Barr to ignore the consequences of their actions so long as they were elegantly messaged.

Gingrich laid this out in a memo for Republican officeholders titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” In it, he carried on from Joseph Goebbels, who had repeatedly asserted that in order to control a society, one must first take control of that society’s language. Gingrich gave Republicans a list of words to describe anything having to do with Democrats:

decay, failure (fail), collapse(ing), deeper, crisis, urgent(cy), destructive, destroy, sick, pathetic, lie, liberal, they/them, unionized bureaucracy, “compassion” is not enough, betray, consequences, limit(s), shallow, traitors, sensationalists, endanger, coercion, hypocrisy, radical, threaten, devour, waste, corruption, incompetent, permissive attitude, destructive, impose, self-serving, greed, ideological, insecure, anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs; pessimistic, excuses, intolerant, stagnation, welfare, corrupt, selfish, insensitive, status quo, mandate(s) taxes, spend (ing) shame, disgrace, punish (poor . . .), bizarre, cynicism, cheat, steal, abuse of power, machine, bosses, obsolete, criminal rights, red tape, patronage.

Gingrich told Republicans that it was as important to characterize themselves in a positive light as it was to trash-talk Democrats. His list of words to apply to themselves and their policies was as follows:

share, change, opportunity, legacy, challenge, control, truth, moral, courage, reform, prosperity, crusade, movement, children, family, debate, compete, active(ly), we/us/our, candid(ly), humane, pristine, provide, liberty, commitment, principle(d), unique, duty, precious, premise, care(ing), tough, listen, learn, help, lead, vision, success, empower(ment), citizen, activist, mobilize, conflict, light, dream, freedom, peace, rights, pioneer, proud/pride, building, preserve, pro-(issue): flag, children, environment; reform, workfare, eliminate good-time in prison, strength, choice/choose, fair, protect, confident, incentive, hard work, initiative, common sense, passionate.[3]

All over the country, through the 1990s, Republican politicians proudly memorized his list and used his words as often as possible in speeches, writings, and media appearances. They also began to refer to the Democratic Party, founded and named by Thomas Jefferson, as the “Democrat Party.” (There is, of course, no such thing as a “Democrat Party,” but in the 1950s Joe McCarthy told Republicans that “Democratic” sounded too nice and they should instead always say “Democrat Party with an emphasis on the rat!”[4])

The entire Republican Party, along with Fox News and right-wing hate radio, adopted this usage in 2009 after Barack Obama was elected, and now the phrase even makes its way into mainstream news reports written by young reporters who apparently don’t know the correct name of the party.

When tyranny begins to emerge, shifts in language become obvious, and it’s important to pay close attention to how language is used, especially when certain phrases or memes are used repeatedly.

Tyrants understand that it’s more important to control the news than to control the army; armies will follow what they believe to be true, but only when first convinced of its truth, and that requires control of or substantial influence over the news.

Look at how Trump spent three years demonizing the media while telling police to treat people with abuse. What followed was the specific targeting of reporters across the nation in the summer of 2020 by police firing rubber bullets (which kill 2 percent of the time and permanently maim 18 percent of the time), blinding one reporter and seriously injuring dozens of others, as well as using tear gas and bone-breaking clubs and batons.

Pay special attention to his language. “Fake news,” “America first,” “enhanced interrogation,” “voter fraud,” “rapists and murderers,” “welfare queen,” “big government,” “Christian,” and “pro-life” are all terms the GOP has twisted to their ends. They use the word “freedom” to describe an end to taxes on the rich and “liberty” to describe a willingness to subvert society and the rule of law.

History shows that this manipulation of language rarely ends well.

“Deconstruct the State”

For tyranny to overcome a republic, it must first dismantle institutions of governance so that it can replace them with its own tyranny-supporting people and systems.

Government, itself an institution, is in reality made up of many smaller institutional entities, each created to achieve a singular purpose. The Environmental Protection Agency protects the environment. The Food and Drug Administration makes sure that our food is safe and our drugs are pure. The Internal Revenue Service collects revenue—taxes—and delivers them to fund the functions of government.

These government agencies also serve as a check on the power of the nation’s oligarchs.

As tyrannies emerge out of oligarchy, they always first corrupt the individual institutions of governance. In this, they are usually joined with groups whose interests are regulated, controlled, or advanced/constrained by those institutions.

Since the 1980s, Republicans have made a practice of moving large numbers of lobbyists and industry executives into senior positions in regulatory agencies. Trump, for example, installed a coal lobbyist to be in charge of the Interior Department, an oil lobbyist to be in charge of the EPA, an anti-union lobbyist to be in charge of the Labor Department, a former tech industry lobbyist as director of national intelligence, a defense contractor lobbyist to be in charge of the Pentagon, a former student loan industry executive as the federal student loan watchdog, and a former Verizon lawyer to be in charge of the FCC (which regulates Verizon). Even his response to COVID-19 was run by Alex Azar, the former CEO of a pharmaceutical company that doubled its price for insulin during Azar’s tenure. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg; in most agencies, even obscure ones, industry agents were put in charge, or the agencies had their funding slashed.[5]

Former White House chief strategist and Breitbart News exec Steve Bannon once said that his and Trump’s main job was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” That’s geek-speak for tearing down the US government. And with thousands of jobs across the federal government empty, the goal has largely been accomplished.[6]

Meanwhile, most members of Congress (the entire GOP and about half of the Democratic Party) have been co-opted by big-money interests working openly for oligarchy, and, with the help of multimillionaire oligarch Mitch McConnell, the entire federal judiciary has been reshaped, including the Supreme Court.

In this fashion, authoritarians deconstruct government to enfeeble its protections for its citizens and empower those who would prey on those citizens.

Scapegoating to Dilute the Outrage

Tyrants are notorious for blaming their opponents for doing the very things the tyrants do. It’s a very effective technique to redirect and dilute outrage or concern focused on the tyrant, shifting it to their victims.

Mussolini and Hitler famously accused Jews and communists of trying to seize power to overthrow the state, when they themselves were doing that very thing. Trump similarly accused his political opponents of election fraud, corruption, and deceit, when in fact he, McConnell, and the GOP were aggressively practicing those dark arts.

Republicans, after consistently voting to deny the State Department funding to harden outposts like Benghazi, held years of show trials accusing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of causing the deaths that occurred there (even though far more State Department employees had died in overseas attacks during the Bush administration).

Similarly, while more than five million emails from the Bush administration were “lost” when their private email domain was shut down and scrubbed after it was suggested that those emails might show that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were warned about Osama bin Laden but chose to ignore the warnings, the GOP spent years trashing Clinton over 30,000 private emails she chose not to share with Congress.

Since then, first daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, used private email extensively while working in the White House, as did Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Show trials and accusations designed to deflect blame or focus are ancient techniques of tyrants.

Scapegoating Race, Religion, Gender

It’s an axiom of fiction that the hero can be only as good as the villain is bad. It goes all the way back to the Greek classics.

For example, when Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster invented Superman in 1933, they simultaneously invented Lex Luthor and kryptonite. If Superman hadn’t had a supervillain to fight, the story would have been simply boring.[7] Superman stops a drugstore robbery, then a bank robbery, then catches a killer, etc.: boring.

This lesson has never been lost on the world’s tyrants and wannabe tyrants. Hitler followed Czar Nicolas II in turning the Jews into an all-powerful international force that bent nations to their will. Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines did it with drug dealers. For Erdogan, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, and Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, it was secularists and Shiites.

For Richard Nixon, it was “hippies and Blacks,” as it was for Ronald Reagan, although he expanded that to include “welfare queens” and, during the AIDS crisis, gays.

George W. Bush drove up his approval numbers by going after “Muslim terrorists,” as did several election cycles of Republican politicians in that era.

Right-wing radio commentator Rush Limbaugh was always fond of trashing “feminazis,” ultimately running faux ads about the “Hillary Clinton Nutcracker.”[8]

Trump, whose father was once arrested at a Klan rally, spent his life denigrating and discriminating against African Americans. He knew who the bad guys were and shouted it loud when five Black teenagers were falsely accused of attacking a white woman in Central Park in 1989, an effort for which he was richly rewarded in the white-run media of that time.[9]

Politically, he kicked off his campaign by demonizing Mexicans, but within the first year of his presidency, America heard him warn of supervillains like “caravans” of brown people from Central America, Mexican “murderers and rapists,” immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti, and people working against fascism under the banner of Antifa (short for “anti-fascist”).

In each case, Trump presented the people he was demonizing as nearly superhuman—they were such a danger and could cause so much damage to America that he had to declare national emergencies, first to stop them at the southern border, and later to stop protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

Into that latter mix stepped Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton, who evidence indicates wants someday to be president. Writing in the New York Times, he warned America about “[b]ands of looters” who “drove exotic cars,” along with “nihilist criminals . . . simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of leftwing radicals like antifa.”[10]

Shades of Lex Luthor!

If Donald Trump fails in his aspiration to exploit white America’s racism to become our first American tyrant, it’s only because of his mediocre intellect and general incompetence.

But he won’t be the last to try.

Normalizing Outrageous Behavior

Tyranny doesn’t generally leap forward out of nothing; incremental changes over time prepare the soil, and one day it hits a tipping point with enough destruction of institutions, enough cynicism among the populace, and enough of a shift in wealth and power away from the people and into the hands of the very, very wealthy supporters of tyranny.

One of the “good Germans” whom Milton Mayer interviewed for his book They Thought They Were Free told him the following:

You see, one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. . . . In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.” . . .

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.[11]

If, the week after Donald Trump announced his candidacy, a large march of neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” and the murder of a counter-protester had taken place, America would have been shocked. But after a year or more of increasing levels of violence and increasingly open use of neo-Nazi and racist iconography, the march on Charlottesville seemed like just another Trump rally.

When he called for Black protesters to be shot and set upon with dogs during the George Floyd murder protests, it followed three years of similarly outrageous statements and was a mere footnote in the news that week.

The lesson is to vigorously resist every move toward normalizing the outrageous. Resist with all your might.

Tyrants Always Corrupt Police

On April 23, 2018, the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson wrote a column titled, “ICE Has Become Trump’s Personal Bullying Squad.”[12] Gerson called ICE Trump’s “Praetorian Guard,” referring to the private security details employed by Roman generals and emperors, who swore loyalty to the individual for whom they worked rather than to the state. Having campaigned on demonizing brown-skinned immigrants, Trump found it easy to commandeer ICE forces to his own ends.

Two years later, in July 2020, ICE announced that they were opening a six-week “Citizens Academy” course to train civilians in “defensive tactics, firearms familiarization and targeted arrests.” Anybody familiar with the history of Hitler’s Brownshirts, which started out as citizen-based private security for his rallies in the 1920s and ended up as the infamous “Storm Troopers,” must have gotten chills reading the story announcing this in Newsweek.[13]

For Dick Cheney, it was the CIA, although their operations were almost entirely confined to overseas torture sites and Guantánamo.

In both cases, the awesome police powers of the state—the only group that can legally kill Americans outside of homicide proceedings—were directed to political, rather than public safety, ends.

The SS started out in 1925 as Hitler’s bodyguards; when he’d fully risen to power, they became, as Encyclopedia Britannica says, “a state within a state,” so great was their power.[14]

A Tyrant’s Tool: Obedience

There’s no shortage of social science experiments showing the “evil” core nature of humans.

In 1960, Stanley Milgram, a professor at Yale University, designed an experiment in which students were told to administer successively higher-voltage shocks to actors they thought were experiment subjects. The actors screamed and begged for mercy at the fake shocks, but Milgram told the students to keep increasing the shocks up to the point where the actor appeared to have passed out or died. The students repeatedly did as they were told.[15]

They were “just following orders.”

The experiment was revisited in Poland in 2019 with the same result.[16]

In 1968, the week of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Iowa third-grade teacher Jane Elliott performed a demonstration to show her class how easy it was for people to become racially biased. She divided the kids into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and told the class that the brown-eyed kids were superior and the blue-eyed ones were inferior.

Within a few hours, the brown-eyed kids were bullying the blue-eyed kids and asserting their own superiority. They took it so to heart that several blue-eyed students began to stumble academically, having internalized the message of their own inferiority (even though Elliott had told them it was just a demonstration).[17]

Interestingly, as Rutger Bregman points out in his seminal book Humankind,[18] many of these types of studies are now well debunked, including Milgram’s. It turns out that, generally, you can’t turn normal people into killers by simply having authority figures demand it of them. Instead, you first have to convince them that hurting or killing another person is necessary because that person represents a very real threat to friends or family; violence among normal people is almost always, psychologically at least, defensive.

One of the main survival skills of early humans was to rapidly identify tribe, clan, and kin—and equally rapidly identify “outsiders.” The imprint of this, and our urge to protect those close to us, is deep in our DNA.

When the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte authorized his police to murder suspected drug dealers and users in extrajudicial killings, he told them that those people were a threat to their families and communities and that the threat could be resolved only by their deaths.[19] Duterte later bragged about the killings, initially numbering around 12,000.[20]

In the spring of 2018, I attended a demonstration in Portland, Oregon, where a group of neo-Nazis were proclaiming their racial superiority and demonstrating their masculinity (or lack thereof) by strutting around with guns. Several wore T-shirts that said, “Free Helicopter Rides For Liberals,” a reference to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of throwing pro-democracy protesters out of helicopters.[21]

They had become convinced that Black and Hispanic people—and “liberals” who worked for a multiracial society—represented a threat to themselves and their families, a belief that people like Donald Trump, former Klan leader David Duke, and Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s policy of family separations at the border with Mexico, worked hard to reinforce.

Pinochet had no shortage of police and paramilitaries who were willing to murder his political antagonists, although, again, the police and army went along with him because he’d convinced them that if the “liberals” were left alive, they would produce such a great harm to Chilean society—a harm their own families would experience—that killing them was necessary.

