Me vs. We: The Battle for America’s Soul

From Greedy Kings to Corporate Conglomerates – It’s Always Been the Same Fight

Yesterday, I wrote about how the mental illness of hoarding syndrome afflicting a few hundred of our nation’s rightwing billionaires has destroyed a large chunk of the American middle class and is threatening the health of our biosphere. But the overall story is larger than just that.

Trump is embroiled in a bribery scandal that has the entire world agog. The potentates and dictators of the Middle East are openly contemptuous of his willingness to defy Congress and sell them advanced American weapons systems in exchange for billion-dollar Trump hotels in their countries.

Putin and his state-owned media ridicules Trump daily, pushing his attacks on Ukraine in Trump’s face. And federal workers and our military are aghast at the incompetence, corruption, and even the alleged alcoholism of the people Trump has scraped off the floor of Fox “News” to run their agencies and make federal prosecutors.

All of this corruption and incompetence has one major goal: the enrichment of the Trump family and the people close to them. It’s an old, old story, that dates back to the earliest days of human prehistory.

There are basically two models for social organization, regardless of all the names. They are “me societies” and “we societies.”

Russia, for example, is today a classic example of a “me society.” The nation is run by a small cabal of “me-me-me” oligarchs, who own or control basically every major company and, in most cases, entire industrial, commercial, media, and retail sectors. Each is owned by one or more morbidly rich individuals and their families, who are looking out for their own “me” interests (profits) with little regard for the public good.

The country’s leader glorifies the individual above society, arguing that governance by hyper-masculine elites (“me”) willing to use state violence against those advocating democracy and the welfare of the general population (“we”) is simply The Way It’s Always Been. (Putin refers to this as “Russia’s historic greatness.”)

And in that, Putin is right. The majority of post-agricultural-revolution history (the past 7,000 or so years) has been a narrative of what Jefferson referred to as the three great tyrannies: warlord kings, the morbidly rich keeping average people in squalor and ignorance, and violence-enforced theocracies.

As he noted in A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774):

“History has informed us that bodies of men, as well as of individuals, are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.”

On the other hand, as I lay out in detail in my new book The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, the majority of those societies that emerged from tens of thousands of years of trial-and-error experimentation in governance were and even today still are explicitly “we societies.”

Native American societies that informed and inspired this nation’s Founders and the Framers of the Constitution, for example, considered the accumulation of great wealth — hoarding — to be a dangerous mental illness, right up there with forcible theft, rape, and murder.

People who hoarded food or other forms of wealth were disciplined and, if they continued, often banished from the tribe altogether (which could be a functional death sentence, as no other tribes would take such twisted people in).

The Algonquin people had a word for this mental illness, as I describe in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. In today’s English, we could loosely translate their word “Wétiko” as “greed.”  

The late Professor of Native American Studies at UC Davis Jack Forbes told me, when I was writing Last Hours, that Wétiko literally means “cannibal,” and Forbes uses it quite intentionally to describe European standards of culture: we “eat” (consume) other humans by conquering them, seizing their lands, and consuming their life-force by enslaving them either physically or economically.

For example, the Lakota term “Wasi’chu” described individuals who hoard resources, literally translating to “he who takes the fat.” The term critiques greed and the accumulation of wealth at the expense of communal well-being.

And this was common all over the world; the Batek, an Indigenous group in Malaysia, consider sharing food a moral duty. They believe all food belongs to the forest, and hoarding is socially unacceptable. If someone hoards food, others may take it without it being considered theft. Refusing to share can lead to communal anger and is believed to cause supernatural harm to the refuser.

In Aboriginal Australian communities, “humbugging” refers to making excessive demands on family or community resources, often leading to financial abuse. While sharing is a cultural norm, humbugging is viewed negatively and has prompted legal and community responses to protect vulnerable individuals, especially elders.

Yesterday I noted how so many of America’s billionaires are infected with this mental illness which humanity once found disgusting: Today we call it “Hoarding Syndrome,” considered a subset of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) until 2013 when the APA gave it its own specific descriptor in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).

