It's very simple. From the beginning the moneyed interests in this country were bent on making sure the federal government stayed as weak as possible. The reason? So they could avoid the things that prevented them from making more money: regulations and taxes. That’s the entire reason that so much power was left up to the individual states. Without a powerful federal government, the states could do whatever they wanted and limit voting rights in order to create tax havens and regulation-free operations for the corporations who set up shop there. The Constitution itself was built on the idea of keeping political power away from the citizens themselves, and vesting it in the hands of a wealthy elite. The Electoral College is just one vestige of this oligarchical past. And if it seems maddeningly archaic today, think about what it used to be like in its original design: the individual senators from the states were the ones who picked the electors, NOT the voters. Everything, I repeat, EVERYTHING that is wrong with our country today was designed to be that way. The whole goal, from the very beginning, has been to make sure that rich, capitalist oligarchs were able to wield complete and unfettered control over the country in order to create a capitalist utopia in which the citizens worked as wage-slaves for the wealthy. And it has nearly come to pass.
As I have said over and over on this blog, politicians are employees of the capitalist oligarchy. They have no other job but to make sure that their constituents pay as little taxes as possible, that they have no regulations on their businesses, and that the electorate—the expendable cogs in their money-making machinery—has no way to stop them. There have been a couple of major glitches in the plan, to be sure. The most devastating was the Civil War, which forced Southern aristocrats to forego literal chattel slavery for the less obvious method already in place in the North: wage-slavery. The Great Depression was also a major misstep for capitalists in that it destroyed much of their wealth and ushered in the only socialist era of the country’s history: the New Deal. Since then, however, wealthy capitalists have been working tirelessly to take over the country from within. And now the final phase of their plan has been set in motion. The only question is whether or not the citizens will wake up out of their stupor and resist, or keep their heads buried until one day they find themselves living in a capitalist dictatorship.
The key to achieving this goal is so ionic that it almost defies belief. The cornerstone is getting the most rabid and jingoistic Americans to hate democracy. Essentially, to get them to hate America itself. This is why we saw the former presidential moron cozying up to dictators, because the trick is to float the idea of strength over freedom to his followers. This is why Fox news propagandists recently went to Hungary to tout the authoritarian government there, or sided with Russian aggression over the sovereignty of Ukraine. The idea is to get the anti-intellectual right-wing voter to eventually give up his rights and freedoms to an authoritarian government in the U.S., one that is based on unfettered and unlimited capitalism. And it’s working. Gun rights aren’t about guns for Republicans in Congress, they’re about money, money for their employers who make the guns. Busting unions isn’t about the freedom to work, it’s about freedom to keep wages low in order to make money for their employers. Nothing, I repeat, NOTHING that goes on in Washington D.C. in the Republican caucus is about politics—it’s about MONEY for the people who employ them. That’s it. And a right-wing agenda that is all about curtailing freedoms—in the guise of morality—even when it isn’t directly about money simply works in their favor by getting their base used to the idea of not being free.
The capitalist oligarchy doesn’t care if nut cases shoot up grocery stores and schools and churches. In fact, they WANT that, because it keeps the people at large arguing among themselves. And while the people are embroiled in political theater, with the right-wing ignoring the problem and the left losing their shit because they can’t do anything about it, corporations and the wealthy elite continue to work tirelessly behind the scenes to strip away voting rights and entrench unregulated capitalism in order to enslave the rest of us—EVEN THOSE WHO VOTE REPUBLICAN—to the point where eventually we won’t be able to do anything about it short of armed revolution. How’s that for irony? What’s so unique now, in this late-stage end game, is that they don’t even have to pretend anymore. The oligarchy simply orders their employees in Congress to do their bidding and lie about why they’re doing it, and because that works they continue to lie, and even when they’re caught they just lie some more, to the point where it is absolutely clear that right-wing politicians have absolutely no fear of completely ignoring the will of the people who vote them into office. It costs them nothing because most of the country is so stupid that they can’t see what’s happening. People have become so blinded by the very idea of “politics” as it is fed to them by the propaganda arms of the oligarchy in the media that they can’t see that politics itself is meaningless, something merely to distract them from the truth.
The most recent articulation of these historical facts is by Nancy MacLean in her excellent work on U.S. economic history entitled Democracy in Chains. But her work is nothing new. As early as 1955 historian Richard Hofstadter and like-minded academics put out a book of essays called The Radical Right, outlining the multitude of ways in which the right was bent on taking over the country, through eliminating voting rights, controlling the judiciary, and eventually taking over the entire federal government itself. Again, the big push by the corporate oligarchy came in the wake of the New Deal because of how much it threatened to curtail unfettered capitalism. And I want to be clear, this was absolutely NOT a fear about the elimination of capitalism in any way, shape or form, because the New Deal was in no way anti-capitalist. That’s right. The problem for the oligarchy is that ANY government is too much government. Because what they really want are NO RESTRICTIONS of any kind on their capacity to make money. They want to be able to destroy the environment, destroy communities, destroy families, destroy the workers themselves, and do the same to every other country in the world, all in the pursuit of making as much money as quickly as possible. And to accomplish this, all they need to happen is to destroy democracy itself. Because that’s what is finally standing in their way.