Should a competent authoritarian rise to power in the United States, he would also find many willing to go along with violence, torture, and even murder. Millennia of tyrants have taught the world how it’s done.

Take Militias and Violence Seriously

In March 2019, Donald Trump warned America.

I can tell you, I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.[22]

This wasn’t the first time he voiced this kind of threat. At a rally the previous September, he said, “Law enforcement, military, construction workers, Bikers for Trump. . . . They travel all over the country. . . . They’ve been great. But these are tough people. . . . But they’re peaceful people, and antifa and all—they’d better hope they stay that way.”

Hitler’s Brownshirts started out as a volunteer force to provide “security” for his rallies, as did Mussolini’s Blackshirts. Both eventually became part of the official police apparatus of the state. That’s the threshold that tyrants always cross, and against which Americans must be vigilant.

When they start forming militias, take them seriously.

Like when Trump tweeted “Liberate Michigan!” and heavily armed militia members, complete with swastikas, upside-down stars, and Confederate battle flags, showed up at the state capitol building. These men (almost always white men) are typically armed with assault weapons and live ammunition to intimidate normal people and suppress protest and dissent against the rise of neofascism.

Tim McVeigh read the novel The Turner Diaries, about a right-wing takeover of America in which a federal building is bombed and the president overreacts by trying to seize people’s guns; the outcome is a revolution by armed white men who end up killing most people of color and Jews, and in the end, what’s left is something like the old Confederacy. The Turner Diaries is still a best seller among those on the hard right.[23]

In October 2018, Cesar Sayoc sent pipe bombs to the entire Democratic Party leadership, CNN, Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, and President Obama’s director of national security, James Clapper. He lived in a van in Florida covered with pro-Trump posters, and the only reason none of his intended victims died was because he was an incompetent bomb-maker.

The New York Times reported a few days later that Trump, offended by accounts in the media that Sayoc, a registered Republican, was also a Trump fan, accused “the news media of trying to use Mr. Sayoc’s political leanings to ‘score political points against me and the Republican Party.’”[24] Trump continued, “The media has tried to attack the incredible Americans who support our movement to give power back to the people.”

His millions of followers believe every lie he utters, form into violent mobs and threaten reporters at rallies, post threats on social media against anyone who dares to criticize their leader, and have invoked his name in more than 50 cases of politically motivated assault or murder.[25] These people are a match waiting to be lit.

PART SIX

Breaking Oligarchy, Restoring Democracy

Breaking oligarchy is no small task. In many ways, just holding it at bay has been a constant theme through the history not only of the United States, but of every developed nation in the world.

While numerous nations around the world have democratized in my lifetime, the past few decades have seen others— major world powers—slide from democracy into strongman oligarchies on their way to tyranny. In every case, the oligarchs took over because they were able to corrupt the media, then the politicians, then the political process and the government itself.

In every case, the process followed the path that America has been on since the Powell Memo and the Reagan Revolution:

• Oligarchs fund media, lobbyists, and think tanks that seize the public dialogue while burrowing deeply into popular media and academia.

• They use the power of that money to further weaken laws keeping money out of politics.

• They move from ownership of individual politicians to ownership of an entire political party.

• They use that party to seize control of government itself and then “deconstruct the administrative state.”

• Without the state protecting the people, and with the state controlling elections in a way that widely disenfranchises the victims of the oligarchy, democracy becomes a sham exercise and a police state emerges to enforce the new economic and social order.

If oligarchy is to be broken, the connection between the oligarchs’ money and the political process must be severed, or at least drastically impeded.

To pull America back from oligarchy and return to democracy, nothing is more urgent than breaking the financial cord between America’s oligarchs and America’s politicians. “Get money out of politics” is how it’s usually described, and it’s absolutely essential, as money controlling politics is the very definition of oligarchy.

America’s first oligarchic eruption, in the early 1800s, was broken by Lincoln’s not only defeating the traitors who had led the Confederate uprising against American democracy but also bankrupting the South’s oligarchs in the process.

Our second oligarchic eruption, in the period from 1880 to 1930, was ended by the Republican Great Depression, which activated worker rage and brought FDR to the White House. Roosevelt’s raising of the top marginal income tax rate to over 90 percent also helped diminish the economic power of the oligarchs themselves.

Today, top tax rates are back down where they were in the 1920s (secretaries literally pay higher tax rates than their billionaire employers, as Warren Buffett has pointed out for years), and oligarchs are even more firmly in control of the levers of power.[1]

Furthering the analogy, the coronavirus has provoked an economic crisis, just as the stock market crash did in 1929. This has highlighted the vast difference between the lives of the bottom half of American workers, who average—before taxes!—a gross income of $18,500 a year, versus the lives of the top 10 percent (averaging $220,000 a year) and the top 1 percent (averaging $1.5 million a year).[2] The increasing visibility of that gap has, as it did in the early 1930s, provided America with an opportunity to harness democratic reforms that begin with getting big money under control.

The success of American efforts to turn back oligarchy and restore democracy will determine the fate of the American experiment. We will either continue the Reagan-to-Trump road to tyranny, or we will seize the moment as Lincoln and FDR did and return this country to its core values. Democracy or tyranny: that is our choice.

Breaking Oligarchy: The Oligarchs’ Media Empire

To the extent that America has been captured by right-wing media oligarchs, we were preceded down that path by Australia and the United Kingdom, according to Australia’s former prime minister Kevin Rudd. In a 2019 article for the Sydney Morning Herald, Rudd says that one of the English-speaking world’s most powerful oligarchs (my word, not his) is “Rupert Murdoch— the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.” He continues, “Murdoch is not just a news organisation. Murdoch operates as a political party, acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far-right ideological world view.”

And Murdoch is an international oligarch.

In Britain, Murdoch made Brexit possible because of the position taken by his papers. In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox News is the political echo chamber of the far right, which enabled the Tea Party and then the Trump party to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. In Australia, as in America, Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, killing action on climate change and destroying anything approximating multiculturalism.

Oligarchs generally exert political influence with both the carrot and the stick. They praise and fund and lift up politicians and political parties that are willing to carry out their agendas. And those who resist them are ruthlessly destroyed.

“Murdoch is also a political bully and a thug,” former prime minister Rudd writes,

who for many years has hired bullies as his editors. The message to Australian politicians is clear: either toe the line on what Murdoch wants or he kills you politically.

This has produced a cowering, fearful political culture across the country. I know dozens of politicians, business leaders, academics and journalists, both left and right, too frightened to take Murdoch on because they fear the repercussions for them personally. They have seen what happens to people who have challenged Murdoch’s interests as Murdoch then sets out to destroy them.

Echoing Teddy Roosevelt’s method for dealing with the oligarchs of his day, Rudd’s solution is to break up Murdoch’s media empire using a “full royal commission into the future of Australian media ownership, with particular reference to News Corp.”[3]

We should do the same here in the United States and expand it beyond Murdoch’s companies to reversing the parts of the 1996 Telecommunications Act that allowed media consolidation (radio, TV, newspapers, internet service providers), returning to local and regional diversity in media ownership and real competition in the internet world.

Breaking Oligarchy: A Free Press

Tyrants hate a free press. It’s a simple fact.

Hitler called the press of his day the Lügenpresse (lying press), and Stalin called reporters and newspapers “the enemy of the people.” Trump has adopted this poisonous term for his own, along with his favorite smear, “fake news.”[4] In each case, the goal is to suppress public knowledge of the tyrant’s lies and make people doubt true reporting that may reveal the abuses of the tyrant.

When Trump talks about the press being fake and filled with lies, it isn’t an objective critique of the media; it’s designed to weaken citizens’ faith in and connection to the fourth estate, the one unofficial branch of governance that the Framers recognized, in the Constitution’s First Amendment.

Push back, with everything available to you, calling out what he’s doing.

Similarly, America needs to recognize not just journalists but acts of journalism, regardless of who commits them. Thanks to the internet, we now have millions of citizen-journalists, and they need legal protections. In a 1799 letter to Elbridge Gerry, Jefferson wrote, “I am for . . . freedom of the press, & against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force & not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents.”[5]

Breaking Oligarchy: Economic Rights for Everybody

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln took on oligarchy and won. In the modern era, nobody has fought American oligarchs more than Franklin D. Roosevelt. He took them on, he relished the battle, and he beat them (even after they tried to organize a coup against him).

Five months before he died and World War II ended, in December 1944, he included in his State of the Union speech a plan to permanently block the oligarchs from exploiting working people and keeping Americans in need and fear through their economic power. He said that since it looked as if the war in Europe and Japan was coming to a close on our terms, “[i]t is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy” for both a “lasting peace” and “the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever known before.”[6]

Its frame and plan were deceptively simple.

The first Bill of Rights, Roosevelt said, provided Americans with what he called “political rights,” things like “free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.” These rights, FDR said, assured “our rights to life and liberty,” political rights, but didn’t guarantee our right to “happiness,” and therefore didn’t go far enough to fulfill the promises of the Declaration of Independence by holding the oligarchs who controlled large parts of the economy in abeyance.

Recognizing that a strong and robust middle class was the nation’s best defense against oligarchy (in the speech, he referred to it as “Fascism”), he noted that “these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” That, he said, would require not just political rights for all Americans, but economic rights as well. “We have come to a clear realization,” FDR said, “of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” Quoting himself from a 1936 campaign speech, he added, “Necessitous men are not free men.”

Rights are unusual and powerful things in those countries (like ours) where one of the main functions of government is to protect rights. As FDR pointed out, our political rights are largely protected, from free speech to the right to a trial by jury. But the right to have health care, a higher education, housing, or even a well-paying job? In America today, those are all privileges, not rights, so government has no obligation to either protect your access to them or supply them if the marketplace fails to.

Shifting these things from being privileges to rights would be earth-shaking in the United States. Countries of the developed world took this step decades ago, most of them citing FDR’s famous 1944 speech and making those changes after World War II, but every attempt to do so here in the United States has been successfully blocked by Republican conservative ideologues.

However, FDR had the force of personality and political brilliance to pull it off, and the crisis of the Republican Great Depression and World War II to create an opening for its acceptance. So he began planting the first seeds with his constitutionally required annual State of the Union presentation.

“In our day,” he said, “these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident.” Americans, after all, loved their Social Security and unemployment benefits, and had learned from the contrast between Democratic and Republican policies that a strong social safety net was a key to the American Dream.

Therefore, he said, it was time for “a second Bill of Rights, under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all, regardless of station, race, or creed.

“Among these [rights]” that should be included in the second Bill of Rights were:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job . . .

• The right of every family to a decent home . . .

• The right to adequate medical care . . .

• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment . . .

• The right to a good education.

His list also included the right of farmers to make a decent living and the right of small businesses to operate without “unfair competition and domination by monopolies,” as well as the right to “earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.” But the list of five items above was the core of his plan.

Today, while most of the developed world has all of these as rights guaranteed by their governments, America still denies them to the majority of our citizens. You and I don’t have these things because America’s oligarchs have decided that it’s not in their interest for us to have them.

As Russell Kirk pointed out, a healthy and wealthy working class would pose a serious challenge to economic aristocracy. Economic mobility like that of the white working class prior to 1980 is a threat to the rigidified economic and social caste system that conservatives have imposed on our nation since the Reagan Revolution.

If we are to follow the example of each of the former 80-year cycles of oligarchic abuses leading to crashes leading to progressive reformations, as we did in 1776–89, 1861–65, and 1929–45, it’s time now to use the COVID-19 crisis and the Trump Depression to rebuild a strong middle class. And that means following the steps that FDR laid out in 1945:

• Medicare for all, with health care as a human right instead of a privilege.

• Free college education for all Americans as a right.

• Decent housing and an end to homelessness in the United States (as numerous other countries have done) as a right.

• Good pay and union representation in the workplace as a right.

• A strengthened Social Security program, including an expansion of Social Security Disability Insurance, which protects every American of every age from disasters like disabling accidents or diseases.

At Princeton University in 2011, economist Angus Deaton and Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman looked into what it takes for Americans to be happy. Analyzing more than 450,000 responses to questions put to Americans over a two-year span, they found that the answer was pretty simple: $75,000 a year.

“No matter where you live,” Deaton told Gallup, “your emotional well-being is as good as it’s going to get at $75,000, and money’s not going to make it any better beyond that point. It’s like you hit some sort of ceiling, and you can’t get emotional well-being much higher just by having more money.”[7]

Great wealth not producing happiness is so well known that it’s a cliché, but why is $75,000 the touchstone point for most Americans? While Deaton and Kahneman “decline to take a position on policies that might result from these findings” in their paper, they do point out how much worse Americans are in terms of baseline happiness compared with citizens of other developed countries.[8]

Other developed nations guarantee health care, education, and adequate food and housing as rights of citizenship, but all these things require cold, hard cash in America. If we were to guarantee these basics as other developed nations do, it’s entirely possible that Americans could join the citizens of those nations in experiencing a good measure of happiness regardless of their income.

The COVID-19 crisis and the 2020 George Floyd murder, with the anti-racism uprising that followed, have laid bare the brutality of conservative economic and social policies, letting us all see how the oligarchs in this country really feel about the rest of us.

To seriously begin the process of taking away their nearly absolute power, we need a newly empowered middle class that enjoys the safety and stability that come from government meeting these basic human needs.

Breaking Oligarchy: Tax the Crap Out of the Rich

In the early 1970s, Terry O’Connor and I owned a company that made herbal teas, potpourris, and smoking mixtures. This being before the Reagan Revolution, the top personal income tax rate had just recently been lowered from the 90 percent where it had been since FDR’s time to 74 percent by LBJ.

We had 18 people working for us and were buying herbs by the ton, much of it imported from Eastern Europe. We were making a lot of money; we’d leased a couple of new Volvos, and Louise and I were traveling around the country in a small plane (I’m a licensed pilot).