Had they been born poor or not gotten a lucky break, they’d be living in apartments with newspapers and empty tin cans stacked floor-to-ceiling.

Instead, they’ve hoarded wealth beyond the imagination of most people. Estates all around the world, yachts, private jets: there’s never “enough” for them.

Society has known about this mental illness forever. Dante, Shakespeare, Gogol, Balzac, and Dickens, for example, all wrote of wealthy characters who disrupted society and the lives of those around them because of their own Hoarding Disorders.

Embracing that indigenous wisdom, many of the idealists who started this country explicitly rejected rule by the rich. None were dynastically wealthy: not a single one of our Founder’s wealth lasted beyond a second or third generation, unlike today’s billionaires, whose families will carry their wealth for centuries to come. Several, like Jefferson and Washington, died in or near bankruptcy.

The most outspoken in this regard were Franklin, Paine, Jefferson, and Rush: they were clear that they were trying — within the social limits of their time — to create a “we society.”

The Constitution refers to “the general welfare” of Americans twice, once in the Preamble, defining it as one of the basic reasons for the Constitution itself, and once in Article 1, Section 8, defining the powers of Congress to raise taxes and spend money “to provide for … the general Welfare of the United States…”

Over the centuries the concept of a “we society” expanded here in America, as the voting franchise and individual human rights were expanded and extended beyond wealthy, land-owning straight white men.

Progressive Republican President Abraham Lincoln, for example, enthusiastically signed the Morrill Act on July 2, 1862, giving each of the states 90,000 acres of federal land to use to fund and build 76 tuition-free land-grant colleges so young people could climb out of poverty through free education. My mother’s alma mater Michigan State University was one of them.

But the “me society” rich of the day kept trying to corrupt politics to their own advantage. In his 1888 State of the Union address, President Grover Cleveland pointed out:

“We view with pride and satisfaction this bright picture of our country’s growth and prosperity, while only a closer scrutiny develops a somber shading. …

“We discover that the fortunes realized by our manufacturers are no longer solely the reward of sturdy industry and enlightened foresight, but that they … 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.”

And what was causing this crisis for America’s 19^th century working-class families? President Cleveland laid it out with a surprisingly blunt vehemence in the next sentences:

“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.”

The people — and Congress — were listening to this critique of the “me society” that was emerging with the industrial revolution. Americans were outraged at the way corporations and the morbidly rich were behaving, and President Cleveland had given voice to their anger. A mere two years later the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 was passed, criminalizing monopolies (called “trusts” back then).

A short two decades later, progressive Republican Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft were using that same law to break hoarder John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust into almost 30 pieces.

Theodore Roosevelt was clear that he wanted to move America closer to the “we society” that he believed the Founders envisioned and the times demanded. On August 31, 1910, he told an audience in Osawatomie, Kansas:

“The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being. 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.”

During Roosevelt’s tenure, with widespread public support, states and the US Congress began passing powerful laws to limit the corrupting power of the morbidly rich’s “me society” money in politics.

In 1905, for example, Wisconsin passed a law (Section 4489a, Sec. 1, ch. 492, 1905) that explicitly said:

“No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer, consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office.” (emphasis added)

The penalty included a substantial fine, years in prison for individual executives, lawyers, or lobbyists, and the political death sentence of the corporation itself, ie being forbidden from doing business in Wisconsin.

Two years later, efforts to control “me society” bad behavior by rich people and corporations went federal with the Tillman Act of 1907. That law explicitly forbade any corporation nationwide from giving any money to politicians:

“It is unlawful for any national bank, or any corporation organized by authority of any law of Congress, to make a contribution or expenditure in connection with any election to any political office…” (emphasis added)

By 1925, the Tillman Act had been incorporated into the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, further limiting money in politics, and in 1938 we got the Hatch Act which limited contributions from rich people to $5000 per candidate and $3 million per party and made it an explicit crime for a president to use the White House to hawk commercial property like Teslas, meme coins, or Goya beans.

