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The framers of the constitution struggled with establishing the balance between the rights of individuals and the power of government to act for the common good when they first met in 1787. They set up a system of checks and balances, emphasized the separation of powers and passed the bill of rights insuring against the exercise of arbitrary and capricious governmental power that could infringe on a great many individual liberties.
But what the framers were most concerned with protecting were the rights of property and those who had it. The opportunity that was missed was to establish a truly democratic state in which economic justice as well as universal human rights was the law of the land.
The men who wrote the Constitution were all men of property and constituted an elite segment of society. The rights of property were paramount in their minds, especially their own. As the eminent, late historian, Richard Hofstadter said, all American political traditions, Jeffersonian, Federalist, Jacksonian or otherwise, "...shared a belief in the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, the value of competition... hey ... accepted the economic virtues of a capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man."
The framers missed the opportunity to make good on the words in the Declaration of Independence and give to all people, including women and those who were then slaves, the same rights. They distrusted the uneducated masses and believed in providing for the common good thru the use of governmental power only for very limited purposes. They also carefully crafted a system that would continue to put power largely in the hand of the propertied classes.
As Hofstadter noted, it was inevitable that Jefferson's laissez faire economics became the politics of the most conservative thinkers, not his concern with the rights of man. Hofstadter also said that Jacksonian democracy was really just a "phase in the expansion of liberated capitalism." The fear of tyrrany -- then and now -- was to a great degree the fear of interference with one's unfettered property rights.
As for our political rhetoric and partisanship, we are stuck in an old, traditionally American trap -- the sort of trap we all fall into when we respond to hate speech with anger.
In a 1964 article in Harpers' Magazine, Hofstadter wrote of "The Paranoid Style of American Politics." He said "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds." His article shows how from even the end of the 18th century in America the elite class of wealthy men who dominated the leadership of the United States to the present day protected their economically privileged status against the have-nots below them by using the fear of such people as Masons, or Catholics as scapegoats to cover up their own economically advantageous position. Even Aaron Burr's conspiracy to carve out an empire for himself in Louisiana was alleged to have been a Masonic plot.
Hofstadter noted that Harriet Beecher Stowe's father was a leader in the early anti-Catholic movement. The hallmark of these paranoid movements was the use of the fear, in Stowe's words, that "a great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by 'the potentates of Europe,' multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation, and sending increasing thousands of voters to 'lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power.'"
Sound familiar? Fear of outside enemies and paranoia about immigration has a long and unfortunate history in this country as a calculated technique of politics.
This technique is designed and used by those who wish to obscure the central, primarily economic issues of our time. They use the hate speech, the paranoid style of politics, as a way of changing the subject from economic justice to some sort of cultural or social issue.
The most common tactics, the structural hallmarks of this technique are the use of simple logical fallacies: presenting false dilemmas, misstating an opposing view so as to easily dismiss the resulting straw man, and the always popular ad hominem attack.
The point is to divert attention, stir emotions and thus change the subject.
As Hofstadter saw American history up to 1865 and beyond, a common ideology of "self-help, free enterprise, competition, and beneficent cupidity" has guided the Republic since its inception. By cupidity, Hosftadter meant that efforts to promote the common good through the actions of government were hit and miss, spotty, and based more on tactical political considerations than otherwise.
The missed opportunities, the things that could have been done better, other than ending slavery and granting women and ordinary people the vote right off, are not very different from the issues facing us today: Improving the country's education system, its transportation and energy infrastructure, curbing the unfettered use of monopoly or plutocratic corporate power, protecting public health, establishing the right of ordinary working people to a living wage, to health care, and granting access to and assistance for many of the necessities of life that the wealthiest Americans simply take for granted.
These options all have been taken off the table by a system that places more value on the ability of a few to manipulate their wealth to skew our political system for their own advantage than it places on the public good.
The balance was struck in the beginning in favor of economic individualism at the expense of the ability of government to provide adequately for the public good.
That much appears not to have changed.
During his tenure in the White House, Theodore Roosevelt had shown how powerful that office could be in marshalling reform sentiment. He believed that the president had to be responsive to the will of the people, but that he also had an obligation to lead and not merely follow the mob.
Roosevelt's successor, William Howard Taft, proved far more conservative than Roosevelt had realized, and by 1910 the ex president was harboring ideas that he might run for office again in 1912. Roosevelt began to articulate his own version of progressive reform, which he called the "New Nationalism," and which would be the basis for his campaign for the presidency.