One afternoon, we met with our CPA and my dad, who did the bookkeeping for the tool-and-die shop where he worked and was our business adviser. They looked over our books and pointed out that we were taking salaries that could only be described as absurd.

“You’re paying stupid amounts in taxes,” my dad told us. “Put the money into the company instead, and when you sell it, you can take the money out as capital gains at a much lower rate. And, in the meantime, you use that money to develop new products and expand your marketing.”

We did that—cut our pay about in half, hired two new people, and rolled out a new product line.

We were not alone in making that equation. In the 1970s, the average American CEO took home pay equal to, at most, 30 times what his lowest-paid worker made. Money stayed in the company, business grew at a healthy rate, and the bottom 90 percent saw their paychecks, year over year, grow faster than the top 10 percent’s.

All because of that high marginal tax rate.

Reagan came into office in 1980 and, just as Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge had done in the early 1920s, cut the top rate from 74 to 25 percent. The result was the same as during the Roaring Twenties: workers saw their pay sag while the rich became the fabulously rich.

The experience of dozens of governments around the world over the past 100 years proves this truism: when the top marginal tax rate is too low, it makes oligarchs fabulously wealthy but is generally bad for business (particularly small business) and bad for the economy. Given that countries from Denmark to Israel to Japan are all well above 50 percent and doing just fine, thank you very much, that’s at least a benchmark to shoot for.

And it provides an easy answer to the question Republicans always ask when people suggest Americans should have the nice things that people in Denmark, Israel, and Japan have, like free health care, free education, good pay, and decent housing: “How are you going to pay for it?”

Simple. Just raise taxes on the rich.

When Republican Dwight Eisenhower was president, he and Vice President Richard Nixon happily presided over a growing economy with a 90 percent top tax rate.[9] Corporate taxes paid for about a third of the cost of government (today it’s 7 percent[10]). And when wealthy people—shockingly wealthy people—died, their kids paid an income tax of sorts (the estate tax) on the money they got because they’d been members of the lucky sperm club. All of these tax rates have collapsed under the steady barrage of 40 years of Reaganism, and we see it in our potholed highways, crumbling schools, and collapsing bridges.

It’s time to return to the rational tax policy that helped Ike build new infrastructure all across our nation while presiding over a strong, prosperous economy.

Breaking Oligarchy: Prosecute Trump and His Henchmen under the Hatch Act

The single most consistent defining characteristic of an emerging dictatorship in a country that started as a democracy is that the dictator regularly holds elections and always wins, because he uses the instruments of government to make sure he wins.

Way back in 1939, Congress rendered this illegal with the Hatch Act, making it a crime punishable by fines and imprisonment for “any person employed in any administrative position by the United States” to “use his official authority” to promote or hurt the nomination or election “of any candidate for the office of President” or other federal office.[11]

Nonetheless, Donald Trump repeatedly broke this law and compelled his appointees to break it, including people working in “administrative positions” in the Justice Department, the Postal Service, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Reserve, and our various intelligence agencies.

Of all the various crimes against our republic committed by the Trump administration, this is the most serious, because the most common way that autocrats and tyrants hold power forever once they’ve gained it is by politicizing the agencies of government.

Trump and his collaborators must be prosecuted under the Hatch Act, and the Act itself must be strengthened to prevent this from ever happening again.

Breaking Oligarchy: Publicly Funded Elections

The lifeblood of oligarchy is the ability to use money to influence politics. Only when big money is torn out of politics will the oligarchs be defeated.

In his first term (1901–04), Teddy Roosevelt made a name for himself going after the late 19th and early 20th centuries oligarchs, so it stung him badly when he was accused, in the 1904 election, of taking corporate and oligarch contributions.

He gave a major speech to Congress taking on the oligarchs in December 1905, saying,

The fortunes amassed through corporate organization are now so large, and vest such power in those that wield them, as to make it a matter of necessity to give to the sovereign—that is, to the Government, which represents the people as a whole—some effective power of supervision over their corporate use. In order to insure a healthy social and industrial life, every big corporation should be held responsible by, and be accountable to, some sovereign strong enough to control its conduct. . . .

I believe that this regulation and supervision can be obtained by the enactment of law by the Congress. Our steady aim should be by legislation, cautiously and carefully undertaken, but resolutely persevered in, to assert the sovereignty of the National Government by affirmative action.[12]

He returned to the theme with his State of the Union address in January 1907, saying, “It is well to provide that corporations shall not contribute to Presidential or National campaigns, and furthermore to provide for the publication of both contributions and expenditures.”

However, Roosevelt pointed out, only “honest men” would act upon such a law, which would be “disobeyed by the unscrupulous.”

His answer? Get all money out of politics, except election funding provided by the government itself. “The need for collecting large campaign funds would vanish,” he said, “if Congress provided an appropriation for the proper and legitimate expenses of each of the great national parties, an appropriation ample enough to meet the necessity for thorough organization and machinery, which requires a large expenditure of money.”[13]

Teddy Roosevelt brought us some of America’s most important progressive innovations.

The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 had been lying fallow for years until he picked it up and used it to begin tearing apart the Standard Oil Trust.

Multigenerational wealth had exploded among the families of the industrialists of his era; he got the estate tax put into law and enforced it vigorously.

He led the way in good-government laws with the Tillman Act of 1907, which made it a felony for any corporation to contribute money or anything of value to any candidate for federal office.

And here he was, proposing publicly financed elections. While that particular policy never passed, Teddy continued to push for it to the end of his life.

Today that goal of clean elections has been made much more difficult by Supreme Court decisions like Buckley and Citizens United. But in the past decade, there were serious attempts to begin the process of amending the Constitution to roll back these decisions, including legislation introduced in Arizona,[14] Illinois,[15] New Jersey,[16] New Hampshire,[17] Nebraska,[18] and Oregon.[19]

There are also several non-amendment strategies for getting around Supreme Court decisions, ranging from “court stripping” (passing laws that invoke Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution to forbid Supreme Court oversight) to simply changing the composition of the Court through expanding the number of its members. I cover these in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, so I won’t go into detail here, but they are all viable and have been used before.

Progressives have spent years pushing for publicly funded elections and a political system free of the influence of big money. If we’re to prevail against the toxic American oligarchy, the battle for clean elections must be embraced across the entire Democratic Party.

Breaking Oligarchy: Support the Resistance

On November 2, 1772—a year before the Boston Tea Party and four years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence—Sam Adams formed the first 21-man “Committee of Correspondence” to rally opposition to the British and spread the word of rebellion in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. That group spun off more than 80 affiliated committees in fewer than 100 days.

A month later, the Virginia House of Burgesses formed its own Committee of Correspondence, including Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry among its members, and by the end of the year, these committees had spread to eight more colonies. They led the first colonial fight against British tyranny.[20]

Support for resistance to segregation and racial violence made Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. into forces whom presidents and Congress had to take seriously, finally crippling Jim Crow with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

On the other hand, every German knows the story of the White Rose, the pseudonym under which Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and their friend Christoph Probst published anti-Hitler pamphlets in 1942. When they were arrested, tried, and brutally executed on February 22, 1943, there were no protests; by then, the German people were totally cowed.

As tyranny stretches out its putrid, rotting arm across America, support those who stand in its way. Better, join them.

Breaking Oligarchy: Restore Election Integrity

Most oligarchies preserve many of the trappings of democracy to give them legitimacy; Russia and Hungary still have elections, for example. It’s pretty much the same here in the United States, and if things don’t change, the window during which contemporary oligarchs can be overthrown will pass.

Once a certain threshold of vote manipulation is passed, it becomes very difficult for people of good will to return a state, region, or nation back to democracy; voter suppression becomes self-perpetuating, barring a major upheaval in the political landscape. In 1923, according to the memoirs of his secretary, Joseph Stalin said, “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.”[21]

While Russian oligarchs rigged elections (and still do, apparently), this was also at the core of Southern oligarchs’ holding power in the post-Reconstruction era in the United States, using everything from ballot stuffing to poll taxes to so-called literacy tests.

The latest power-holding strategy used by Donald Trump and the GOP is to manufacture a phony epidemic of “voter fraud”—a crime committed by fewer than a dozen people a year in the United States—and use it as an excuse to pass onerous laws preventing millions of poor people, people of color, elderly people, and students from voting. Trump amplified and repeated this dozens of times with his jeremiads against “rigged elections.”

A month before the 2016 election, the first paragraph of an article by Darrel Rowland in the Columbus Dispatch read,

The news release said, “Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted today announced his office will begin mailing absentee ballot applications to voters statewide this weekend.” What it didn’t say was that more than a million of Ohio’s 7.7 million registered voters wouldn’t get the mailing, because Husted’s office had pared the list beforehand.[22]

The oligarchs who own the Republican Party have turned voter suppression into a fine art as well as an industrial-sized machine. In the two years running up to 2016, fully 17 million voters were erased from voter rolls, most in red states and most of them living in college towns and urban areas with large African American or Hispanic populations.[23]

And even when people haven’t been removed from the voting lists, the Brennan Center reports, African Americans are five times as likely as whites to have their vote disqualified for various minor reasons like “overvoting” (checking the name of the candidate and also writing the same name in) and other things that wouldn’t otherwise obscure the intent of the voter.[24]

This is a feature of the system in red states, not a bug.

While there are several places in the Constitution and its amendments where a right to vote is asserted, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that there is no such right to be found in that document.

In their Bush v. Gore decision in 2000, the Court explicitly found, “There is no Constitutional right to vote for President of the United States,” and the idea of disenfranchising minority voters didn’t bother the Court’s conservative majority at all when they gutted the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder, 2013), which had passed the Senate unanimously just a few years before.

Between voter suppression and gerrymandering, Republicans have become adept at picking their voters instead of voters picking their politicians, as the system was intended.

Until there’s an explicit right to vote that is recognized by the Court or put into law or the Constitution, the oligarchs who own the GOP will continue to play this despicable game.[25]

Breaking Oligarchy: Build Progressive Institutions Instead of Just Providing Three-Year Grants

For over a decade, I’ve been an unpaid board member of a progressive fund that gives away, literally, millions of dollars to progressive groups.[26] For years, our organization was also affiliated with numerous other progressive funding groups, such as the Democracy Alliance, and I’ve attended more meetings filled with wealthy liberals than I can easily count.

What I’ve learned is that progressive groups generally fund start-up groups with the goal of getting them “on their feet” within a relatively short window, usually just three to five years. There is, however, virtually no ongoing support for progressive infrastructure; pretty much every funding organization wants groups to “stand on their own two feet.”

When America’s billionaire oligarchs took Lewis Powell’s call to arms to heart, they didn’t put such frankly self-defeating and unrealistic conditions on their financial support. In many cases, they didn’t even wait for groups they could fund to emerge: they started groups themselves. For 50 years, oligarchs have been funding what they call America’s conservative infrastructure: long-lasting organizations like the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, ALEC, and the Mercatus Center.

Liberals and Democrats, on the other hand, have been supporting a hodgepodge of progressive organizations that come and go with the winds of activist fashion: one year it’s gay rights, the next Black rights, then Hispanic rights, then marijuana legalization, then single-payer health care, then addressing the needs of white Appalachia or working for a Green New Deal.

The reason for this difference in approach is almost certainly one of mission. Conservatives are dedicated to the singular goal of preserving the power of great wealth and oligarchy, while the progressive movement is a coalition of diverse interest groups, most completely lacking access to big-money funding.

The progressive movement toward restoring democracy to America needs to focus on systems, rather than projects, and start building institutions for the long haul.

Charles Koch’s efforts in the 1970s and 1980s—leading in various ways to every group mentioned above—have borne fruit, although it took most of his lifetime for them to reach the pinnacle of their power. He and his group of fellow libertarian oligarchs built the conservative movement the same way he built Koch Industries—step-by-step, never flinching, not succumbing to the fads of the day, steadily moving toward a clear goal.

Wealthy progressives and pro-democracy foundations need to learn and apply the same strategies.

Breaking Oligarchy: Help Republicans Reinvent the GOP

Ask anybody what the Republican Party stands for, and they’ll typically say some variation on “Tax cuts, small government, and deregulation.”

These are all purely oligarch priorities. Oligarchs don’t like to pay taxes (and generally don’t), don’t want to pay for a social safety net, and don’t want government telling them how much pollution their factories can dump in our air and rivers.

So, in order to reach beyond their oligarch funder base, the GOP has had to approach other groups that were, prior to the 1960s, partners with Democrats, particularly white supremacist racists, white evangelical “Christians,” and people who think a woman’s place in society is to answer to men in all cases, including birth control and abortion.

The Republicans’ fealty to the oligarchs who fund them explains the unwillingness of their party—from Gingrich to McConnell—to negotiate with Democrats or govern in good faith; they’re not interested in governing, they’re only interested in protecting the oligarchs’ interests.

Trump exposed these dynamics pretty handily, and thus the GOP is in trouble now. The Republican Party of Dwight Eisenhower embraced progressive values like unionization and Social Security, but their contrast with Democrats was that they simply thought things should move forward more slowly and carefully.

Opposition parties are good things; they help clarify and sharpen issues for voters and in policy debate. Reach out to your GOP friends who aren’t total racists or misogynists (the latter are beyond redemption, in all probability) and help them bring their party back to its pre-Reagan rationality.

Breaking Oligarchy: Rebuild a Progressive Democratic Party

In the year before the 2010 election, I noticed a sudden explosion of grassroots organizing activity in the GOP. Most conspicuously, CDs and online videos were popping up all over the place telling Tea Party activists how to infiltrate and take over the Republican Party. One claimed that “the most powerful political office in the world” is “not the president of the United States. It’s the precinct committeeman.”[27] Precinct positions are largely filled with volunteers (although some are elected and some are paid) and are so powerful because, as the video explained, they are the only people who “get to elect the leaders of the two political parties.”

