ann program and author of The Hidden History series.
His latest book is The Hidden History of American Oligarchy Reclaiming Our Democracy from the
Ruling Class.
Always great to have you on time.
Thanks, David.
It's great to be here with you.
So let's let's go back a little bit, as you always do in the books, and talk about the
origins of some of these issues that still plague, plague the country today.
How far back does this sort of oligarchical apparatus exist in the history of the United
States?
Well, it goes back to arguably Plymouth Rock and slightly before, but, yeah, because we
fought a war, you know, the Revolutionary War against the oligarchy of the United Kingdom,
it was called a monarchy, but it's just another version of oligarchy, oligarchy being defined
broadly as rule by the rich.
The consolidation of political power into a small number of very wealthy hands is sort
of the political version of what Monopoly is in the economic marketplace, you know,
and and then we you know, we've had we're now in the midst of our third real internal
challenge by oligarchs in the era from the 30s to the eighteen sixties, largely as a
result of the invention of the cotton gin, the South consolidated massively.
Small farmers, particularly cotton farmers, were wiped out, large plantations and their
owners rose up and took over the entire political structure of the South declared war on the
north, didn't like that pesky democracy next door that was agitating and rabble rousing
among their ranks.
And, you know, we we fought a bloody war against these oligarchs and defeated them and in fact,
broke up their plantations.
Parchment is now a state prison in Louisiana.
Robert E. Lee's plantation, one of the largest, is now Arlington National Cemetery, etc..
So and then they rose up again in the eighteen, eighties and nineties with the industrial
revolution, a new generation of oligarchs.
And to the point that, you know, in the nineteen thirties, in the early 90s, in nineteen thirty
three, they tried to hire Smedley Butler to kidnap or assassinate Franklin Roosevelt.
They already had enlisted over one hundred thousand right wing veterans out of this right
wing veterans group to march on the White House and seize him.
We overthrew that.
And and Roosevelt openly said, you know, they hate me and I welcome their hatred.
He put the oligarchs back in the bottle and they stayed there until the nineteen eighties.
Reagan let them back out again, along with a little help from the Supreme Court.
And today, we're now facing the third major confrontation between oligarchy and democracy.
And the study from Gillinson page suggests that we are now in a full blown oligarchy.
And the question facing America today is, do we continue going down that road or do
we go back to democracy because oligarchies are very unstable and oligarchs tend to oligarchies
tend to resolve themselves in one of two ways.
Either the oligarchs are defeated, as we did in the 60s and as we did in the nineteen thirties,
or the oligarchs turn a nation into a police state, as Viktor Orban has done in Hungary
or Putin and Russia in order to maintain their power.
Those are the choices we're facing right now when it comes to sometimes what you might
call the conventional wisdom around oligarchy, which is often not.
It might be conventional, but it's not necessarily accurate.
There's this idea that the biggest acceleration in this oligarchical overclass, so to speak,
was during industrialization, in part because of the ability to really concentrate wealth
among those who could own a lot of those factories and take advantage of the industrialization
that was taking place.
Is it accurate to point that is the biggest moment of acceleration of this or would that
not be right?
Well, technological changes always have massive societal impacts.
I mean, you know, you can you can find that all the way back to the agricultural revolution,
the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, the, you know, the invention of steel, et
cetera.
And and typically those kinds of changes as the society gets reordered.
You have a class within society that succeeds in grabbing as much of the pie as they can.
The technological innovation in the in the eighteen hundreds in the early eighteen hundreds
was the invention by Eli Whitney of the Cotton Gin.
You know, the hardest part of the bottleneck in the production of cotton is getting those
seeds out of a bowl of cotton.
They're really hard to pull out and the cotton gin could do what fifty enslaved people could
do in the same amount of time.
So the big plantations, which could afford the cotton gins, were able there fifty times
more efficient and that's how they wiped out their small competitors.
Similarly, in the in the late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, you saw people like
Carnegie and Rockefeller and and the Dupont family and Mr. Dupont.
I forget his first name.
Alfred definitely.
No, it was Alfred.
In any case, you saw these guys doing essentially the same thing, monopolizing the wealth and
then converting that economic power into political power.
And that's that's what we've seen the billionaire class.
