What makes the USA great is a system where fairly elected officials representing divergent views create laws by achieving rational measured consensus, where the officers of a fairly elected chief executive enforce those laws, with an independent judicial branch, where individuals can seek redress.
America is now in crisis, an inevitable stage when one political party’s pursuit to secure minority rule has become so desperate that it no longer has the leeway to conduct the business its congressional representatives were ostensibly elected to do.
Language of fraud
The current pursuit of political power to benefit a minority of America’s wealthiest has been accompanied by language that vilifies specific groups of ordinary Americans.
The language and methods now used by MAGA Republicans are a cleverly updated version of 170-year-old propaganda and tactics, updated for cable TV, talk radio and social media.
In the 1850s, Southern slave-holding elites plotted to expand slavery across the continent and ensure the dominance of their hierarchical world view. They argued that letting ordinary American men and those legally considered property, slaves and women, hold political power would destroy America and result in tyranny.
The Southern planters’ bid to reshape America was eventually thwarted by ordinary free and enslaved men and women who labored and fought to ensure instead that the language enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal” would be applied to them.
Over and over, America has witnessed cycles of massive wealth creation by the labor and innovation of ordinary people followed by increased efforts by the wealthiest to limit government and deny groups of citizens their fair share of political power.
An activist government
The Republican party rose to power in 1860 on the promise of equal opportunity and equal access to resources for ordinary Americans. In the absence of the Southern Democrats who abandoned the union—congress transformed the US government into an activist promoter of infrastructure.
This appealed to and energized the free men and women in the north who were scared of becoming a permanent underclass of laborers and subsistence farmers like many of their Southern countrymen.
These were the ordinary Americans, who along with enslaved men and women labored and fought to defeat the Confederacy.
The language of oligarch backlash
The Civil War ended slavery, but provided only a brief pause to rich whites’ domination of poor Southerners, white and black. Meanwhile, northern industrialists quickly began chafing to roll back regulations as they moved to monopolize markets that strangled the working poor.
The 14th amendment made all those born in the US citizens, and the 15th amendment guaranteed male citizens the right to vote, allowing the Department of Justice—newly created to protect freed slaves—and the army to combat domestic terrorism aimed at disenfranchising blacks.
The old southern establishment, however, created workarounds and adopted new language to regain dominance.
Rich Southerners howled when freed slaves elected governments that created the South’s first public schools and hospitals because it represented a “redistribution of wealth” from the rich to the poor and that politicians elected by newly enfranchised blacks were living large on white taxpayers money.
The same wealthy southerners who in 1861 had bamboozled fellow citizens into shedding their blood to protect a slave economy that benefited only a tiny minority and impoverished a huge majority of them, began contradicting themselves.
Within 10 years of starting a war that publicly vowed to defend slavery and white supremacy over blacks, the southern establishment denied the war had ever been about slavery but was instead 100 percent about states’ rights, which was, of course, 100 percent bullshit.
Their argument that popularly elected postwar governments were robbing taxpayers to benefit the poor and lazy at the expense of hardworking southern whites was also bullshit. It was aimed at re-establishing oligarchic control in the south but began to be recycled in the north by big business trying to put the brakes on government regulations that benefited laborers, small businesses and farmers.
The propaganda, accompanied by voter suppression, and election fraud, and combined with a power struggle within the ruling Republican party saw southern blacks disenfranchised and the nation’s working poor squeezed in the vice-like grip of unchecked monopolies in America’s gilded age.
After 1871, those promoting women’s suffrage, safe workplaces or fair markets to sell their crops were branded by business interests as “communists” who would curtail the freedoms of free-market capitalists and destroy the country.
These same industrial interests that championed free markets also depended on high government tariffs to eliminate foreign competition. Any move to lessen the tariffs’ and the burden they placed on ordinary Americans through higher prices was labeled a dire threat to the economy by monied interests.
When reform-minded Grover Cleveland was re-elected president—four years after leaving office despite winning the popular vote in his 1888 first re-election bid—monied interests warned he would crash the economy and then caused it to happen.
Republicans urged investors to pull their money out of Wall Street, they did, and days before Cleveland returned to office the stock market crashed, resulting in the Great Depression of 1893.
The Republican leadership, now firmly wedded to big business, held the depression that monied interests had instigated up as proof that government regulations were disastrous to the economy.
The Progressive Era and beyond
Republicans were soon swept into office as a result of the depression, but its hardships and the burdens on ordinary Americans, but a reform wing of the Republican Party recognized their plight.
This group, which included Theodore Roosevelt, sympathized with farmers and small businesses. With American imperialism revving up and thrusting our ideals on other countries at the turn of the century, these Republicans felt it appropriate to clean up its act at home.
Roosevelt wanted to restore the ideals of Lincoln—but without mention of black civil rights.
His curbs on monopolies made him famous and his policies intended to give ordinary Americans a chance to rise above their station were — as Lincoln’s before him and the later “liberal consensus” started by FDR and pushed further under Truman and Eisenhower.
FDR came to power after the administrations of Republican Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover left financial interests regulate themselves in the 1920s, when urban America enjoyed an economic boom that ended as the 1929 stock market crash plunged the world into the Great Depression.
The liberal consensus
Although popular with the majority of Americans, big business championed by Senator Robert Taft wanted to overturn New Deal government regulations and leave it to businessmen to once more regulate themselves.
Taft and his cohorts blasted FDR’s New Deal, which created America’s first social safety net as “communism.”
When FDR desegregated government factories during World War 2, those attacking him found increased support among white workers and Southern Democrats by resorting to racist tropes.
Government programs, such as the hugely successful GI Bill, allowed ordinary Americans the opportunity to become upwardly mobile were tremendously popular. This posed a problem for those wishing to roll back government and give the capitalist free market free reign.
Movement Conservatism
The solution was to adopt a “conservatism” that employed the tropes of fascism, and promised to destroy the secular threat to Christians.
The movement identified some as “undeserving” who received government benefits, and “others”: blacks, feminists, immigrants who would deprive hardworking white Americans of their rights.
The goal is more or less the same as it always has been, to cut back spending on government programs while reducing taxes on the richest Americans and eliminating restraints on their right to run their businesses as they see fit.
This American “conservatism” is the opposite of true conservatism, which seeks change only after careful rational deliberation and is keen to hold on the tried and true, while rejecting government by ideology.
Ronald Regan’s presidency saw removal of business restrictions slashed budgets for government programs and record budget deficits.
The pipe dream of today’s “conservatives” is that deregulating businesses and weakening labor rights leads to unparalleled wealth. And it has: for a tiny majority of America’s wealthiest.
This is not conservatism, it’s a failed ideology that seeks to create oligarchic rule of rich white men.
Since Regan, the gap between America’s rich and poor has grown increasingly vaster. The advocates of small government policies that have created so much hardship and debt among ordinary Americans now recycle the 170-year-old image of hardworking whites being robbed of their country by “others.”