Second, it’s only the Precinct Committee members who determine who gets to run in a party’s primary, so if everybody in the primary is a Tea Partier, the general election candidate from the GOP is guaranteed to be one him- or herself, regardless of who wins the primary election.

Finally, members of the Precinct Committees exclusively select nominees to replace elected officials who resign to run for higher office or pass away. As such, they’re pivotal to the power structures of the parties.

The videos (and lots of literature, meetings, and speeches saying the same thing) worked. The Republican Party was taken over from within. Thousands of Tea Partiers enthusiastically poured into the GOP, not realizing that their entire movement was funded with money from America’s most polluting and deadly industries, dedicated to keeping pollution profitable and cutting billionaires’ taxes.

I’ve been talking about this on my radio and TV programs since 2010, encouraging my progressive listeners to do what the Tea Partiers did in 2010 when they took control of the GOP. And it’s produced results.

In the final two weeks of February 2020, I went on a book tour for The Hidden History of the War on Voting and spoke to thousands of people in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Chicago (we ended it there, as the corona-virus outbreak was becoming obvious). Dozens of people, when getting their books signed, went out of their way to tell me that they were now Precinct Committee members, and a few of them had pulled together a group in 2016 in Denver to write Colorado’s contribution to the Democratic Party’s platform that year.

The most effective way to use politics to block oligarchy in America is not to wait for some billionaire to run a bunch of ads on TV or exhort people to vote. It’s to build strong and resilient democratic institutions, from school boards to town councils to the Democratic Party itself. And that requires us to show up and participate.

We Now Know . . .

In 1953, Russell Kirk complained in his book The Conservative Mind, “Modern reformers’ fanatic determination to make the laboring classes dissatisfied is a curse to us all.”[28]

His book sure looked prescient to Reagan and his oligarch funders when the middle class was wealthy and unionized enough that workers weren’t terrified of losing their jobs if they protested (as with the PATCO strike right after he came into office), women weren’t afraid of the repercussions of standing up to patriarchy, and students felt both academically and economically safe protesting.

To make things worse from the conservative viewpoint, there was a window during the 1960s when even Black people like Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and their Black Panther colleagues felt secure enough to walk into the California State Capitol building carrying shotguns and pistols.[29] In 1986, Stanford sociologist Douglas McAdam called this “biographical availability,” whereby the circumstances of people’s lives made them more or less “available” to stand up and speak out.[30]

Kirk and the generations of Republicans (and a few Democrats) who followed him did everything they could to make sure the “riots” of the 1960s—with people burning flags, draft cards, and bras—never happened again. They made middle-class men and women financially insecure while saddling an entire generation of young people with a crushing burden of debt, rendering them biographically unavailable.

But the coronavirus pandemic changed things, as—for the first time in two generations—over 20 million Americans of all ages were suddenly free to go into the streets, triggered by the police murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and others. American workers and students became biographically available to speak out, and it shook the political foundations of our nation, all while exposing the rot and slide into oligarchy that had overtaken the GOP and parts of the Democratic Party during the years since the Reagan Revolution.

The militarized response to them from the Trump administration also revealed how deeply he and his GOP sycophants were planted in the soil of neofascism and tyranny.

As the ubiquity of the coronavirus forces deep changes in how we do everything from work to school to eating out, we’re also given a great opportunity. While we’re reinventing our workplaces and schools, it’s essential that we also reinvent our government. And we don’t have to resort to musty parchments to find a path: FDR laid it out for us in the 1940s, and it still stands as a shining polestar.

First, we challenge oligarchs and tyrants head-on through expanding the right to vote, the right to unionize, and the obligation of the very wealthy to pay reasonable taxes.

Then we provide Americans with the life that citizens of every other advanced democracy already enjoy: free health care, free education, good public transportation, greening infrastructure, and a democratic government that responds to all of its citizens’ wants and needs.

A frightened and fractured populace is exactly what autocrats and oligarchs want; our work in this generation is to heal our nation’s wounds and bring all of our citizens up to a basic standard and quality of life whereby they can enjoy life, liberty, and—perhaps most important for social stability and democracy—happiness.

In January 1776, Thomas Paine wrote in his pamphlet Common Sense, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

While we may be on the precipice of 21st-century neofascism, we’re also at one of those rare turning-point moments that history seems to hand us every 80 years, as history did Paine and his peers.

Let us all make the most of it. Tag, you’re it!

NOTES

Introduction: America Slides into Oligarchy and Dances Close to Tyranny

1. https://prospect.org/mapping-corruption-interactive#justice-dept-info

2. https://prospect.org/mapping-corruption-interactive#state-dept-info

3. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/mark-esper-defense-secretary-raytheon-lobbyist.html

4. https://prospect.org/mapping-corruption-interactive#homeland-security-info

5. https://prospect.org/mapping-corruption-interactive#treasury-deptinfo

6. https://prospect.org/mapping-corruption-interactive#commerce-deptinfo

7. https://prospect.org/mapping-corruption-interactive#interior-deptinfo

Part One: The Crisis of Oligarchy

1. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-regulatory-relief-support-economic-recovery/

2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2020/04/11/states-using-covid-19-to-ban-abortion-increase-everyones-risks-and-hardships-in-acrisis/#b84a427aa8c6

3. https://www.foxnews.com/us/coronavirus-firearms-ammunitions-sales

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/us/politics/republicans-vote-by-mail.html

5. https://www.salon.com/2020/04/29/trump-leverages-thecoronavirus-pandemic-to-advance-anti-immigrant-policies/

6. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/coronavirus-stimulus-package-trump-jared-kushner-tax-break-real-estate

7. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/trump-mcconnell-covid-19-liability-immunity-plan.html

8. https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/trust-in-media-down.php

9. https://www.sanders.senate.gov/koch-brothers

10. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/nsc-pandemic-office-trump-closed/2020/03/13/a70de09c-6491-11ea-acca-80c22bbee96f_story.html

11. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/trump-coronavirus-politics-us-health-disaster

12. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-to-new-york-youve-been-mean-to-me-drop-dead

13. https://www.vox.com/world/2020/3/15/21180414/coronavirus-uk-herd-immunity-vallance-johnson

14. https://respectfulinsolence.com/2016/12/09/fixing-the-fda-by-appointing-a-commissioner-who-doesnt-believe-in-the-fdas-mission/

15. https://www.usatoday.com/story/theoval/2013/06/07/obama-reagan-government-san-jose-fundraiser/2399687/

16. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/04/viktororban-hungary/557246/

17. Ibid.

18. https://www.breitbart.com/faith/2019/11/26/hungarys-orban-christian-persecution-is-organized-attack-on-an-entire-culture/

19. https://prospect.org/coronavirus/viktor-orban-viral-authoritarianism-hungary/

20. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-election-rallies-idUSKCN1GR1U6

21. https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/648269/Hungary-plan-fence-border-Romania-migrants-refugees-crisis-Viktor-Orban-Schengen

22. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/world/europe/viktor-orbanhungary.html; https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/25/world/europe/hungary-election-viktor-orban.html

23. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/world/europe/hungary-judges-independence.html

24. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/world/europe/viktor-orbanhungary.html

25. https://www.pulselive.co.ke/news/world/in-hungary-govt-to-detain-migrants-in-container-camps/zv2vtyt

26. https://www.pulselive.co.ke/news/world/in-hungary-parliament-approves-detention-of-all-asylum-seekers/l5ly5es; https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/238776

27. https://cathnews.co.nz/2019/02/14/immigration-christianity-hungary-orban/

28. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/13/woman-killed-at-white-supremacist-rally-in-charlottesville-named

29. https://www.politico.eu/article/the-roma-peoples-hungarian-hell/

30. https://on.ft.com/2Em7CYc

31. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/world/europe/hungary-orban-media.html

32. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-soros-idUSKBN19W0XU

33. https://codastory.com/disinformation/orban-media-moguls-targeting-european-outlets/

34. https://visegradinsight.eu/orbans-next-victim-the-hungarian-science-academy/

35. https://index.hu/english/2019/08/28/hungary_climate_change_viktor_orban_fidesz_european_union/

36. https://www.dw.com/en/eu-parliament-votes-to-trigger-article-7-sanctions-procedure-against-hungary/a-45459720

37. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/22/hungary-viktororban-george-soros

38. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-hungary-orban-netanyahuidUSKBN1K919F

39. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/9/24/1887498/-Trump-placed-hold-on-military-aid-to-Ukraine-well-before-he-called-their-president

40. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hes-a-tough-man-trump-shrugs-off-concerns-about-hungarys-hard-right-leader-during-white-house-visit/2019/05/13/2fe20b5e-7592-11e9-b7ae-390de4259661_story.html; https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/10/22/why-hungarys-orban-would-want-trump-sour-ukraine/

41. https://cathnews.co.nz/2019/02/14/immigration-christianity-hungary-orban/

42. http://hungarianfreepress.com/2018/11/20/the-gruevski-affair-andhow-viktor-orban-turned-hungary-into-a-criminal-state/

43. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/30/harrowing-warning-all-hungary-hands-far-right-leader-dictatorial-powers-amid

44. https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2019/11/atlantics-december-2019-issue/601795/; https://apnews.com/a3b7df66e50f488a841a31ce31124987

45. https://fs.blog/2017/02/aristotles-politics/

46. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/trumps-reelection-could-spell-theend-of-american-democracy/

47. https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-economy

48. https://www.lawliberty.org/book-review/the-reconstruction-republicans-answering-the-slaveocratic-revolution/

49. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/time-bring-monarchy-u-s-time-end-one/; https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Navigation/Community/Arcadia-and-THP-Blog/September-2018/Smedley-Butler-and-the-1930s-Plot-to-Overthrow-the

50. https://www.salon.com/2019/10/30/how-the-supreme-court-andthe-morbidly-rich-are-ruining-democracy-in-america_partner/

51. https://constitution.congress.go/constitution/amendment-1/

52. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/104-1995/s268

53. http://reclaimdemocracy.org/clear_channel_backlash/

54. Robert B. Ekelund Jr., George S. Ford, and Thomas Koutsky, “Market Power in Radio Markets: An Empirical Analysis of Local and National Concentration,” Journal of Law and Economics 43, no. 1 (April 2000): 157–84.

55. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/05/18/sounds-familiar-for-a-reason/d8b48d41-422c-4efe-a697-82c0bf07bde8/

56. https://billingsgazette.com/news/local/crash-in-minot-leads-to-death-of-resident-others-hospitalized/article_6d7ee616-ae07-59c8-bf10-a86348afa68e.html

57. https://fortune.com/longform/media-company-ownership-consolidation/

58. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-20-568A1.pdf

59. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZX.html

60. https://downfalldictionary.blogspot.com/2019/11/william-clark-copper-king-fails-to-buy.html

61. https://www.chron.com/news/article/Top-court-agrees-to-review-overturned-Tom-DeLay-5331253.php

62. https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/understanding-public-funding-presidential-elections/

63. https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/What_is_ALEC%3F

64. https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

65. “James Madison’s notes of the Constitutional Convention,” June 26, 1787; https://www.consource.org/document/james-madisons-notes-of-the-constitutional-convention-1787-6-26/

66. https://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/12/roberts.statement/

67. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/3/18632438/federalist-society-leonard-leo-brett-kavanaugh

68. https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/21/almost-30-percent-of-all-u-s-circuit-judges-are-now-trump-appointees/

69. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-judicial-nominees-young-ideologues_n_5c7d698be4b0a6fcad23be3e?mhj

70. Jeff Nesbit, Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2016).

71. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/04/11/public-trust-in-government-1958-2019/

72. https://theintercept.com/2015/07/30/jimmy-carter-u-s-oligarchy-unlimited-political-bribery/

73. http://everyvoice.org/featured/joe-biden-money-politics-hell-wayrun-democracy

74. Al Gore, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change (New York: Random House, 2013), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/03/al-gore-us-democracy-hacked.

75. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/08/06/annotated-transcript-the-aug-6-gop-debate/

76. https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

77. https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/404017-trump-supporters-whose-pro-russia-shirts-went-viral-were-not

78. https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/colliding-cultures/john-winthrop-dreams-of-a-city-on-a-hill-1630/

Part Two: How Oligarchy Led to the Civil War

1. https://www.britannica.com/event/Enlightenment-European-history

2. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/adams-the-works-of-john-adams-vol-4

3. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/sanjacinto-philosophy/chapter/john-locke-second-treatise-of-government-chapter-2-of-the-state-of-nature/

4. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6854

5. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-4313

6. L. Conradt and T. J. Roper, “Group Decision-Making in Animals,” Nature 421 (January 9, 2003): 155–58, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature01294.

7. Ibid.

8. James Randerson, “Democracy Beats Despotism in the Animal World,” New Scientist, January 8, 2003, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3248-democracy-beats-despotism-in-the-animal-world/.

9. Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History (New York: Little Brown & Co., 2020).

10. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, https://www.ushistory.org/paine/commonsense/sense4.htm.

11. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed14.asp

12. Ibid.

13. “James Madison’s Notes of the Constitutional Convention,” August 8, 1787, https://www.consource.org/document/james-madisons-notes-of-the-constitutional-convention-1787-8-8/.

14. https://archive.org/stream/constitutionapr02madigoog/constitutionapr02madigoog_djvu.txt

15. Ibid.

16. Thomas G. West, Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).

17. https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/cotton-gin-patent

18. The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the First Session of the Thirty-Eighth Congress (City of Washington: John C. Rives, Congressional Globe Office, 1864), 2979, https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Congressional_Globe/eU5vgQZ_As4C?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=from%20being%20worth%20$250%20they%20went%20up%20to%20$1,200%20and%20$1,300.

19. Henry Leffmann, The States-Rights Fetish: A Plea for Real Nationalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1913), https://www.alibris.com/The-States-Rights-Fetish-A-Plea-for-Real-NationalismHenry-Leffmann/book/11712701.