Now, in the last 40 years in the United States, how do you apply this analysis to what we've
seen over the last year during this pandemic where we've seen when it comes to business,
we've seen very large businesses that already had certain degrees of infrastructure in place
sweep up even more market share as a lot of small businesses, mom and Pops and others,
for a variety of different reasons, have gone under likely permanently in the cases of many
of them.
Well, it's it we're witnessing a another reconsolidation this time in part because of the pandemic,
but also in large part because, you know, in 1983, Ronald Reagan stopped enforcing the
antitrust laws in this country.
And we haven't had a president since then that did enforce them.
So, you know, if the if the NFL said, you know, we're just not going to enforce laws
against people punching each other in the gut as they run by or ripping facemasks off,
pretty soon, eventually you're going to have the team that's the best at punching people
and ripping facemasks off is going to be the team that's winning all the games in the NFL.
That's what's happened here.
I mean, you know, it might take a while before you get there because everybody considers
it kind of distasteful.
But when Reagan changed the rules of business, he really set us up on this trajectory to
where we're at right now.
You mentioned the two ways that oligarchy can go.
It can be defeated or it can become the police states that you described or born Putin, et
cetera.
What tends to determine whether it goes one way or the other, the people, whether the
you know, typically what what precipitates the crisis that flips oligarchy in one direction
or the other is is is usually an economic crisis.
And that's what Russia is facing right now with very, very low oil prices, which is what
their economy is based on.
With Orben, it was the Syrian refugees flooding into Hungary and his and it produced both
an economic and a social political crisis.
And his first the first thing that Orban did when he moved from being a president to being
an autocrat was to say that he was going to build a wall along the southern border of
Hungary to keep out the Syrian refugees.
He actually built that wall, by the way.
And, you know, and it's amazing, the whole chapter in my book about this, how Trump basically
is following was following Orban's playbook, blow by blow by blow.
I mean, it was just just breathtaking.
And so, you know, it's a crisis usually that precipitates that.
What is it that distinguishes an oligarch from simply a billionaire or a multi multi
millionaire?
Is it a political power component?
Is it something about the political system in which they operate?
Generally speaking, I mean, the definition is subject to popular whim.
There are dictionary definitions for an oligarch typically described as a very wealthy person.
But but I think in in this context and certainly in the modern context, when we talk about
oligarchs, whether we're talking about Russian oligarchs or American oligarchs or whatever,
we're talking about people who have amassed great wealth and are using that for not only
increasing their own wealth, but seizing the political power and process in a way that
will increase their own wealth and guarantee the continuation of their wealth and their
political power.
Some might argue that the successes against the oligarchy that we saw during the New Deal
era, FDR, you mentioned that earlier in your sort of kind of brief history of the trajectory
of this in the United States.
Some might argue that a combination of an additional many decades of entrenchment of
power among the few in the United States, combined with the media apparatus that's fomented
by high speed Internet and the sort of fragmentation of media make this a very different situation
from that in which the successes during FDR and the New Deal era took place.
And so it really needs to be a different road map for achieving maybe a similar outcome.
Do you agree with that, that circumstances have changed to such a degree that the playbook
must be different to some degree or not at all or completely?
What FDR did was he repudiated the economic policies of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge
and Herbert Hoover.
Those policies were almost identical to the ones that Ronald Reagan put into place that
we're confronting right now.
When Herbert Hoover ran for president, his two big sales pitches were, number one, a
return to normalcy.
That was his slogan.
What he meant by that was dropping that top tax rate of ninety one percent that Woodrow
Wilson had put in during World War One, back down to twenty five percent, which he did.
And his second one was more business and government, less government and business, in other words,
privatize and deregulate, which was Reagan's agenda, which he did.
And that took us to the Great Depression, the generation before that.
In the 90s, the supply siders so-called had this theory called the Horsens Sparrow theory,
which was that because back then people didn't have cars, they rode horses and.
The streets in in every town in America were filled with horse piles of horse manure and
and sparrows love to pick you the occasional bit of undigested grain out of them.
And so the theory was, if you feed the horses, more oats, more undigested oats will come
out the back end, which will feed the sparrows.
In other words, give the rich people their tax cuts and that will trickle down to the
average worker.
Yeah, sort of a farmhouse, farmhouse trickle down, recycled about three times in the last,
what?
One hundred and eighty years.