The New Nationalism was not a shallow piece of rhetoric thrown together for the campaign; it represented a carefully thought through analysis of American society and the role that government ought to play.
The old nationalism, he claimed, had been used by sinister, special interests. He now proposed a New Nationalism of dynamic democracy that would recognize the inevitability of economic concentration; to counter the power of the giant corporations, Roosevelt proposed bringing them under complete federal control, so as to protect the interests of the laboring man and the consumer.
TR said: "The absence of effective state, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. "
And that remains our problem to this day.
The noisy, seemingly endless American culture war -- fought over such issues as Hollywood depravity and the alleged disparity between mainstream values and those of cultural elites -- is a giant smoke screen that clouds the real cause of Middle America's distress. And what might that real cause be? I think it's economic. To be specific, it's unconstrained free-market capitalism, which has routed the social and political forces that once kept it in check.
Like Tom Frank, I think it is unregulated capitalism, taken to its laissez-faire extreme, that has outsourced the blue-collar prosperity of cities like Wichita and driven the Kansas farm economy to "a state of near collapse." So why did so many aggrieved Kansans band together not to fight the economic philosophy that put the screws to them, but to elect and reelect proponents of that very laissez-faire philosophy?
To explain this paradox, look to what Frank calls the "Great Backlash," a species of conservatism that emerged in reaction to the social and cultural upheavals of the late '60s. The backlash "mobilizes voters with explosive social issues -- summoning public outrage over everything from busing to unchristian art -- which it then marries to pro-business economic policies."
Frank says it is not a marriage between equals. The business agenda gets enacted, producing "low wages and lax regulation." The rich get obscenely richer as a result. Yet the cultural agenda remains unfulfilled. "Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its
act." Meanwhile, backlash strategists have repackaged the idea of the American "elite," to devastating political effect.
In its new meaning, as Frank says, retailed incessantly on talk shows and in screeds with titles like "Treason" and "Bias," the term doesn't refer to members of the nation's economic upper crust, who reap the benefits of tax cuts and deregulation. No, in backlash-speak, an "elitist" is a member of an exclusively cultural establishment, defined as a collection of liberal snobs in the media, the academy and government who sneer at the values of ordinary Americans. Hapless liberals are forced to fight a rear-guard action against these charges in large part, Frank says, because they've conceded most of the economic ground already.
One day, in the library stacks, Frank stumbled across a book called "The Populist Revolt." Up to that point, he had associated the term "populism" with the kind of revolt Reagan was urging: of ordinary Americans against a too-powerful government. Now he discovered a radically different populism, in which late 19th-century Kansans, among others, saw concentrated economic power as the main force citizens needed to confront.
The contrast was a revelation. One populism acknowledges that we live in a business universe. The other doesn't see that. For the new conservatives, it's all about government, and business is just invisible.
Frank asks: If not capitalism, what?
He answers that we live in a capitalist state now, but we also lived in a capitalist state in the 1960s and the 1950s and the 1940s. And yet it was a very different country. The balance of power between labor and management hadn't collapsed. Wealth distribution hadn't reverted to a 19th-century pattern, with ever-increasing concentration at the top.
That capitalism was a better model, according to Frank, and I agree.
According to Frank, a large part of the blame for the backlash phenomenon should go to the criminal stupidity of the Democratic Party in abandoning its commitment to labor and economic justice in pursuit of white-collar votes and corporate contributions.
The Dems think that to collect the votes and -- more important -- the money of these coveted constituencies, Democrats must stand firm on issues like abortion rights while making endless concessions on economic issues such as NAFTA, welfare, privatization and deregulation. The result? Democrats become Tweedledum to the Republicans' Tweedledee on the laissez-faire economy, leaving their opponents free to woo blue-collar voters with backlash issues.
Frank is right on.
The Democrats either need to go back to what TR said or I call for a new, third party to represent me in taking the following positions, as said by TR in 1910:
"In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity.
"In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege.
"The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.
"There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.
"We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.
"One of the fundamental necessities in a representative government such as ours is to make certain that the men to whom the people delegate their power shall serve the people by whom they are elected, and not the special interests. I believe that every national officer, elected or appointed, should be forbidden to perform any service or receive any compensation, directly or indirectly, from interstate corporations; and a similar provision could not fail to be useful within the states.
"The object of government is the welfare of the people. The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so far as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens."
This defines the fundamental political question of our time.
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