20. Forrest A. Nabors, From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2017), 8.

21. The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the First Session of the Thirty-Eighth Congress, Appendix, 117, https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Congressional_Globe/eU5vgQZ_As4C?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22If%20the%20cotton-gin%20had%20not%20been%20invented%22

22. “The Constitutionality and Rightfulness of Secession,” speech by Hon. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, in the Senate of the United States, December 18 and 19, 1860.

23. https://archive.org/stream/speechdeliveredi00dunk/speechdeliveredi00dunk_djvu.txt

24. The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the First Session of the Thirty-Eighth Congress, Appendix, 117, https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Congressional_Globe/eU5vgQZ_As4C?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22not%20to%20secure%20toleration%20for%20slavery%20%22

Part Three: How Oligarchs Hung On after the Civil War: Controlling Free Commoners

1. https://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html

2. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (Washington, DC: Gateway Editions, Kindle Edition), 5.

3. Russell Kirk, “‘One Man, One Vote’ in South Africa,” National Review, March 9, 1965, 198.

4. Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 490–91.

5. https://www.euronews.com/2018/03/20/which-country-in-europe-has-the-most-prisoners-

6. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/locked-in-profitsu-s-prison-industry-numbers-n455976; https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p18_sum.pdf

7. https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_population_rate?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All

8. https://time.com/5405158/the-true-history-of-americas-private-prison-industry/

9. https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe70s/money_05.html

10. Slaughter House Cases, 83 US 36 (1872).

11. Samuel M. Clyatt v. United States, 197 U.S. 207 (1905).

12. Bailey v. Alabama, 219 U.S. 219 (1911).

13. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/197/207

14. https://chesnuttarchive.org/Works/Essays/peonage.html

15. https://www.clarionledger.com/in-depth/news/local/2020/01/09/debtors-prison-miss-still-sends-people-jail-unpaid-debt/2742853001/

16. Anjali Tsui, “They Loan You Money. Then They Get a Warrant for Your Arrest,” ProPublica, December 3, 2019, https://www.propublica.org/article/they-loan-you-money-then-they-get-a-warrant-for-your-arrest.

17. ACLU, “A Pound of Flesh: The Criminalization of Private Debt,” 2018, https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/022118-debtreport.pdf.

18. Federal Reserve, Report on the Economic Well-Being of US Households 2018, https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2018-report-economic-well-being-us-households-201905.pdf.

19. Lizzie Presser, “When Medical Debt Collectors Decide Who Gets Arrested,” ProPublica, October 16, 2019, https://features.propublica.org/medical-debt/when-medical-debt-collectors-decide-who-gets-arrested-coffeyville-kansas/.

20. Ibid.

21. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/03/hospital-bills-medical-debt-bankruptcy/584998/

22. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304901?journalCode=ajph

23. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/439/299/

24. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2012/07/a-short-history-of-payday-lending-law

25. Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (Kindle Edition, 2011; first published 1857 by J. J. Reed, New York).

26. Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South, 20.

27. William H. Skaggs, The Southern Oligarchy (New York: Devin-Adair Publishing Co., 1924).

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., 171.

30. As quoted in Skaggs, The Southern Oligarchy, 280.

31. https://www.governing.com/topics/education/gov-education-funding-states.html

32. https://hechingerreport.org/new-north-south-divide-public-higher-education/

33. Ibid.

34. Sandy Baum, “The Evolution of Student Debt in the US: An Overview,” Urban Institute, 2013, https://www.upjohn.org/stuloanconf/Baum.pdf.

35. https://www.chamberofcommerce.org/student-loan-statistics/

36. Dan Baum, “Legalize It All: How to Win the War on Drugs,” Harper’s, April 2016, https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/.

37. https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/mississippi-burning-murders/15/

38. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mississippi-burning-1988

39. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/04/why-donald-trump-is-just-following-ronald-reagans-footsteps-race/

40. https://www.gregpalast.com/the-great-florida-ex-con-gamernhow-the-felon-voter-purge-was-itself-felonious/

41. https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/donald-trump-jr-just-took-a-stunning-stand-on-the-confederate-flag

42. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-14963752

43. Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 381.

44. Ibid.

Part Four: A Third Oligarchy Rises with the Reagan Revolution

1. https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/john-d-rockefeller

2. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Andrew-Carnegie

3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/DuPont-Company

4. https://www.britannica.com/biography/J-P-Morgan

5. https://www.thoughtco.com/robber-barons-from-americas-past-4120060

6. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Grover_Cleveland%27s_Fourth_State_of_the_Union_Address

7. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-J-Field

8. https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv

9. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romney-says-corporations-are-people/2011/08/11/gIQABwZ38I_story.html

10. https://www.nytimes.com/1976/01/31/archives/state-campaign-fund-law-now-faces-sharp-revision.html

11. https://static.nbclearn.com/files/nbcarchives/site/pdf/33292.pdf

12. https://fortune.com/2017/01/27/donald-trump-cfpb-consumer-protection-financial-bureau-elizabeth-warren/

13. https://fortune.com/2016/11/10/trump-voters-free-trade-globalization/

14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

15. Eric Katz, “Social Security Offers Nearly Its Entire Workforce Early Retirement,” Government Executive, August 4, 2017, https://m.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2017/08/social-security-has-sent-early-out-offers-nearly-its-entire-workforce/140008/?oref=govexec_today_pm_nl.

16. https://www.gq.com/story/no-irs-audits-for-the-rich

17. https://connectingvets.radio.com/articles/efforts-privatize-va-led-billions-profits-contractors-and-longer-waits-veterans

18. https://www.theweek.com/articles/767184/how-george-bush-broke-post-office

19. https://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2007/pb22204.pdf

20. https://qz.com/1836901/trump-grudge-against-us-postal-service-is-a-threat-to-us-election/

21. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchic Tendencies of Modern Democracy (Franklin Classics Trade Press, 2018).

22. http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/od2ndst.html

Part Five: When Oligarchy Becomes Tyranny

1. Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, first edition, enlarged edition, 2017).

2. Ibid.

3. https://agendatwentytwenty.com/2018/08/17/gopac-memo-language-a-key-mechanism-of-control-gingrichs-declaration-of-war-against-civil-debate-and-respect-for-opponents/

4. William Safire, “Oh, Hell, What’s in an Adverb?,” National Journal 28, no. 27–52 (1966): 1615.

5. https://www.salon.com/2019/09/19/drain-the-swamp-trump-has-named-more-lobbyists-to-cabinet-than-bush-or-obama-did-in-8-years/

6. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/top-wh-strategist-vows-a-daily-fight-for-deconstruction-of-the-administrative-state/2017/02/23/03f6b8da-f9ea-11e6-bf01-d47f8cf9b643_story.html

7. http://www.tcj.com/who-discovered-superman/

8. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/6/8/524741/-

9. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/17/central-park-five-donald-trump-jogger-rape-case-new-york

10. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html

11. Mayer, They Thought They Were Free.

12. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ice-has-become-trumps-personal-bullying-squad/2018/04/23/5197541e-472d-11e8-8b5a-3b1697adcc2a_story.html

13. https://www.newsweek.com/ice-launching-citizens-academy-course-how-agency-arrests-immigrants-1516656

14. https://www.britannica.com/topic/SS

15. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stanley-Milgram

16. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/milgram-experiment-easy-taking-violent-orders/

17. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lesson-of-a-lifetime-72754306/

18. Bregman, Humankind.

19. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/28/duterte-confesses-my-only-sin-is-the-extrajudicial-killings

20. Ibid.

21. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jan/09/chile.pinochet

22. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/434110-trump-suggests-that-things-could-get-very-bad-if-military-police

23. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/09/us/behind-a-book-that-inspired-mcveigh.html

24. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/nyregion/cnn-cory-booker-pipe-bombs-sent.html

25. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/blame-abc-news-finds-17-cases-invoking-trump/story?id=58912889

26. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6957369/Texas-executes-white-supremacist-ringleader-beat-fatally-dragged-James-Byrd-Jr.html; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6954963/Texas-execute-killer-covered-KKK-tattoos-ringleader-dragging-death-black-man.html

27. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/hate-incidents?keyword=pentagram&state=OK&f%5B0%5D=field_hate_incident_type%3A3

28. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2011/conspiracy-con

29. https://pictureshistory.blogspot.com/2011/01/totenkopf-nazi-germanys-toughest.html

30. Jefferson Memorial Society, from the author’s library of The Collected Writings of Thomas Jefferson. The letter to José Corrêa de Serra on October 24, 1820, was written from Monticello.

Part Six: Breaking Oligarchy, Restoring Democracy

1. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/oct/18/hillary-clinton/clinton-correct-buffett-claimed-pay-lower-tax-rate/

2. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Kindle Edition, 2019), 5.

3. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/cancer-eating-the-heart-of-australian-democracy-20180826-p4zzum.html

4. In fact, Trump supporters used the term “Lügenpresse” during the 2016 campaign. https://time.com/4544562/donald-trump-supporters-lugenpresse/.

5. Thomas Jefferson, letter to Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-30-02-0451.

6. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, State of the Union address, January 11, 1944, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/address_text.html.

7. https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/150671/happiness-is-love-and-75k.aspx

8. https://www.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/content/docs/news/Happiness_Money_Summary.pdf

9. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/eisenhower-obama-wealthy-americans-mitt-romney-pay-taxes/story?id=15387862; https://www.cbsnews.com/news/businesses-paying-their-lowest-share-of-taxes-since-at-least-1960/

10. https://www.thebalance.com/current-u-s-federal-government-tax-revenue-3305762

11. https://employment.laws.com/hatch-act-text; https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/s2170/text

12. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/seventh-annual-message-4

13. Ibid.

14. http://openstates.org/az/bills/51st-2nd-regular/HCR2026/

15. http://openstates.org/il/bills/98th/SJR27/

16. http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2014/Bills/ACR/133_I1.HTM

17. http://openstates.org/nh/bills/2014/SB307/

18. http://openstates.org/ne/bills/103/LR23/

19. http://openstates.org/or/bills/2013RegularSession/SJM9/

20. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Committees-of-Correspondence

21. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stalin-vote-count-quote/

22. https://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2016/10/02/1-a-million-ohio-voters-didnt-get-absentee-ballot-mailing.html

23. The various parts of this are discussed at length in my book The Hidden History of the War on Voting.

24. https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/Democracy/Design_Deficiencies_Lost_Votes.pdf

25. For a more detailed discussion of this topic, read The Hidden History of the War on Voting.

26. http://www.voqal.org

27. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug0H0NSk8v0

28. Kirk, The Conservative Mind.

29. I write extensively about this incident in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment.

30. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9780470674871.wbespm012

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks go to Troy N. Miller, who worked with me for years as a producer and writer for the television show The Big Picture, which I hosted every weeknight for seven years in Washington, DC. Troy worked hard as a researcher, sounding board, and editor, and deserves recognition for it.

At Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Steve Piersanti—who was the founder—worked with me to kick off this series. It’s been a labor of love for both of us, and I’m so grateful to Steve for his insights, rigor, and passion for this project. Of the many other people at BK who have helped with this book (and some projects associated with it), special thanks to Jeevan Sivasubramaniam (who has helped keep me sane for years) and Neal Maillet, a constant source of encouragement and wisdom. BK is an extraordinary publishing company, and it’s been an honor to have them publish my books for almost two decades. And thanks to Tai Moses, who edited my Thom Hartmann Reader and returned to do a first pass with this book, for all her insights and help.

BK also provided a brilliant final editor for the book, Elissa Rabellino, who did a great job smoothing and tightening the text.

Bill Gladstone, my agent for over two decades, helped make this book—and the Hidden History series—possible. Bill is truly one of the best in the business.

My executive producer, Shawn Taylor, helped with booking expert guests on my radio and TV programs, many of whom provided great information and anecdotes for this book. And my video producer, Nate Atwell, is a true visual genius. I’m blessed to have such a great team helping me produce a daily radio and TV program, which supports my writing work.

And, as always, my best sounding board, editor, and friend is my wife, Louise. Without her, in all probability none of my books would ever have seen the light of day.

