Column by George Sibley
Politics – January 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
BECAUSE I HAD the good fortune to grow up in one of the few historical moments in which democracy — government by the people, for the broadest benefit of all the people — was actually realized to a great extent, I naturally took it for granted. But now that the plutocrats have come storming back from their early 20th-century setbacks, and recaptured almost everything, I realize how foolish I’ve been — and how much we are losing, have already lost, through naivete about the true depth and extent of the raging greed-fear of those for whom no amount of wealth and power is ever enough.
Viewing the wreckage of American democracy today, after the 22-year full frontal assault that began with the Reagan presidency, I realize that we have merely returned to the usual state of affairs in human society: the people are once again governed by wealth and power; governance is again dedicated to protecting property and privilege, and maintaining order over the underclasses who have little property and no privilege but who are needed to do the hard work.
Check your history books. With a few relatively brief exceptions — the Israelite tribes under the “Judges,” a period in Greece, and the early Roman republic — this is the way it has usually been, at least in the western world, from the cradle of so-called civilization through the whole cultural evolution of Anglo-European societies. Governments have existed to protect property and privilege, and to keep the underclasses under control. “Plutocracy” is the applicable word: “a government or state in which the wealthy class rules.” (Webster)
America also emerged, fleetingly, as an exception to the plutocratic status quo during the 20th century — mostly, I think, because the Anglo-European plutocracies had used America as a dumping ground for the malcontents and debtors who might have challenged the rule of the wealthy at home. A strong anti-plutocratic strain was present here from the start. But despite that constituency and a constitution that tried to avoid handing governance to the wealthy on the usual silver platter, the plutocrats were stronger, and came out of the Civil War fully in charge. Then in a thousand brutal confrontations with laborers, suffragettes, and other “Coxey’s Armies,” the plutocrats set about the task of beating down anyone who challenged their right to Have It All. This process was so brutal that even some of those born to the manor lost their stomach for it. Thus we had “traitors to wealth” like Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt who stepped in and said, “Whoa, maybe there’s enough wealth to spread it around a little.”
In fact, from the late 19th century on into the mid-1970s, there was at least the illusion of enough wealth for everyone. Thanks mostly to cheap and easy oil; the plutocrats realized that nothing — no amount of head-bashings, mass arrests, murders, or sending the Army against the people as they did in Cripple Creek and Telluride — was going to stay the people from an indulgence in democracy.
And for a time, the plutocrats actually relented. The people got a progressive income tax to redistribute opportunity. We got the right to organize the workplace for better conditions and wages. We got Social Security. We even declared war on poverty. A huge middle class began to emerge, representing the broadest distribution of property and wealth in history. This seemed so right that, growing up in the midst of it, I could not see how anyone could possibly oppose it.
FOOLISH BOY. The wealthy alphas had lost a few battles, but they never gave up on the war. And once the illusion of infinite wealth disappeared with the peaking of domestic oil production in the mid-1970s, they came storming back with the well-organized “Reagan revolution” in 1980.
In the two decades since, practically all of those gains for the people have been lost: the progressive income tax is gutted; the right of labor to organize is so proscribed as to be virtually gone; inheritance taxes will soon go, insuring a permanent aristocracy; and a plutocrat attack is currently being launched to gut Social Security. The middle class is disappearing before our eyes — the people either sinking back into the growing underclass or scrabbling to get a petite bourgeoisie niche in the plutocrat’s system.
Myself, I have been in denial for twenty years. Because I grew up in that brief 20th-century episode of democracy, I assumed that this middle-class renaissance was the norm, and that this onslaught of angry greed would vent itself and we would all get back to completing the tasks of democracy. But the election of 2002 shatters that fantasy. We are now almost back to the historical norm — full plutocracy on the Anglo-European model.
And what tools they have assembled for controlling us now! In addition to all the branches of the official government and the ever-growing army, they control the media. With the exception of “little magazines” like this one, they control the whole “conversation of the culture.”
So what shall we do? Try to get as organized and angry as the plutocrats did after their losses? Or just continue to give them everything they want — which is everything?
“…for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.” — Robinson Jeffers
George Sibley teaches and writes in Gunnison.