Thom
Hartmann / Independent Media Institute
The
billionaire fascists are coming for your Social Security, Medicare
and Medicaid. And they’re openly bragging about it.
Right
after Trump’s election, back in December of 2016, Newt Gingrich
openly bragged at the Heritage Foundation that the Trump
administration and Republicans in Congress were going to “break
out of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt model.”
That “model,” of course, created what we today refer to as “the
middle class.”
This
week Mitch McConnell confirmed Gingrich’s prophecy, using the huge
deficits created by Trump’s billionaire tax cuts as an excuse to
destroy “entitlement” programs.
“I
think it would be safe to say that the single biggest disappointment
of my time in Congress has been our failure to address the
entitlement issue, and it’s a shame, because now the Democrats are
promising Medicare for All,”
McConnell told Bloomberg. He added, “[W]e’re
talking about Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.”
These
programs, along with free public education and progressive taxation,
are the core drivers and maintainers of the American middle class.
History shows that without a strong middle class, democracy itself
collapses, and fascism is the next step down a long and terrible
road.
Ever
since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been working
overtime to kneecap institutions that support the American middle
class. And, as any working-class family can tell you, the GOP has had
some substantial successes, particularly in shifting both income and
political power away from voters and toward billionaires and
transnational corporations.
In
July of 2015, discussing SCOTUS’s 5 to 4 conservative vote on
Citizens United, President Jimmy Carter told me: “It
violates the essence of what made America a great country in its
political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited
political bribery…” He added:
“[W]e’ve just seen a complete
subversion of our political system as a payoff to major
contributors…”
As
Princeton researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page demonstrated in
an exhaustive analysis of the difference between what most Americans
want their politicians to do legislatively, versus what American
politicians actually do, it’s pretty clear that President Carter
was right.
They
found that while the legislative priorities of the top 10 percent of
Americans are consistently made into law, things the bottom 90
percent want are ignored. In other words, today in America, democracy
only “works” for the top 10 percent of Americans.
For
thousands of years, economists and economic observers from Aristotle
to Adam Smith to Thomas Piketty have told us that a “middle class”
is not a normal byproduct of raw, unregulated capitalism—what
right-wing ideologues call “the free market.”
Instead,
unregulated markets—particularly markets not regulated by
significant taxation on predatory incomes—invariably lead to the
opposite of a healthy middle class: they produce extremes of
inequality, which are as dangerous to democracy as cancer is to a
living being.
With
so-called “unregulated free markets,” the rich become super-rich,
while grinding poverty spreads among working people like a heroin
epidemic. This further polarizes the nation, both economically and
politically, which, perversely, further cements the power of the
oligarchs.
While
there’s a clear moral dimension to this—pointed out by Adam Smith
in his classic Theory of Moral Sentiments—there’s also a vital
political dimension.
Smith
noted, in 1759, that, “All
constitutions of government are valued only in proportion as they
tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them. This is
their sole use and end.”
Smith
added a cautionary note, however: “[The]
disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the
powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor
and mean condition… is the great and most universal cause of the
corruption of our moral sentiments.”
Jefferson
was acutely aware of this: the Declaration of Independence was the
first founding document of any nation in the history of the world
that explicitly declared “happiness” as a “right” that should
be protected and promoted by government against predations by the
very wealthy.
That
was not at all, however, a consideration for the architects of
supply-side Reaganomics, although they appropriated JFK’s “rising
tide lifts all boats” metaphor to
sell their hustle to (boatless) working people.
Far
more troubling (and well-known to both Smith and virtually all of our
nation’s founders), however, was Aristotle’s observation that
when a nation pursues economic/political activities that destroy its
middle class, it will inevitably devolve either into mob rule or
oligarchy. As he noted in Politics: “Now
in all states there are three elements: one class is very rich,
another very poor, and a third in a mean. … But a [government]
ought to be composed, as far as possible, of equals and similars; and
these are generally the middle classes. … Thus it is manifest that
the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle
class, and that those states are likely to be well-administered in
which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both
the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; for the
addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of
the extremes from being dominant.”
This
is how America was for the Boomer generation until about two decades
ago: a 30-year-old in the 1970s had a 90 percent chance of having or
attaining a higher standard of living than his or her parents. But,
since the 1980s introduction of Reaganomics, there’s been more than
a 70 percent drop in “social mobility”—the ability to move from
one economic station of life into a better one.
So,
if our democratic republic is to return to democracy and what’s
left of our middle class is to survive (or even grow), how do we do
that?
History
shows that the two primary regulators within a capitalist system that
provide for the emergence of a middle class are progressive taxation
and a healthy social safety net.