INDEX

A

abolitionism, 55, 58, 60

ACLU, 79

Adams, Abigail, 55

Adams, John, 48–51

Adams, John Quincy, 64

Adams, Sam, 147

administrative state, deconstruction of, 2, 117–19, 132

advanced democracies, 45, 80, 138–39, 141

Affordable Care Act, 38, 102, 105, 108, 109

African Americans, 77, 88

Black teenagers falsely accused, 121

civil rights movement and, 55, 91–92

Trump family’s discrimination against, 88, 121

voter suppression against, 150

The Age of Reason (Paine), 72

Agrarian Justice (Paine), 72

agricultural revolution, 61

Air America, 27

Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), 48

Alito, Samuel, 30

Alt-Right movement, 20

Amendments to the Constitution

First Amendment, 11, 23–24, 32, 136

Second Amendment, 86

Thirteenth Amendment loophole, 74

Fourteenth Amendment, 94, 97–98

American Bar Association, 34

American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), 32, 33, 38, 41

American Revolution, 6, 22, 45, 48–51, 62

animals, democracy and, 52–54, 113

Antifa, 121, 122

anti-monopoly laws, 62, 76

antiwar movement, 1960s, 55, 87–88, 92

Arbery, Ahmaud, 156

Aristotle, 21, 44

“artificial persons,” 97–98

“art of the con,” 100–101

The Atlantic, 20

Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 39

Augustus, 20

Australia, media empire, 134–35

authoritarian countries, xiii, 86–87

authoritarian followers, 16, 112

The Authoritarians (Altemeyer), 112

Azar, Alex, 118

B

Bain Capital, 27

banking oligarchs, 4–5, 76, 81

bankruptcy, 70, 76

of oligarchs, 132

student debt denied, 70, 85

banks, deregulation of, 101

banned books, 81–82

Bannon, Steve, 2, 118–19

Barr, William, 3, 19, 35, 115

Baum, Dan, 87–88

Bayer, Zsolt, 18

Beatles, 91

Belloti decision. See First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti

Benghazi, 119–20

“benign oligarchy,” 36

Bernhardt, David, 5

Bible, as excuse for slavery, 55, 57

Biden, Joe, xiii, 19, 43

Bierce, Ambrose, 75

Biggs, Tres, 79–80

Bill of Rights, 86

proposal for second, 137–39

biographical availability, 156

birth control pill, 91

Black Panthers, 155–56

Blackshirts, 36, 128–29

Bloomberg News, 41

Boogaloo Bois, 41

Booker, Cory, 129

Boston Tea Party, 48, 147

bounty hunters, 77

breaking oligarchy, 1, 131–57

bankrupting of, 132

breaking media empire, 134–35

building progressive institutions, 151–52

Democratic Party, rebuilding, 153–55

diminishing economic power of, 132

free press, 135–36

Hatch Act prosecution, 144

publicly funded elections, 145–47

Republican Party, rebuilding, 152–53

restoring election integrity, 148–50

supporting resistance, 147–48

tax rates, 132–33, 141–43. See also oligarchy

Bregman, Rutger, 54, 126

Breitbart, 41

Brennan Center, 150

Brewer, David, 77

Brexit, 134

bribery, xiii, 21, 31, 34, 42–43

British East India Company, 47, 49

British oligarchy, 22, 47–52, 93, 147–48

Brooks, Rayshard, 156

Brownshirts, 36, 125, 128–29

Brown v. Board of Education, 73

Buckley, William F., Jr., 72, 92

Buckley and Bellotti decisions, xiii, 23, 32–33, 41, 93, 99

Buckley v. Valeo, xiii, 32, 99–100, 146

Buffett, Warren, 133

Burke, Edmund, 72–73, 102

Bush, George H. W., 101, 109

Bush, George W., 35, 70, 85, 86, 89, 120–21

Postal Service strategy, 106–7

Bush, Jeb, 89

Bush v. Gore, 150

Butler, Smedley, 22

Byrd, Robert, 24

C

Calhoun, John C., 65, 83

campaign finance, 1, 31, 99

breaking oligarchy, 145–47

Canadian Legislative Assembly, 67

Carnegie, Andrew, 94

Carter, Jimmy, 41–42

Cartwright, John, 51

census, rigged, 5

Chamber of Commerce, 3

Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, 18, 124

Cheney, Dick, 120, 125

Chesnutt, Charles, 77

Chile, 127, 128

“Christian” purity, 17

CIA, 125

citizen-based “private security,” 125, 128–29

citizen-journalists, 136

“Citizens Academy” ICE course, 125

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 30, 32, 41, 99, 146–47

Civil Rights Act of 1964, 90, 148

civil rights movement, 55, 91–92

Civil War, 2, 5, 6, 20, 22, 45, 47–68, 132

as oligarchs’ war, 65–68. See also South

civil war, concern about, 20–24, 44

Clapper, James, 129

Clark, William A., 31

Clear Channel, 26, 27

Cleveland, Grover, 94

climate change, 18

Clinton, Bill, 24, 26, 88, 101

“New Democratic” playbook, 108

tobacco industry and, 37

Clinton, Hillary, 102, 119–20

coal mines, 75–76

“cold war,” 20

Columbus Dispatch, 149

Commerce Department, 5

Committees of Correspondence (1772), 147–48

Common Sense (Paine), 157

Compromise of 1877, 69

Congress, oligarchs’ control of, 31–33, 43, 119

Conradt, L., 52–53

consent of the governed, 71–72

The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (Kirk), 69, 72–73, 91–92, 139, 155, 156

conservative movement, funding of, 151–52

“conservativism,” 69, 72

Constitution, 3, 23

Article IV, Section 2, 58

Constitutional Convention of 1787, 33–34, 55, 65–66

slavery not promoted during, 57

consumer and worker protections, 10

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 102

Conyers, John, 24

Coolidge, Calvin, 142

corporate ag mergers, 76

corporate bonds, 10

corporate personhood, 94–99

“artificial persons,” 97–98

“natural persons,” 97, 98

corporations

COVID-19 protections for, 10

“criminal justice reform,” 4

federal immunity proposals, 96–97

lifespan of limited in 1880s, 94

“operating in the public interest,” 95–96

reinvesting money in company, 142

corruption, legalized, xiii, 2–3

Cosmopolitan magazine, 84

Cotton, Tom, 122

cotton gin, 47, 57, 61–66, 83

courts

circuit courts, 34, 96, 97

Framers’ views of, 33–34

Obama’s judicial nominations, 34

oligarchs’ control of, 21, 119

packed, Hungary, 17

Trump protected by, 35

unqualified judges on, 80

court stripping, 147

COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic of 2020, 6, 9–10, 81, 107, 118, 139, 141, 155

anti-mask protests, 39

biographical availability and, 156

economic crisis provoked by, 133

Hungarian dictatorial legislation during, 19–20

Trump administration’s shutdown of agencies, 12–13

credit cards, 81, 91

criminalization

of debt, 69–70

of drug possession and use, 70, 87–88

“criminal justice reform,” 4

crisis, 36, 44–45, 139

Cumulus Media, 26, 27, 30

Cuomo, Andrew, 13

Curry, J. L. M., 84

Curtius (Roman Senator), 108

D

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Mayer), 12

Darwinian natural selection, 52, 54

Davis, John Chandler Bancroft, 96–98

Dean, John, 16

Deaton, Angus, 140–41

debt, 75–78

after Civil War, 69

medical, 70, 78–81

student, 70, 81–86, 107

debt-collection industry, 79–80

debtors’ prisons, 78

debt peonage, 69–70, 75–77

Declaration of Independence, 48, 49, 51–52, 56–57, 137

DeFazio, Peter, 24

Defense Department, 4

defensiveness, 127–28

dehumanization tactics, 18

DeLay, Tom, 31

Delmas, Delphin, 98

democracy

defined, 1, 21

presidents who contributed to, 110

Reagan era dismantling of, 33, 43

steps in taking down, 21–22

world powers slip into tyranny, 131–32

Democracy Alliance, 151

Democratic Leadership Council, 102

Democratic Party, xiv

clean elections and, 147

labeled as “Democrat Party,” 116

oligarchs’ control of, 3, 102–3, 108–9

Department of Homeland Security, 4, 12, 144

deregulation, 81, 101

DeVos, Betsy, 105

disability claims, 104, 140

“disposable” people, 75

Dred Scott decision, 65

drug possession and use, criminalization of, 70, 87–88

due process rights, 97

Duke, David, 127

Dunkin, Christopher, 67

DuPont family, 94

Duterte, Rodrigo, 20, 120, 127

E

“earned media” (cost-free news coverage), 38

economic-elite domination, 43

economic security, as defense against oligarchy, 137, 139

education

higher, 85, 140

illiteracy in South, 81–86, 105

“school choice” movement, 105–6

textbooks, 17

Ehrlichman, John, 87

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 39, 143, 153

election integrity, restoring, 148–50

Electoral College, 89

Eliot, T. S., 73

Elliott, Jane, 126

Ellsworth, 65

el-Sisi, Abdel Fattah, 20

Enlightenment, 48–50, 55

environmental protections, 38, 106–7

The Epic of Gilgamesh, 20

Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 20, 120

Esper, Mark, 4

estate tax, 145, 146

European Union, 16, 18–19

F

Fairness Doctrine, 25–26

“Farm Aid” fundraising concerts, 62

farmers, debt peonage and, 62, 76

Farnsworth, John, 64–65, 67

fascism, 2, 137

Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 25, 29–30

Federalist, No. 14, 56

Federalist, No. 31, 56

Federalist Society, 34–35, 41

Federal Reserve, 10, 79, 144

federal workforce, cutting back, 104–5

Fidesz party (Hungary), 17, 19

Field, Stephen, 76, 96, 97

financial crimes, 15

financial panic of 1770, 6

First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, xiii, 32, 99–100

Fisher, Marc, 27

Florida, 89, 91

Floyd, George, 90, 121, 124, 141, 156

foreign corporations, media control by, 29–30

foreign governments, election interference by, 35

Founders and Framers, 33–34, 47, 56, 58–60

fourth estate, 23–24, 29, 136

Fox News Channel, 13, 23, 29, 41, 116, 134

Franco, Francisco, 20

Franklin, Benjamin, 55

Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, 38

free commoners, control of, 69–92

free market, COVID-19 and, 13–14

Free Speech TV, 29

“free trade” agreements, 101

French Revolution, 72

From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction (Nabors), 66

The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change (Gore), 43

G

Garland, Merrick, 34

genetic origin of democracy, 51–54

Georgia, Constitutional Convention and, 57

Germany, 41, 114

Germany, Nazi, 7, 20, 36, 112, 113, 119, 135

Gerry, Elbridge, 136

gerrymandering, 17, 150

Gerson, Michael, 125

“gig economy,” 77

Gilens, Martin, 33, 43

Gingrich, Newt, 114–16

Giuliani, Rudy, 19

Goebbels, Joseph, 115

Golding, William, 54

Goldwater, Barry, 69, 72, 92

good-government laws, 31, 145–47

good vs. evil rhetoric, 114–16

Gore, Al, 43, 89

Gould, Jay, 94

government

as “cause of problems,” 39–40

“deregulate, cut, denigrate” line, 41

smaller institutions, 117–18

trust in, 39–40

Government Executive, 104

Great Depression. See Republican Great Depression

Great Recession of 2008, 4

Greek and Roman republics, 20

Greek thinkers, 48

Guantánamo, 125

gun manufacturers, 32

H

Hamilton, Alexander, 56

Hancock, Matt, 13

happiness, 137, 140–41, 157

Harding, Warren, 102, 142

Harper’s magazine, 87–88

Harris, Kamala, 129

Harris, Katherine, 89

Hayes-Tilden presidential election (1876), 69

health insurance, 86, 108–9

Hebrew kings (Bible), 20

Helmsley, Leona, 105

Helper, Hinton Rowan, 81–82

Helsinki Committee (Hungary), 17

Henry, Patrick, 58, 148

Heritage Foundation, 41

Hewitt, Hugh, 28

Heyer, Heather, 18

The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment (Hartmann), 37, 86

The Hidden History of Monopolies (Hartmann), 7

The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America (Hartmann), 35, 147

