The Final Battle

Response to Heather Cox Richardson’s Question

American historian Heather Cox Richardson (“HCR”, if I might), in her YouTube blog, Politics Chat, has likened America’s present situation to that of past periods in our history.

She says we’ve been through similar times of crisis and come out of them with democracy reinvigorated. She expects that to happen again. Enough American people will rise up and push back on the fascist-thinking MAGA regime to stop its advance.

At the end of her January 15 Politics Chat, she expressed that in the post-MAGA era there will be an opening to advance new policies and that now is the time to begin advocating for new initiatives and new policies to restore America.

This wasn’t the first time she’s encouraged this forward thinking. But it was the first time (that I’m aware of) that she talked about how she envisions her own role in the post-MAGA era:

On the other side of that [the MAGA regime], we’ve got to build a better country. And we [will] have that opportunity to do it even better now.

But here’s what my contribution is going to be to that. What I’m going to contribute is I’m going to be the person in the back of the room always saying, “Ok, these changes are great. How are we going to make sure we never backslide again?” Because that’s going to be a key lesson going forward.

Her question is of utmost importance. To help explain why it is so important, I’d like to give it historical context. Then I’d like to give Crisis and Transition’s answer to how to prevent backsliding.

HCR says America has been here before. Several times in our history there’s been the rise and consolidation of the power of financial elites, followed by pushback from progressive grassroots forces. Then again, the reconsolidation of power by the elites.

Here’s a quick synopsis of these historical cycles, per my rough understanding. (Full disclosure: I’m not a historian — not even particularly well read on American history. But I’m confident in the broad outline.)

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The American Revolution

The Revolutionary War was fought because the American colonies lacked representation under British imperial rule. The colonists came to recognize that the only way that they could control their destiny was to fight for self-rule.

After attaining independence, the Founding Fathers established a republican democracy. Their new government brought about the greatest expansion of citizen political empowerment of its time, though voting was mostly limited to property-owning white males — about 6 percent of the population.

The American colonies were free from British imperial rule, but not entirely free from rule by Americans with imperialist mentality. The economy of the Southern states was based on slave labor, and the lands to the west were subject to imperialist expansion under the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

The Civil War

The American Civil War brought an end to slavery. General Sherman promised former slaves “40 acres and a mule”, and in the Reconstruction Era that followed the War the American Constitution was amended to grant citizenship, equal treatment under the law, and voting rights to Black Americans.

But these gains didn’t fully hold. The land originally distributed to the freed slaves was quickly returned to the land-owning Southern whites. In the Jim Crow era (beginning in the mid 1870s) racial segregation was instituted in the South and Black Americans were disenfranchised. And white privilege was often maintained by the terrorist activities of the Ku Klux Klan.

In the American North there was the rise of the Gilded Age, a time of rampant corruption and of the exploitation of the growing industrial working class. In business, powerful corporate trusts were formed that gained monopolistic control over major industries.

The Progressive Era

By the 1890s, a wave of popular struggle against political corruption, monopoly business practices, and labor exploitation began to consolidate, initiating the Progressive Era.

This era saw multiple overlapping reform movements advocating political, economic, and social reforms. At the economic level, unions crusaded for the eight-hour workday, worker job safety, and the abolition of child labor; and reformers pushed for anti-trust laws to break up monopolies. At the political level, democracy was extended through direct primary elections, direct election of senators, women’s suffrage, and the introduction of initiatives and referendums.

By the beginning of World War I the Progressive Era was in decline. There was repression of American left movements in the form of First Red Scare and the Palmer Raids. During the Roaring 20s, American society became enamored of wealth and luxuries. Financial greed was rampant, and speculative investments were little regulated. Wealth inequality soared; the rich lived lavishly. Until the Wall Street crash of 1929.

The New Deal

During the Great Depression, Americans again took up the struggle for a more inclusive and egalitarian society. The signature political initiative of this era was the New Deal.