One hundred and sixty years.
What should the playbook be for the people at this point in time?
Well, what FDR did is he went back to classic economics, Adam Smith economics and and in
that he said that basically what drives an economy is demand, not supply.
And demand is aggregate demand is the phrase economists use.
It's it's a fancy word that really just means wages.
So if we want to get our economy back in order, what we need to do is get money into the hands
of average people.
And to a certain extent, that means, you know, going back to to top tax brackets that that
are substantial, you know, well over 50 percent and making sure that when people do work,
they're properly and appropriate, appropriately renumerated paid for that.
So you've got the 15 dollar minimum wage.
We need to bring back labor unions, which pretty much nobody is talking about right
now, but it really should be at the top of the agenda.
And strengthen workplace protections and worker protections right across the board, and we
need to strengthen the social safety net.
We're the only developed country in the world that doesn't consider health care.
Right.
And offer basically free health care to everybody.
We're the only developed we're the only developed country in the world that has medical debt
as a cause of personal bankruptcy.
We're the only developed country in the world that has student debt.
Anything close to what we have every other developed country in the world offers either
free or very inexpensive college to to anybody who can qualify.
We don't.
It's insane.
We need to we need to go back to the foundation foundational economics.
This was stuff that literally Thomas Jefferson was pitching.
He started the first free university in the United States, the University of Virginia,
and was very proud of the fact that it was completely free.
He thought that would build America.
He was right.
It seems that one of the big propaganda victories that the economic right I mean, going back
to the time maybe Reagan forward when it comes to these supply side trickle down idea, is
one of the biggest propaganda victories they've had is pushing out the understanding of the
demand side of economics completely.
And you see it even when minimum wage is discussed, you hear the discussion of, well, that's going
to increase costs for the businesses and they'll have to lay people off and they won't be able
to afford employees.
It ignores what which to some degree ignores that labor is only one at one input cost for
the product or service that's being produced.
But it also ignores the fact that you're creating demand side stimulus and all of a sudden all
of those employees have more money that they can spend at other businesses.
It's it has been a huge victory to completely make it a one sided conversation, has it not?
That's right.
And and you're absolutely right.
And it's not an accidental prop..
Propaganda victory.
Lewis Powell laid this out in nineteen seventy one.
I documented in this book on on American oligarchy and and then Nixon the next year put him on
the Supreme Court, where he proceeded in a series of decisions to cement these policies
in place.
But and groups like the Heritage Foundation and the funding of universities around the
country, university professors in economics and political science and things like that,
think tanks that are publishing constantly.
I mean, do any Google search on pretty much anything that has to do that is peripheral
to the interests of the billionaire class?
And you'll find just the first 20 links are going to be right wing propaganda.
It's it's really pretty breathtaking how much money they put into this, how large an infrastructure
they have built out since nineteen seventy one to promote this right wing worldview that
that really only benefits the top one percent of Americans when we're thinking about this
nascent Biden administration.
To to what degree are you optimistic, if at all, about Joe Biden making good on the promises
he made specifically with regard to this type of wealth inequality and economic policy that
we're talking about?
I'm very encouraged so far.
The biggest challenge that Biden is going to have is the filibuster.
And if Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema continue to oppose eliminating the filibuster, we're
screwed.
He'll get one or two things done by reconciliation, and that'll be it.
You can only use reconciliation once or in some cases, rare cases twice a year.
And and then the Republicans will you know, Mitch McConnell will do what he's been doing
for the last couple of decades.
He'll just block everything.
And, you know, we've got this is why people need to call two or two to two for thirty
one twenty one, which is the switchboard of the United States Senate, and deliver their
opinions, their thoughts about whether the filibuster should stay or go to Joe Manchin
and Kirsten Sinema and every other Democratic member of the Senate.
That's two to two to four.
Thirty one twenty one.
If you didn't write that down real fast.
And and, you know, because we've got to end the filibuster, otherwise we're screwed.
We've been speaking with Tom Hartmann, host of the Thom Hartmann program.
The newest book is The Hidden History of American Oligarchy Reclaiming Our Democracy from the
Ruling Class.
We will all be watching together.
Tom and I always appreciate your insights.
Thank you, David.
It's a real pleasure and honor to be on the program.
Thank you for inviting.