The Hidden History of the War on Voting (Hartmann), 154

Hispanics, police violence against, 90

Hitler, Adolf, 7, 20, 36, 112, 113, 119, 135

Hobbes, Thomas, 54, 102, 113

homelessness, 61, 140

housing, right to, 139, 140

Howe, Timothy, 66, 67–68

“How to Stop a Civil War” (Atlantic), 20

Humankind: A Hopeful History (Bregman), 54, 126

human nature, 54

Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 18

Hungary, 16–17, 148

Hussein, Saddam, 120

Husted, Jon, 149

I

“ICE Has Become Trump’s Personal Bullying Squad” (Gerson), 125

iHeartMedia, 27

illiteracy, in South, 81–86, 105

immigrants and refugees

asylum seekers, 4, 10, 125, 127

camps, refugees in, 4, 17, 90, 113, 125

COVID-19 crisis and, 10

Hungary, 17–18

The Impending Crisis of the South (Helper), 81–82

impoverishment of America, 14–15

inciting incident, 44

Income Tax Law, 96

indenture, 61

Inslee, Jay, 13

institutional infrastructure, 15

Interior Department, 5

Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 40

“invisible hand,” 40

“iron law of oligarchy,” 107–8

Israel, 19

J

Jackson, Andrew, 65

Japanese internment camps, 113

Jefferson, Thomas, 48, 49, 51, 136, 148

as founder of Democratic Party, 116

Jesus, 28

Jews, blame of, 113, 119, 120, 123, 124, 129

Jim Crow laws, 94, 148

Johnson, Andrew, 67

Johnson, Lyndon B., 40, 90, 110

journalism, acts of, 136

Justice Department, 3–4, 144

K

Kahneman, Daniel, 140–41

Kansas, debt peonage, 78, 79–80

“keeping you safe” as lie, 113–14

Kennedy, John F., 39, 90

Kennedy, Robert, 90

Kent State murders, 1970, 92

Khazan, Olga, 80

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 91–92, 126, 148

Kirk, Arthur, 76, 91

Kirk, Russell, 69, 72–73, 91–92, 139, 155, 156

Knox, Henry, 4

Koch, Charles, 12, 103, 152

Koch, David, 12

Koch oligarchy machine, 4, 12–13, 44

Ku Klux Klan, 69, 121

Kushner, Jared, 120

L

bin Laden, Osama, 120

Lafayette Park, Washington, DC, incident, 112

laissez-faire capitalism, U.S., 75

“Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” (Gingrich), 115–16

language use, shifts in, 114–17

leadership

in animals, 52–54, 113

authoritarian type, 112

Leffmann, Henry, 65–66

Lennon, John, 91

liberals, as “threats,” 72, 114–15, 127

Libertarians, 12–14

lies, 100–101, 109, 113–14

Limbaugh, Rush, 121

Lincoln, Abraham, vii, 69, 132, 136

lobbyists, 4–5, 32, 118, 131

Locke, John, 48–49

Lord of the Flies (Golding), 54

Louisiana Purchase, 67

M

Machiavelli, Nicolò, 20

Madison, James, 33–34, 56–57

managerial class, 107–8

Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp., 81

Martin, Trayvon, 32

Mason, George, 59–60

Massachusetts, 147

Matthew 25, 28

Mayer, Jane, 12

Mayer, Milton, 112, 114, 122–24

McAdam, Douglas, 156

McCain, John, 101–2

McCarthy, Joseph, 116

McConnell, Mitch, 10, 34–35, 114, 119

McHenry, James, 9

McVeigh, Timothy, 20, 129

media, 16, 21

breaking oligarchs’ empire, 134–35

bullies as editors, 134–35

campaigns and, 100

“enemy of the people” rhetoric, 10, 135–36

“fake news” smear, 135–36

foreign corporations’ ability to control, 29–30

as fourth estate, 23–24, 29

free press, 135–36

Hungary, 18

language use, shifts in, 116–17

legal protections for citizen-journalists, 136

locally owned, 24–26

loss of trust in, 10

Lügenpresse (lying press) rhetoric, 135

oligarchy’s control of, 1, 34, 116–17

reporters targeted by violence, 117

Telecommunications Act of 1996, 24–25, 135

Trump’s demonizing of, 117, 135–36

medical debt, 70, 78–81

Medicare, 38, 107, 140

Medicare Advantage, 107

Mercer, Robert, 103

Michels, Robert, 107–9, 110

middle class, 6

buffered by “disposable” people, 75

educated, as threat to oligarchs, 81, 91–92, 137

rebuilding, 139–40

Middle Eastern governments, 71

Middle States, 59

Midwestern farmers, 62

Milgram, Stanley, 126

militias, 128–30

Miller, Stephen, 127

Mississippi, debt peonage, 78

Mississippi Burning (movie), 89

Mnuchin, Steve, 4

“model legislation,” 32

modern oligarchy, 71

monarchy, 21

money laundering, 31

monopolies, 7, 94–95

Morgan, J. P., 94

Moros, Nicolás Maduro, 20

Morris, Gouverneur, 58–59

MSNBC, 29

Murdoch, Rupert, 13, 23, 29, 134–35

Muslims, police violence against, 90

Mussolini, Benito, 20, 36, 119, 128–29, 135

N

Nabors, Forrest A., 66, 67

Nadler, Jerry, 24

National Guard, 92, 112

National Review, 73

National Security Council, 12

Native Americans, police violence against, 90

“natural persons,” 97, 98

Nature, 52

nature, state of, 49

Nazism, rise of, 112

Nebraska farmers, 76

Negro Voice newspaper, 77

Nelson, Willie, 62

neoliberalism, Reaganomic, 15

neo-Nazis, 127

Nesbit, Jeff, 37

Netanyahu, Benjamin, 19

New Deal, 6

Newsweek, 125

Newton, Huey, 155

New York Cotton Exchange, 84

New York Times, 99, 122

Nicolas II, 120

Niles, Hezekiah, 50

Ninth Circuit Court, 96, 97

Nixon, Richard, 16, 35, 88, 93, 121, 143

“silent majority,” 88

“War on Drugs” origination in, 87–88

non-amendment strategies, 147

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 101, 102, 109

Notes (Madison), 33–34

Novanglus (pen name of Adams), 48–49

nullification crisis, 65

O

Obama, Barack, 18, 30, 38, 102

ammunition sales after election of, 37

Gingrich’s word list used against, 116

judicial nominations blocked, 34–35

Obama administration, 13, 26

Obamacare. See Affordable Care Act

obedience, 126–28

O’Connor, Terry, 141

Office of Management and Budget, 104

oligarchs

banking, 4–5, 76, 81

bankrupting, 132

COVID-19 crisis used by, 9–10

executive branch, seizure of, 15–22

railroad, 96–97

“starve the beast” strategy, 103–7. See also South; tyranny

oligarchy

1920s, 5

agricultural revolution as first documentation of, 61

crisis of, 9–11

defined, 1, 21, 93

free commoners, control of, 69–92

institutional infrastructure, 15

“iron law of,” 107–8

Koch machine, 4, 12–13, 44

modern, 71

“national coordinating group,” 38

“policy networks,” 37–38

“propaganda arm,” 38

South, cotton gin and, 62–66

steps in taking down democracy, 21–22

successful control of in past, 7

Supreme Court sets up, 99–103

third, rise of, 93–110

Trump’s defense of, 15–20

types of, 71

as unstable system, 5. See also breaking oligarchy; South

Olin Foundation, 34

Orbán, Viktor, 16–19, 111

P

Pacifica Network (radio), 29

Page, Benjamin, 33, 43

Paine, Thomas, 55, 72–73, 157

“Pandemic Playbook” (Obama administration), 13

Parks, Rosa, 148

PATCO strike, 155

Patriot Act, xiii

payday loan industry, 78–79, 81

Peabody Fund, 84

“Peonage, or the New Slavery” (Chesnutt), 77

Pew Center, 40

Philadelphia, Mississippi, 88–90

Pinckney, Charles, 57

Pinochet, Augusto, 127, 128

Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP (Nesbit), 37

police corruption, 125

police powers, xiii, 15–16, 36, 125

police state, 6, 22, 23, 132

authoritarian countries, 86–87

Black people, war on, 88

South as, 57, 86

as terrorist tactic, 90

“policy networks,” 37–38

political action committees (PACs), 4, 33

political parties, oligarchy and, 107–8

Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (Michels), 107–9

Pompeo, Mike, 4, 19, 120

Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, 106–7

Postal Bulletin, 106–7

Powell, Lewis, 3, 34, 40, 72, 93, 100

Powell Memo, xiv, 3, 6, 35, 40, 72, 131

Prager, Dennis, 28

Precinct Committee members, 154–55

presidency

oligarchs manipulate, 15–22

racism and, 88–89

Presser, Lizzie, 79–80

Princeton University happiness study, 140–41

prison labor, 61

prisons

camps for asylum seekers, 90

companies, 4, 74

privatization schemes, 105–6

privileges, shift to rights, 137–38

Probst, Christoph, 148

progressive complications, 44

progressive institutions, building, 151–52

progressive radio programming, 27

ProPublica, 78

prosecution, selective, 22

protests, 39

after Floyd killing, 90, 121, 156

Lafayette Square Trump photo op, 112

militarized response to, 112, 156

students stopped by fear of debt, 81, 86, 156

Trump’s outrageous comments about, 124

Publilius Syrus, 75

Putin, Vladimir, 20

R

racial hierarchy, 69, 73

racism

policing, racialized, 69

scapegoating strategy, 121–22

weaponizing race, 88

radio markets, 24–28

railroad oligarchs, 96–97

Rand, Ayn, 39

Randerson, James, 53

Reagan, Ronald, 3, 6, 14, 15, 26, 32, 35, 39

anti-monopoly laws gutted by, 62, 76

“art of the con,” 100–101

election campaign, 1980, 109

NAFTA and, 109

PATCO strike, 155

Philadelphia, Mississippi campaign speech, 88–89

scapegoats for, 121

Reagan Revolution, 23, 33, 34, 73, 131, 141

payday loan industry and, 81

“War on Drugs,” 87

recessions, 75

Reconstruction, 14, 36, 66, 69

refugees, in Hungary, 17

regulatory agencies, 117–18

Hatch Act violations, 144

Reichstag incident (Germany), 113

religion, white rejection of, 92

Republican Great Depression, 2, 6–7, 22, 45, 93, 132, 138

Republican Party, 36

Koch brothers’ control over, 12

long shots taken by, 109

Murdoch-enabled takeover of, 134

oligarchs’ seizure of, 3, 37–38

votes against State Department funding, 119–20

republican theory, 60

resistance, supporting, 147–48

“restitution centers,” Mississippi, 78

retirement, early, 104

revolution, origination of in mind, 49–51

Revolutionary War, 4

“revolution principles,” 48

rights, 137–38

The Rights of Man (Paine), 72

right-wing talk radio, 23, 28, 37, 116

Roaring Twenties, 2, 142

Roberts, John, 34

Rockefeller, John D., 94

Roma people, 18

Romney, Mitt, 27, 99

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 7, 22, 93, 110, 132, 157

plan for peace and higher standard of living, 136–39

Roosevelt, Theodore, 31, 76–77, 135, 145–46

Roper, Tim, 52–54

Ross, Wilbur, 5

Rowland, Darrel, 149

“royalists,” 22, 73

Rudd, Kevin, 134–35

Russia, 3, 148, 149

S

Salem (company), 28

bin Salman, Mohammed, 121

Sam Adams Alliance, 38

Samuel M. Clyatt v. US, 76, 77

Sanders, Bernie, 24

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific

Railroad, 97–99, 100

Sayoc, Cesar, 129

scapegoating, 119–20

of race, religion, and gender, 120–22

Schneiderman, Jerry, 16

Scholl, Hans, 148

Scholl, Sophie, 148

“school choice” movement, 105–6

School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, England, 52

Seale, Bobby, 155

Second Treatise of Government (Locke), 49

secularism, blame for societal ills, 72

separation between church and state, 72

Sermon on the Mount, 28

Shelby County v. Holder, 150

Sherman, Roger, 59

Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, 146

show trials, 119–20

Shuster, Joe, 120

Siegel, Jerry, 120

Skaggs, William H., 83–84

Slaughter House Cases decision, 76

slavery

abolition of, 6, 58

Bible as excuse for, 55, 57

“correctional supervision,” 74

cotton gin and, 47, 57, 61–66, 83

economic arguments against, 82

Founders and Framers’ views of, 56–57

legal in 2021, 74–75

prison system, 74

slave patrols, 86

state abolishment of, 60

Thirteenth Amendment loophole, 74

white people, negative effect on, 58–59

Social Security, 72, 140

Social Security Administration, 72, 104

Social Security Disability Insurance, 140

Soros, George, 19

South, 6, 36

criminal legacy, 56

debt peonage in, 76–77

desire to dominate North, 67

feudal Europe, imitation of, 56

illiteracy in, 81–86

impoverished by oligarchs, 2, 14, 56–57, 75–76, 82

landed aristocracy, 83

modern oligarchs, 69

oligarchy rise between 1820 and 1860, 56, 62–65

oligarchy’s desire to extend slavery throughout nation, 67–68

as police state, 57, 86

pre–Civil War, 2

rigged elections, 149

secession, 67

Second Amendment as concession to, 86

voter suppression in, 149–50

white people impoverished in, 56, 75–76, 82.

See also Civil War

South Africa, 73

The Southern Oligarchy (Skaggs), 83–84

South Korea, COVID-19 cases, 12–13

sovereignty, of people, 48–49

Soviet Union, 16

Stalin, Joseph, 135, 149

Standard Oil Trust, 146

“starve the beast” strategy, 103–7

state, deconstruction of as step toward tyranny, 2, 117–19, 132

State Department, 4, 119–20

State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, 85

state of nature, 49

State Policy Network, 38

states

abolishment of slavery, 60

states’ rights, 89, 100

Stevens, John Paul, 30

stock market

artificial inflation of during COVID-19 crisis, 10

crash of 1929, 5, 6, 93, 133

“Storm Troopers” (Nazi Germany), 125

story structure, 44

student debt, 70, 81–86, 107

suffrage movement, 55

Sully, Daniel J., 84

Superman, 120

supporters of oligarchies, 36, 38

Supreme Court

circuit courts, justices preside over, 96

McConnell’s refusal to hold hearings, 34

oligarchy set up by, 99–103

reshaped by oligarchs, 119

Supreme Court decisions

Bailey v. Alabama, 76

Brown v. Board of Education, 73

Buckley and Bellotti, xiii, 23, 32–33, 41, 99

Buckley v. Valeo, xiii, 32, 99–100, 146

Bush v. Gore, 150

California railroad tax cases, 97–98

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 30, 33, 99, 146–47

Dred Scott, 65

First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, xiii, 32, 99–100

Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp., 81

Samuel M. Clyatt v. US, 76, 77

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 97–99, 100

Shelby County v. Holder, 150

Slaughter House Cases, 76

surveillance, xiii, 22

Syrian refugees, 17–18

T

Talkers magazine convention, 28

taxes

breaking oligarchy, 141–43

cuts for wealthy, 105

Germany, 41

Income Tax Law, 96

“starve the beast” strategy, 103–4

top rates, 132–33

Taylor, Breonna, 156

Tea Party, 12, 37–38, 41, 134

grassroots organizing videos, 154–55

“Taxed Enough Already!” slogan, 38

technology

cotton gin, 47, 57, 61–66, 83

Gutenberg printing press, 62

Telecommunications Act (1996), 24–25, 26, 135

telecommunications industry cable TV and internet service providers, 28, 29

newspapers, 28

radio markets, 24–28

TV markets, 28

terrorism, state, 90

theocracies, 71

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933–45 (Mayer), 112, 114, 122–24

think tanks, 72, 101, 131

third oligarchy, 93–110

Tillman Act of 1907, 31, 100, 146

Time magazine, 112

tobacco industry, 37

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 73

“Tokyo Rose” broadcasts, 30

torture, xiv, 125

Toynbee, Arnold, 22

Treasury Department, 4–5

Trump, Donald, xiii–xiv, 3, 12, 88, 114

on bribery, 43

campaign lies, 109

defense of oligarchy, 15–20

as Democrat, 102, 109

demonization of media, 117

father arrested at Klan rally, 121

free press hated by, 135–36

Hatch Act prosecution, 144

Lafayette Park, Washington, DC, incident, 112

“Liberate Michigan!” tweet, 129

lower court appointments and, 35

protected by courts, 35

racism of, 89–90, 121

scapegoats for, 121

Tea Party paves way for, 38

threat of violence, 128–30

“voter fraud” allegations, 149

Trump, Donald, Jr., 89–90

Trump Depression, 139

Trump, Ivanka, 120

trust in government, 39–40

tyranny, 6, 15, 93, 111–30

America’s move toward, 10–11

cartoonish view of, 111

deconstruction of state, 2, 117–19, 132

definition, 21

inevitability of, 36

language of culture modified, 114–17

lies as first step toward, 113–14

normalizing outrageous behavior, 122–24

obedience and, 126–28

police corruption, 125

scapegoating as strategy, 119–20

steps toward, 111–12, 131–32

U

Ukraine, 19

uncertainty, 122–23

Underground Railroad, 67

Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People”—and How You Can Fight Back (Hartmann), 96

unions, 75, 100–101, 140

United Kingdom media empire, 134

United States as “city on a hill,” 45

laissez-faire capitalism, 75

medical debt unique in developed countries, 80

prisoners, number of, 74

US Postal Service, 106–7, 144

Utah, payday loan industry, 78–79

V

Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 94

Vatican City, 71

Veterans Administration, 105

Vindicating the Founders (West), 60

violence, 117, 126–28

“voter fraud” allegations, 149

voters, erased from rolls, 149–50

voter suppression, 17, 148–50

voting, during COVID-19 pandemic, 10

Voting Rights Act of 1965, 90, 148, 150

W

Waite, Morrison Remick, 98–99

Wall Street Journal, 23, 103

War Department, 4

warlord kingdoms, 71

“War on Drugs,” 87

Washington, George, 55, 136

Washington Post, 27, 125

“waste, fraud, and abuse” rhetoric, 104

We, the People, 23, 48–51

West, Thomas G., 60

Westwood One, 27

White, Byron, 100

white-collar prosecutions, drop in, 3–4

white people

oppression of in South, 56, 75–76, 82

religion, rejection of, 92

as “silent majority,” 88

slavery’s negative effect on, 58–59

White Rose (anti-Hitler resistance), 148

white supremacy, 20, 55, 57

Whitney, Eli, 62–63, 66

Winthrop, John, 45

WITL (radio station), 25

women’s rights, 91

workers’ cooperatives, 75

The Works of John Adams, Volume IV, 48

World War II, 30, 136–37

wrongful death lawsuits, 13

Z

Zimmerman, George, 32

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

© Ian Sbalcio

Thom Hartmann is the four-time Project Censored Award–winning, New York Times best-selling author of more than 25 books currently in print in over a dozen languages on five continents in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, politics, and economics, and the number one progressive-talk-show host in the United States.

