Epilogue: What History Will Say About Us (August 23)

The final chapters from Who Stole The American Dream?

Next weekend, Sunday August 30 at noon ET, 9am PT, we’ll discuss this book, my newest, Who Killed the American Dream. This weekend and next, I’m sharing the final chapter of the book.

Epilogue: What History Will Say About Us

History teaches us that oligarchies are unstable systems of government that typically either collapse from their own internal rot—as happened here in 1929 when the Republican Great Depression brought down the oligarchs of the Roaring Twenties—or get overthrown by their own people, as happened in the 1860s when the fascist system that had taken over the Old South was destroyed by the Civil War.

But when oligarchies don’t collapse or get overthrown, they morph into tyranny, and usually that happens within a single generation.

That’s what happened in Russia. It went from the chaos of the 1990s oligarchy to Putin’s authoritarian state in less than twenty years. It’s also what happened in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán took a newly liberated democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state in less than a decade. It’s also what’s happening right now in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, India, and multiple other countries around the world.

Tyranny doesn’t typically pop up all at once. It comes incrementally, moving step by inexorable step, until it hits a tipping point where it can no longer be stopped. Before that tipping point is reached, most people think the system will correct itself, that once everyone figures out what’s happening, things will go back to normal.

They’re almost always wrong.

America is now in that dangerous zone between oligarchy and tyranny. Our nation’s oligarchs have controlled our politics for a solid forty years. They own the media, have captured the courts, and bought most of Congress. The question for today is whether they’ll be satisfied with their comfortable oligarchy or whether they’ll join Donald Trump’s and the GOP’s push for America’s final transition to tyranny.

Steve Bannon told us what the goal was: “Deconstruct the administrative state.” That’s tyrant-speak for dismantling the institutions that might dare to—or have the power to—constrain oligarchic power.

As a result, we’re in a race against time, and the window for successful action is narrowing. Every year that corporate constitutional rights remain in place, America’s oligarchs tighten their grip. Every election they buy makes the next election easier to purchase. Every judge they install makes the next judge easier to intimidate or buy off.

This isn’t alarmism: it’s the historical pattern, repeated across dozens of countries and thousands of years. Oligarchies either fall or they become tyrannies; there’s no third option.

In 2036, it will be 150 years since Davis wrote that corrupt Santa Clara headnote.

What will America look like?

Will we still be the world’s richest democracy, and return to being a nation founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” and government should work first and foremost for We the People?

Or will we continue the Trump-blazed path of being a nation primarily serving a billionaire president, thirteen billionaires in his cabinet, billionaire media owners, and tech bro billionaires addicting our children to rage for their own profit?

The Dream That Was Stolen

In 1944, as millions of Americans fought fascism overseas, Franklin Roosevelt delivered one of his most important State of the Union addresses. He was too ill to travel to the Capitol building, so he spoke from the White House, his voice carried over this newfangled thing called radio into living rooms across America.

While he referenced the war effort in this speech, the man who’d rescued America from the Republican Great Depression leaned heavily on his proposal—what he called a Second Bill of Rights—to make America into what Jefferson called “a more perfect union.” Its focus was a new set of constitutional rights that would guarantee the American Dream to every citizen.

“We have come to a clear realization of the fact,” Roosevelt said, “that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

FDR’s Second Bill of Rights laid out, as mentioned earlier, the rights to a job that pays well, small businesses to be free from unfair competition by monopolies, housing for all Americans, healthcare for all, and free college.

“All of these rights spell security,” FDR said. “And after this war is won, we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.”

FDR died shortly after that speech, on April 12, 1945, but over the next thirty-five years we came close to achieving that dream.

By 1980, two-thirds of Americans lived it. We had jobs that paid enough to support a family, we could afford to buy a home in our 20s, and healthcare didn’t bankrupt us. We attended college without crushing debt, and for most of us, our retirement was secure. Ever since 1933, each generation had done better than the one before it.

Then Reagan was elected and—like Trump did with Project 2025—implemented the Heritage Foundation’s 1,093-page 1980 “Mandate for Leadership,” telling the oligarchs at the US Chamber of Commerce they should seize control of the media, the courts, America’s universities, and public opinion.

While the Mandate’s two thousand–plus recommendations didn’t specifically cite Lewis Powell’s infamous Memo or Davis’s notorious headnote, it didn’t have to: corporate constitutional rights were the obvious tool to accomplish most goals of the Foundation’s billionaire founders and funders.

Reagan, the GOP, and the biggest businesses in America used corporate First Amendment rights to buy elections and drown out the voices of ordinary citizens. They used corporate property rights to battle every regulation that protected workers, consumers, and communities. They used corporate due process rights to block accountability for corporate crimes.

They crushed the unions that gave workers bargaining power, starting with Reagan’s attack on the air traffic controllers’ PATCO. They wrote the trade deals that would ship millions of good manufacturing jobs overseas. They turned healthcare and health insurance from servants of the middle class into raw profit centers. They transformed housing from a human need into a speculative commodity and loaded young people with debt for education that used to be free.

And they transferred over fifty trillion dollars from the homes and wallets and retirement accounts of working Americans to their own money bins.

FDR’s Second Bill of Rights was never passed, but the dream it represented was real for the generations that watched and lived his expansion of democracy and an economy that increasingly worked for all.

But then Reagan and his “conservative” buddies used Davis’s corporate constitutional rights headnote to kill even a hope for FDR’s Second Bill of Rights.

See you next weekend for the last half of the Epilogue and our online conversation!