A clear and present danger
After the obligatory niceties and review of his accomplishments in office, President Joe Biden’s farewell address from the Oval Office got to the nub of it: America is at risk. That is, from “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people.”
Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before.
More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts. They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had. Workers want rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class, the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again.
The ultrawealthy and their enablers among the Republican Party have made no secret for decades that their goal is eradicating post-New Deal America and returning to the McKinley era of robber barons.
William Greider warned two decades ago:
The movement’s grand ambition—one can no longer say grandiose—is to roll back the twentieth century, quite literally. That is, defenestrate the federal government and reduce its scale and powers to a level well below what it was before the New Deal’s centralization. With that accomplished, movement conservatives envision a restored society in which the prevailing values and power relationships resemble the America that existed around 1900, when William McKinley was President. Governing authority and resources are dispersed from Washington, returned to local levels and also to individuals and private institutions, most notably corporations and religious organizations. The primacy of private property rights is re-established over the shared public priorities expressed in government regulation. Above all, private wealth—both enterprises and individuals with higher incomes—are permanently insulated from the progressive claims of the graduated income tax.
They reactionary rich were patient, Grieder continued, methodical. They “understand that three steps forward, two steps back still adds up to forward progress. It’s a long march, they say. Stick together, because we are winning.” And well-funded. Extremely well-funded.
Biden the D.C. long-hauler might not have seen it in 2003, but he sees it now:
You know, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us that about, and I quote, “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Six days — six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.
Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time.
Just as the GOP teamed up with the religious right to usher in the Reagan era, the oligarchy greasing palms in Donald Trump’s America has teamed not only with Christian nationalists, but with autocrats, white supremacists and, as I’ve argued, rump-royalists who would rather be subjects than citizens. Not in McKinley’s America from the end of the 19th century, but in the Old South at the end of the 18th. (Someone must have drawn up a Venn diagram.)
This is serious, and it’s not as if any of it is new. Biden twice argued that to undo the new Gilded Age that the ultrawealthy must again be made to pay their “fair share” in taxes.
Though of lesser international stature than Biden, historian Rutger Bregman made the same case five years ago, not into a camera but into the very faces of the world’s economic elite.
