Elon Musk spent almost a half-billion traceable dollars (and we have no idea how much “dark money” that’s not traceable but legalized by corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court) to try to help rightwing politicians win this week’s election. As the old joke goes, that’s both the good and the bad news.
Given how severely great wealth has distorted our republic — from buying elections and legislation to putting judges on the Supreme Court — Democrats now face some serious decisions about how to proceed.
Who should lead the Party’s efforts both in and outside of Congress? Should the Party embrace its progressive base and push policies like Medicare for All and free college, or stay with Clinton-style “moderate” positions as we move into the next Congress? Impeach Trump or, as Schumer suggested yesterday, “work with him”?
Corporate Democrat Claire McCaskill suggested on MS NOW recently that Democrats must embrace “moderate” positions because those are the ones most likely to be looked upon favorably by “independent” voters, but is that true?
Those same voters swung toward Trump several times recently because, instead of being “moderate,” he was proposing radical change in government policies.
Support for genuinely progressive policies like free college, Medicare for All, taxing the morbidly rich and big corporations, and aggressive actions to mitigate climate change with green energy actually poll very strongly with so-called independent voters.
And there’s something eerily familiar about today that people who’ve read histories of the 1930s and the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal recognize. It’s as if history is repeating itself.
And if that’s actually the case, the choices congressional Democrats make now about how to deal with Musk, Trump, and other morbidly rich American oligarchs and their monopolistic empires (including media monopolies) may be the most important decisions Democrats have made in fifty years or more.
And the stakes are huge: in actual, historical fact, those wielding great wealth have been responsible for the failure or near-failure of pretty much every republic that’s failed since the days of ancient Greece and Rome.
In modern times they’ve provoked the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, the Russian Revolution, and the downfall of dozens of smaller once-democratic or partially-democratic states from Chile in the 1960s to Egypt, Hungary, and Turkey in the last few decades. It’s also happening to Russia as you read these words, although that’s another article altogether.
And now the morbidly rich are screwing up America again, much as they did in the 1920s and the 1850s. If they succeed and enough “moderate” Democrats continue to get into bed with them, it will be both disastrous and perhaps bloody, a word that Trump himself has recently used to describe his plans for the next two years.
America has been through two great cycles since our founding, as brilliantly explained by Neil Howe in The Fourth Turning Is Here and Peter Turchin in Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. Turchin also summarized his thesis in a tight but concerning article for The Guardian two years ago titled “The deep historical forces that explain Trump’s win.”
(I’ve also written about these cycles of history multiple times over the years, here, here, here, here, here, etc., but it deserves a fresh examination in the light of the election and the crucial decisions now facing the Democratic Party.)
Howe explains how every 80 years or so (as our elders die out) we lose access to the lessons our grandparents learned, particularly those about the importance — nay, the necessity — of regulating great wealth so it doesn’t turn government into a vehicle to exclusively serve the morbidly rich.
When the morbidly rich take over, he notes, bad things happen: it was 73 years from the Constitution’s ratification until the oligarchs in the South started the Civil War, exactly 80 years from the end of the Civil War to the end of World War II (caused by greedy oligarchs on Wall Street kicking off the Republican Great Depression), and today we’re exactly 81 years out from the end of World War II.
Turchin breaks those 80-year cycles into 40-year segments. He points out how, in back-to-back 40-year blocks of time, the obscenely rich are brought to heel over four decades, but then rise up and take over again during the next forty years. Over and over again throughout American history.