Following the Agnew and Nixon bribery scandals we got another bunch of laws to further regulate money in politics, including the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act, and the 1974 creation of the Federal Elections Commission, which then promulgated rules further limiting “dark money” and other forms of political bribery.

These modern efforts to establish a “we society” had deep roots in Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency, and largely answer the question about why Congress got so much done for average working people (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, minimum wage, OSHA, EPA, right to unionize, etc.) between 1933 and 1978.

Expanding on the idea of that “we society,” in an August, 1912 speech in Chicago, Teddy Roosevelt called for a national minimum wage and government programs for social security, saying working people shouldn’t earn so little that they must steal food and couldn’t provide for their families, deal with illness, or have a safe, comfortable retirement.

The fulfillment of his vision came a generation later when his distant cousin, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, became president and pushed through his New Deal. He legalized unions, passed a minimum wage law, and started Social Security, among other things.

Throughout the 1950s, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower expanded all of these “we society” laws and added massive national infrastructure projects with huge expenditures on highways, schools, and hospitals that jump-started the postwar economy.

In the 1960s, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson added Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, housing supports, and increased support for education.

America was not only on the path to becoming a “we society”: we were more than halfway there. By 1980 two-thirds of Americans were solidly in the middle class with a single income, healthcare was affordable, union membership was widespread, college was free or very inexpensive in most of the country, and the morbidly rich hoarders were kept under control with a top 74 percent income tax bracket.

The rest of the world was imitating us back then as Western Europe, in particular, expanded on the “we society” programs of TR, FDR, Truman, Ike, JFK, and LBJ. Even little Costa Rica provided healthcare to all its citizens with a Medicare For All type of program and nearly free college (maximum tuition $600/year) for anybody who can pass the entrance exams.

But then came Ronald Reagan with his neoliberal “me society” sales pitch that “greed is good” and the only sure path to national and individual prosperity was to free corporations and the morbidly rich from the strictures of taxation and regulation.

With Reagan‘s help, the hoarder syndrome billionaires took over politics and began to systematically loot America’s economy.

In the forty-four years since his inauguration, America’s middle class has shrunk from two-thirds of us down to around 45 percent of us, and even at that today it takes two incomes to match the lifestyle a single income could sustain in 1980.

America’s richest people, however, have now reached a level of wealth never before seen in the history of the world, not even by kings, pharaohs, or popes.

I lay out how Reagan got there in detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, but the main event that made the Reagan Revolution and Reagan’s neoliberal successors (including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) possible was the Supreme Court overturning the Tillman Act and legalizing political bribery in a series of decisions that started in 1976 and peaked when Clarence Thomas cast the tie-breaking vote in Citizens United in 2010.

This betrayal by Republicans on the Supreme Court of America’s “we society” values, described in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, has caused our country to fall far behind most of the rest of the world’s advanced democracies.

For America to fulfill her promise and become the nation the majority of our citizens want, voters and Congress must prioritize stripping out of law the Supreme Court-invented doctrines of “money is free speech” and “corporations are persons.”

In 2022, Democrats in Congress tried to overcome the power of the “me society’s” legalized big money bribery: the For The People Act passed the House (without a single GOP vote), but was killed in the Senate when Manchin and Sinema betrayed America by upholding a Republican filibuster.

Our job now, if we want America to ever again become a “we society” that produces the many social and economic benefits of democratic governance, is to get a large enough progressive majority in Congress and a Democrat in the White House, so that in 2029 we can actually pull off the revival of a truly democratic America.

That means becoming politically active, volunteering to get inside the Democratic Party so you can be a positive change agent, and spreading the good word in anticipation of elections this fall, next year, and beyond.

In other words, “Tag, we’re still it!”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My new book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available.
You can follow me on Blue Sky here.
The website for my radio/TV program is here.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Battle for America’s Soul”