The many programs and policies that constituted the New Deal were based on a recognition that the government needs to play a role in ensuring Americans a right to an economic livelihood and access to their basic necessities of life. This represented an important expansion of democratic rights.

The Sixties

The gains of the New Deal era, and the flattening of wealth disparity during the Depression, brought an era of prosperity in which the Baby Boomer generation came of age.

This generation became politically animated, in particular, by two arenas of unfinished business in American life. The first was the end of segregation for Black Americans, the second, ending the Indo-China War. The struggle for Black Civil Rights expanded into labor organizing rights for Chicano Americans, social equality for women, expanded sovereignty for Native Americans nations, and equal rights for gay Americans. Protests against the Vietnam War expanded to opposing America’s imperialist foreign policy and to questioning capitalism.

Democratic movements were thrusting for an expansion of liberty and equity on many fronts. American political scientist, Samuel Huntington, reflecting the view of those who felt that the upwelling of protest had gone too far, observed that “The 1960’s witnessed a dramatic upsurge of democratic fervor in America” and famously called it “democratic distemper.”

Corporate attorney, and later Supreme Court justice, William Powell, responded to the democratic distemper with the “Powell Memorandum”, which outlined a strategy for conservative elites to regain dominance.

This strategy proved remarkably successful, culminating in consolidation of rule by the oligarchy that we suffer under today — that, in its MAGA form, Jim Stewartson calls, “the American catastrophe”.

The American Oligarchy

Each period of progressive change required Americans to engage in long periods of protracted struggle. The struggles of the Progressive Era lasted 20 years.

Today, many Americans, in their pain and panic over the horrors of MAGA fascism, seek quick change: Invoke the 25th Amendment. Initiate impeachment proceedings. Get Republican Senators to abandon Trump. Win control of Congress in the November elections. Release the Epstein tapes.

This focus on a path to quick change misreads the nature of the historical period we’re in. This is again a time of protracted struggle. It won’t go on for 20 years, but it won’t end with the fall of Trump.

For behind Trump lies the uber-rich and the powerful corporations. Through the power of their money, they disproportionately finance political campaigns, hire skilled lobbyists, influence the media, pressure regulatory agencies, and in so many ways subvert political democracy.

Bernie Sanders is right to say we live in an oligarchy.

The Final Battle

Trump may go, but the oligarchy will live on. Even if subdued, it will seek to rise again. In the 1960s, democracy was flowering. Those of us who participated in the struggles of the Sixties could never have foreseen the ascendency of oligarchy — and now of fascism. The forces of illiberalism now control much of the legacy new media, the university boards, the courts, public education, and the functions of government. Just as William Powell envisioned.

We may remove Trump. The Democrats may regain control of Congress; they may even advance a progressive agenda.

But the oligarchs will persist — because they come up in an economic system that rewards privilege, and that privilege brings power.

When HCR asks, “How are we going to make sure we never backslide again?” she raises the central question of American history.

The only viable answer to this question, so far as I see, is to extend democracy into the economic realm — to demand a robust form of economic democracy, to see that economic empowerment is a fundamental right of all citizens and all local communities.

As I’ve said before about economic democracy, “Multinational corporations will revile it, but the people will embrace it. They will rally in support, for it is an idea that will restore their dignity, their economic security, and the democratic ideals and freedoms they cherish.”

Economic democracy will not be achieved in the next election cycle. But the future is not about the next election cycle.

The next election cycle is to beat back fascism, to get ICE out of our communities. To raise our voices. Which is important but not sufficient. It won’t deliver us from the polycrisis, and without this humanity’s future is dim.

The fight for the future must, first of all, ensure that we never again backslide into the ascendency of powerful financial elites, that we end the system that privileges the greed and the control by the would-be oligarchs, that we establish the rule of economic democracy.

This is the final battle to secure a just, inclusive, equitable, cooperative society in America.

Let economic democracy become the cry of the American patriots!