His daily three-hour radio/TV show is syndicated on commercial radio stations nationwide, on nonprofit and community stations nationwide and in Europe and Africa by Pacifica, across the entire North American continent on SiriusXM Satellite Radio, on its own YouTube channel, via podcast, on Facebook Live, worldwide through the US American Forces Network, and through the Thom Hartmann app in the App Store and for Android. The show is also simulcast as TV in real time into more than 60 million US homes by the Free Speech TV network on Dish Network, DirecTV, and cable TV systems nationwide.

He has helped set up hospitals, famine relief programs, schools, and refugee centers in India, Uganda, Australia, Colombia, Russia, Israel, and the United States. Formerly rostered with the state of Vermont as a psychotherapist, founder of the Michigan Healing Arts Center, and licensed as an NLP Trainer by Richard Bandler, he was the originator of the revolutionary Hunter/Farmer Hypothesis to understand attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

In the field of environmentalism, Thom has cowritten and costarred in four documentaries with Leonardo DiCaprio, and is also featured in his documentary theatrical releases The 11th Hour and Ice on Fire. His book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, about the end of the age of oil and the inspiration for The 11th Hour, is an international best seller and used as a textbook in many schools.

Thom lives with his wife of 48 years, Louise, and their two dogs and three cats, on the Columbia River in Portland, Oregon. They’re the parents of three adult children.

BOOKS BY THOM HARTMANN

The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream

The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole Your Vote and How to Get It Back

The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment

The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America

ADD: A Different Perception

Adult ADHD: How to Succeed as a Hunter in a Farmer’s World

The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It’s Too Late

Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People”—and How You Can Fight Back

The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America—and What We Can Do to Stop It

Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class—and What We Can Do About It

Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country

The Thom Hartmann Reader

Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being

The Prophet’s Way: A Guide to Living in the Now

Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination (with Lamar Waldron)

Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America’s Original Vision

We the People: A Call to Take Back America

What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return to Democracy

Threshold: The Progressive Plan to Pull America Back from the Brink

The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction (with Dan Sisson)

ADD Success Stories: A Guide to Fulfillment for Families with Attention Deficit Disorder

Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK (with Lamar Waldron)

Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception

Think Fast: The ADD Experience

Healing ADD: Simple Exercises That Will Change Your Daily Life

Thom Hartmann’s Complete Guide to ADHD: Help for Your Family at Home, School and Work

From the Ashes: A Spiritual Response to the Attack on America (anthology)

Beyond ADD: Hunting for Reasons in the Past and Present

Also in the Hidden History Series

The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment

Thom Hartmann, the most popular progressive radio host in America and a New York Times bestselling author, reveals the real history of guns in America and what we can do to limit both their lethal impact and the power of the gun lobby. Taking an in-depth, historically informed view, Hartmann examines the brutal role guns have played in American history, from the genocide of Native Americans to the enforcement of slavery and post–Civil War racism, coining the term “the Unholy Trinity of racism, genocide, and guns.” He also exposes the alliance of the NRA and conservative Supreme Court justices that invented the unlimited right to own guns. Ever practical, Hartmann identifies solutions that can break the power of the gun lobby and put an end to the alarming reality of gun violence in the United States.

Paperback, 192 pages, ISBN 978-1-5230-8599-6

PDF ebook, ISBN 978-1-5230-8600-9

ePub ebook, ISBN 978-1-5230-8601-6

Digital audio, ISBN 978-1-5230-8603-0

Also in the Hidden History Series

The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America

This volume of Thom Hartmann’s explosive series of hidden histories critiques the omnipotent Supreme Court and offers pathways toward returning power to the people. Taking his typically in-depth, historically informed view, Hartmann asks, What if the Supreme Court didn’t have the power to strike down laws? According to the Constitution, it doesn’t. From the founding of the republic until 1803, the Supreme Court was the final court of appeals, as it was always meant to be. The role of deciding what the law is belongs not to the Supreme Court but to the people themselves, who vote at the ballot box. America does not belong to the kings and queens of the Court, it belongs to us.

Paperback, 192 pages, ISBN 978-1-5230-8594-1

PDF ebook, ISBN 978-1-5230-8596-5

ePub ebook, ISBN 978-1-5230-8597-2

Digital audio, ISBN 978-1-5230-8595-8

Also in the Hidden History Series

The Hidden History of the War on Voting

In today’s America, only a slim majority of people register to vote, and a large percentage of registered voters don’t bother to show up: Donald Trump was elected by only 26 percent of eligible voters. Unfortunately, this is not a bug in our system; it’s a feature. Thom Hartmann unveils the strategies and tactics that conservative elites in this country have used, from the foundation of the Electoral College to the latest voter ID laws, to protect their interests by preventing “the wrong people”—such as the poor, women, and people of color—from voting while making it more convenient for the wealthy and white. But he also lays out a wide variety of simple, commonsense ways that we the people can fight back and reclaim our right to rule through the ballot box.

Paperback, 192 pages, ISBN 978-1-5230-8778-5

PDF ebook, ISBN 978-1-5230-8779-2

ePub ebook, ISBN 978-1-5230-8780-8

Digital audio, ISBN 978-1-5230-8781-5

Also in the Hidden History Series

The Hidden History of Monopolies

While it’s well known that billionaire oligarchs and giant corporations have waged war against working-class Americans since the “Reagan Revolution,” less well known is their war against small businesses. Robert Bork, a toxic Reagan acolyte, succeeded in transforming the nature and enforcement of America’s anti-monopoly laws. The result is a shattered business landscape, the average family paying an annual $5,000 “monopoly tax” in higher prices for everything from airline flights to pharmaceuticals, and a massive increase in corporate political power. The coronavirus pandemic has only made things worse. The American business landscape—and the American middle class—will return to health only when Reaganism and Borkism are finally reversed.

Paperback, 192 pages, ISBN 978-1-5230-8773-0

PDF ebook, ISBN 978-1-5230-8774-7

ePub ebook, ISBN 978-1-5230-8775-4

Digital audio, ISBN 978-1-5230-8776-1

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Contents

1. Cover

2. Title Page

3. Copyright Page

4. Dedication

5. Contents

6. Preface

7. Introduction: America Slides Into Oligarchy and Dances Close To Tyranny

8. Part One: The Crisis of Oligarchy

1. Modern Oligarchy Erupts

2. The Presidency: Trump’s Playbook

3. A Second American Civil War?

4. Control the Media

5. Controlling Congress (Both Federal and State)

6. Seize the Courts

7. Inevitable Tyranny

8. How Oligrachs Seized the GOP

9. The Oligarchs’ Most Successful Con

10. The Crisis

9. Part Two: How Oligarchy Led To The Civil War

1. An Awakened Generation Challenges British Oligarchy

2. Just Idealists, or Is Democracy in Our Genes?

3. Revolutionary Principles: Born Equal

4. Best-Laid Plans for Liberty: Ending American Slavery

5. New Technology, New Oligarchy

6. Where Cotton Is King, Cotton Makes Kings

7. The Oligarchs’ War

10. Part Three: How Oligarchs Hung On After the Civil War: Controlling Free Commoners

1. Control and Safety: The Conservatism of Oligarchy

2. Slavery Is Legal in the United States in 2021

3. Through Debt, Oligarchs Can Still Own People

4. Oligarchs Use Medical Debt as an Instrument of Control

5. Oligarchs Control the Commoners through Illiteracy and Student Debt

6. Controlling the Commoners: When All Else Fails, Bring in the Police

7. The Oligarchs’ Biggest Threat: An Educated Middle Class with Leisure

11. Part Four: A Third Oligarchy Rises With The Reagan Revolution

1. Oligarchs Use the 14th Amendment to Get Corporate Personhood

2. The Supreme Court Sets Up American Oligarchy

3. “Starve the Beast” and Gut the Republic

4. Holding Power: Buying Friends on Both Sides of the Aisle

12. Part Five: When Oligarchy Becomes Tyranny

1. Lies: The First Step from Oligarchy to Tyranny

2. Tyrants Modify the Very Language of a Culture

3. “Deconstruct the State”

4. Scapegoating to Dilute the Outrage

5. Scapegoating Race, Religion, Gender

6. Normalizing Outrageous Behavior

7. Tyrants Always Corrupt Police

8. A Tyrant’s Tool: Obedience

9. Take Militias and Violence Seriously

13. Part Six: Breaking Oligarchy, Restoring Democracy

1. Breaking Oligarchy: The Oligarchs’ Media Empire

2. Breaking Oligarchy: A Free Press

3. Breaking Oligarchy: Economic Rights for Everybody

4. Breaking Oligarchy: Tax the Crap Out of the Rich

5. Breaking Oligarchy: Prosecute Trump and His Henchmen under the Hatch Act

6. Breaking Oligarchy: Publicly Funded Elections

7. Breaking Oligarchy: Support the Resistance

8. Breaking Oligarchy: Restore Election Integrity

9. Breaking Oligarchy: Build Progressive Institutions Instead of Just Providing Three-Year Grants

10. Breaking Oligarchy: Help Republicans Reinvent the GOP

11. Breaking Oligarchy: Rebuild a Progressive Democratic Party

12. We Now Know . . .

14. Notes

15. Acknowledgments

16. Index

17. About the Author

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Contents

Preface

Introduction: America Slides Into Oligarchy and Dances Close To Tyranny

Part One: The Crisis of Oligarchy

Modern Oligarchy Erupts

The Presidency: Trump’s Playbook

A Second American Civil War?

Control the Media

Controlling Congress (Both Federal and State)

Seize the Courts

Inevitable Tyranny

How Oligrachs Seized the GOP

The Oligarchs’ Most Successful Con

The Crisis

Part Two: How Oligarchy Led To The Civil War

An Awakened Generation Challenges British Oligarchy

Just Idealists, or Is Democracy in Our Genes?

Revolutionary Principles: Born Equal

Best-Laid Plans for Liberty: Ending American Slavery

New Technology, New Oligarchy

Where Cotton Is King, Cotton Makes Kings

The Oligarchs’ War

Part Three: How Oligarchs Hung On After the Civil War: Controlling Free Commoners

Control and Safety: The Conservatism of Oligarchy

Slavery Is Legal in the United States in 2021

Through Debt, Oligarchs Can Still Own People

Oligarchs Use Medical Debt as an Instrument of Control

Oligarchs Control the Commoners through Illiteracy and Student Debt

Controlling the Commoners: When All Else Fails, Bring in the Police

The Oligarchs’ Biggest Threat: An Educated Middle Class with Leisure

Part Four: A Third Oligarchy Rises With The Reagan Revolution

Oligarchs Use the 14th Amendment to Get Corporate Personhood

The Supreme Court Sets Up American Oligarchy

“Starve the Beast” and Gut the Republic

Holding Power: Buying Friends on Both Sides of the Aisle

Part Five: When Oligarchy Becomes Tyranny

Lies: The First Step from Oligarchy to Tyranny

Tyrants Modify the Very Language of a Culture

“Deconstruct the State”

Scapegoating to Dilute the Outrage

Scapegoating Race, Religion, Gender

Normalizing Outrageous Behavior

Tyrants Always Corrupt Police

A Tyrant’s Tool: Obedience

Take Militias and Violence Seriously

Part Six: Breaking Oligarchy, Restoring Democracy

Breaking Oligarchy: The Oligarchs’ Media Empire

Breaking Oligarchy: A Free Press

Breaking Oligarchy: Economic Rights for Everybody

Breaking Oligarchy: Tax the Crap Out of the Rich

Breaking Oligarchy: Prosecute Trump and His Henchmen under the Hatch Act

Breaking Oligarchy: Publicly Funded Elections

Breaking Oligarchy: Support the Resistance

Breaking Oligarchy: Restore Election Integrity

Breaking Oligarchy: Build Progressive Institutions Instead of Just Providing Three-Year Grants

Breaking Oligarchy: Help Republicans Reinvent the GOP

Breaking Oligarchy: Rebuild a Progressive Democratic Party

We Now Know . . .

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author