One of the first democratic protections to be wiped out in enacting their end game was the gutting of FCC regulations by Ronald Reagan that made it permissible for public news broadcasts to lie to their viewers without any repercussions. This was done so that media oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch could make millions more dollars in the short term, while at the same time the capitalist oligarchy as a whole could undermine the intellect of the uneducated electorate in preparation for their final takeover. Propaganda is a crucial element in the success of this particular takeover. As early as 1944—before the war was even over—the big capitalist lie was formulated by right-wing economist F.A. Hayek in his book The Road to Serfdom—talk about ironic—by doing what the capitalist right has been doing ever since: projection on a grand scale. Because of what he had seen throughout the Roosevelt administration in its attempt to create a more equitable society, he took the truth and turned it around one hundred and eighty degrees to come up with this, Nancy MacLean’s summary in Democracy in Chains:
“It is because nearly everybody wants it that we are moving in this [socialist] direction.” Everywhere,
people were deluding themselves “that socialism and freedom can be combined” when in fact they
were dire enemies. The growth of government, he argued, would in time undermine all freedom and
usher in totalitarian states. (MacLean 39)
The reason everyone was so positive about the New Deal is pretty obvious, because the capitalists and their employees like Herbert Hoover had bankrupted the country. And at that point in time the ONLY entity that was in a position to help a destitute nation—much less actually care if people lived or starved to death—was the Democratic Party in Washington and the Roosevelt administration. The big lie, propagated to this day, is that socialism and capitalism are mutually exclusive, unable to co-exist together. But that lie has been demonstrably proven as such by the many socialist countries in Europe whose people have flourished under the combination. The growth of government—and not just growth, but a powerful government given the mandate to wield sweeping changes on behalf of the people for their best interests—is now the only way to guarantee freedom. It is the corporate state—a fascist, authoritarian government that has as its only mandate the complete freedom for business interests and the wealthy elite—that is the definition of a totalitarian state.
All of the work that sprang from Hayek’s disciples was based upon the completely false assertion that capitalism couldn’t survive in any kind of socialist context. But that was the whole point, to get rid of any kind of government oversight, no matter how slight, in order to free up capitalist markets that were anything but free. The simple fact of the matter is—again, looking to our own history—that the natural evolution of capitalism is NOT toward free market competition, but toward monopolistic consolidation and collusion between those monopolies to set prices which allows for inflation and artificial spikes, to fix low wages, and standardize poor working conditions, just as we see Amazon and other like-minded corporations doing today. These economic disciples of Hayek broke from traditional economic theory in one very dramatic way: NONE of their work was based on testable and verifiable data. None of it was based on facts. Instead, the goal was to destroy democracy from the inside. “But how to spread that view,” says MacLean, “in an era in which Americans—indeed, people the world over—distrusted markets after the Great Depression and the global conflagration it set off, and found government protection beneficial for more and more?” (MacLean 41)
That’s right, the economic reality that motivated this crowd was that the socialist policies of the New Deal were actually WORKING, and making lives better for “more and more” people. It’s maddening in retrospect to look at the utter disingenuousness of these so-called economists. The goal was never to make things better for people in society, only to make them better for corporations and the wealthy. And what we see today is the end result of decades of pushing a flawed ideology that is, at its core, anti-democratic. Since the U.S. government was actually working for the people and making their lives better, the only recourse was to destroy the people’s faith in that government, and so that’s exactly what they set out to do. Instead of “positive” economic practice that attempts to measure and quantify through actual experiment and factual data what works, their only recourse was to turn government into the bad guy. “If only one could break down the trust that now existed between governed and governing, even those who supported liberal objectives would lose confidence in government solutions” (MacLean 42).
Thus we have the deliberate sabotage—from the inside, by Republicans—of nearly every government program and department that can be thought of, from the Veterans Administration and Social Security, to Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, Education, Health and Human Services, the CDC, Transportation, Housing, the Interior, you name it. If Republicans can find a way to slow down, disrupt, defund—if not utterly destroy—a beneficial government agency, they will do it. And they will do it with only one objective in mind: to make people believe, FALSELY, that government is inept and incapable, and not to be trusted. Every frustration that you have with the government, from the IRS all the way down to the DMV, has been consciously created by the corporate right, with the sole objective of getting you to hate government and, it is hoped, democracy by association. If you hate what goes on in Washington D.C. and your state capitol, then you will be less likely to vote, less likely to work for change, less likely to care what happens to other people. They WANT you to feel as if you have no rights so that one day when you wake up and find out you actually don’t have rights anymore, you won't do anything about it. Nothing about government ineptitude in this country is an accident. It is a carefully calculated plan to get you to abandon the only chance we have of making substantive change for the better in our society: by renouncing unfettered capitalism and embracing WE THE PEOPLE instead.
And that’s why everything happening today—EVERYTHING—is unfolding as it was designed to unfold. Convince the population that capitalism is the only economic system that works and that socialism is evil. Convince the uneducated that it is democratic freedom that is responsible for their economic destitution so that they will want to destroy democracy. Convince the people that there is no “system” in place—it’s all a conspiracy theory—so that they believe the real enemy is their next-door neighbor and will expend all of their energies fighting with their fellow citizens rather than the capitalists who have actually enslaved them. Distract them with entertainment, sports, and social media so that they stay uneducated, and will believe any crackpot, anti-government lie fed to them. Make them believe that gun control is bad, that unions are bad, that a living wage is bad, that welfare is bad—never mind the fact that the single largest, by a gargantuan margin, recipient of welfare in this country is corporations. Make them believe that price controls are bad, that wage controls are bad, that regulations that make sure corporations don’t kill them are bad. Convince them that EVERYTHING that is good for them and will make their lives infinitely better . . . is bad. That’s what is going on today. The sky isn’t falling, it’s being dismantled on purpose by a corporate cabal that wants only one thing: to transform this country into a corporate dictatorship bent on turning its citizens into batteries that they can toss into the garbage when they’re used up. It's time—long past time—for people in this country—ALL the people—to wake up to what’s really going on and vote—while you still can—like your lives depend on it . . . because they do.
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