As
Jefferson noted in a 1785 letter to Madison, “Another
means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt
all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher
portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”
Similarly,
Thomas Paine, proposing in Agrarian Justice (1797) what we today call
Social Security, said that a democracy can only survive when its
people “[S]ee before them the
certainty of escaping the miseries that under other governments
accompany old age…” Such a
strong social safety net, Paine argued, “will
have an advocate and an ally in the heart of all nations.”
Tragically,
Republicans are today planning to destroy both our nation’s
progressive taxation system and our social safety net, in obsequious
service to their billionaire paymasters.
Flipping
Jefferson and FDR on their heads, Republicans last year passed a
multi-trillion-dollar tax break for the rich, with a
few-hundred-dollars bone tossed in for working people.
Meanwhile,
Republicans are already hard at work dismantling the last remnants of
the New Deal and the Great Society.
As
Ian Milhiser notes, “Republicans in
the House hope to cut Social Security benefits by 20–50 percent.
Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan to voucherize Medicare would drive up
out-of-pocket costs for seniors by about 40 percent. Then he’d cut
Medicaid by between a third and a half.”
This
is not, of course, the first time Republicans have tried this.
They’ve been trying to dismantle Social Security since 1936, and
Reagan himself even recorded a 33 RPM LP calling LBJ’s Great
Society proposal for a program called “Medicare” as “socialism,”
saying that if it passed then one day we’d all look back
“remembering the time when men were
free.”
And
it’s always been in service to the same agenda—handing political
and economic power over the morbidly rich and the corporations that
got them there.
In
earlier times, we had a word for this takeover of democracy by the
morbidly rich and the corporations: fascism.
As
I’ve written before, in early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice
President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write
a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How
many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”
Vice
President Wallace’s answer to those questions was published in the
New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the
Axis powers of Germany and Japan.
“The
really dangerous American fascists,”
Wallace wrote, “are not those who
are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its
finger on those. … The American fascist would prefer not to use
violence. His method is to poison the channels of public
information.”
“With
a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the
public,” Wallace continued, “but
how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the
fascist and his group more money or more power.”
In
this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word
“fascist”—the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed
to have invented the word.
As
the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: “A
system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme
right, typically through the merging of state and business
leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”
Vice
President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his
concern about the same happening here in America: “American
fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful
coalition among the cartelists, [and] the deliberate poisoners of
public information…”
He
could have been describing Fox, right-wing hate radio, and the
billionaires who keep today’s GOP in power.
Noting
that, “Fascism is a worldwide
disease,” Wallace further
suggested that fascism’s “greatest
threat to the United States will come after the war”
and will manifest “within the
United States itself.”
Watching
the Republicans of his day work from the same anti-worker playbook
they are today, Wallace added: “Still
another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to
democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money
and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to
evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic
extortion.”
As
Wallace wrote, some in big business “are
willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some
temporary advantage.”
In
a comment prescient of Donald Trump’s trashing of “Mexican
rapists” and “gangs” in Chicago, Wallace wrote: “The
symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted
to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be
identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play
upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain
power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in
every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice.”
And
that prejudice would be exploited to win elections so that the
fascists could rob the people and enhance their own power and
wealthy.
But
even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would still have to
lie to the people in order to gain power. And if the day ever came
when a billionaire opened a “news” network just to promote
fascist thinking, they could promote their lies with ease.
“The
American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate
perversion of truth and fact,”
Wallace wrote. “Their newspapers
and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every
crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity
to impugn democracy.”
In
his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the vice president of
the United States saw rising in America, he added: “They
claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty
guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are
the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final
objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture
political power so that using the power of the State and the power of
the market simultaneously they may keep the common man in eternal
subjection.”
In
the election of 2018, we stand at a crossroad that Roosevelt and
Wallace only imagined.
Billionaire-funded
fascism is rising in America, calling itself “conservativism” and
“Trumpism.”
The
Republican candidates’ and their billionaire donors’ behavior
today eerily parallels that day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, “In
vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their
blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for.”
President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace’s warnings are more
urgent now than ever before.
If
Trump and the billionaire fascists who bankroll the Republicans
succeed in destroying the last supports for America’s enfeebled
middle class, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—and
succeed in blocking any possibility of Medicare for All or free
college and trade school—not only will the bottom 90 percent of
Americans suffer, but what little democracy we have left in this
republic will evaporate. History, from Greek and Roman times through
Europe in the first half of the 20th century, suggests it will
probably be replaced by a violent, kleptocratic oligarchy that no
longer shrinks from words like “fascist.”
The
warning signs are already here, and, in the face of nationwide
election fraud based in Republican voter purges, we must turn out
massive numbers if we’re to preserve the American Dream and finally
make it available to all.
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