Lessons from Political Scrapbooking

What are the major conclusions after reading and writing about American political and economic democracy through four elections?

After the 2016 election, I started reading and writing about American politics and economics, to clarify my own thinking about what happened, and to explain in to my adult children. That project soon got completely out of hand! After the 2018, 2020, and imminent 2022 elections, perhaps it's time to summarize my conclusions and move on to more productive pursuits.

The Main Challenge - Minority Rule

• Consider this old question: How did rich Southern planters get poor whites to fight for slavery, against their own interests? The answer is the same as for this newer question: How does the GOP megadonor class get the GOP base to vote against its own interests? That answer: by propaganda to divert and distract, so that the working and middle-class GOP voters identify with the GOP megadonor class, based on shared tribal identity, rather than with working and middle-class Democratic voters, based on shared economic interests.
• This is ultimately an expression of the conflict between medieval authoritarianism and the Enlightenment values that inspired America's founders. As explained in Albion's Seed, as far as English migration was concerned, the Cavaliers brought their feudal landowner-nobility ideas with them to America's South, while in the North, the Puritans bore the most influence of the Enlightenment, and the Quakers were associated with commerce, industrialization and urbanization, inimical to the feudal rural Cavalier lifestyle. Indeed the #1 political issue from 1787 to 1865 was the preservation of parity of political and economic power between the rural Cavalier minority and the northern educated industrial majority. And the survival of the Cavalier planters depended critically on slaves to do the heavy work and poor Southern whites - Borderlanders - to defend the Cavaliers from the slaves, and later from the free states. All these threads are still evident in American politics today.
• Cavalier minority rule persisted among the Southern Democrats - the Dixiecrats - up until the 1960's, when in less than a generation the Dixiecrat megadonors and their white voters migrated to the Republican Party and over time converted it to the Trumpist Dixiecrat Party we know today, no longer having any ideological connection to the Republican Party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower, or Reagan.

Challenges: tools for protecting and enhancing minority political power

• Propaganda flooding media stimulating divisiveness and fortress mentality, with no "fairness doctrine" counterpoint required. Fox, Newsmax, OAN, RT - and now social media - Truth Social, Parler, Telegram, 4chan, etc. It's us vs them, with no room for compromise - that might compromise minority rule. "Fairness" means giving equal time and credence to fact and fantasy.
• Cult of personality is particularly compatible with minority rule by encouraging us-them tribalism - "either you are for me or against me". The cultivated personality doesn't necessarily have to have much actual power as long as he believes he does.
• Unlimited dark money for campaign contributions to pay for all the propaganda flooding media, thanks to a Supreme Court majority groomed to believe that money is speech protected by the first amendment. One dollar - one vote!
• Voter suppression - making it as difficult to vote as possible, for as many people as possible, but especially in precincts that might be disposed to vote against minority rule.
• Suppressing contested elections - by gerrymandering, so that only the party primary matters, and by sore-loser laws, to make doubly sure that only the party primary matters.
• Reducing power of government vs power of ruling class by legislation - thus "balanced budget amendment" and "term limit amendment" intended to insure that government doesn't have the finances or expertise to do anything to inconvenience the megadonor class. And in general, legislators supporting minority rule status quo can do their duty by voting against anything that inconveniences their donors - unlike progressives, reactionaries don't have to actually pass anything to be satisfactory, though of course they are more satisfactory if they can actually pass legislation that actively favors minority rule.
• Reducing power of government vs power of ruling class by judiciary - Mitch McConnell's greatest achievement is packing the Federal judiciary with reactionary lifetime judges to protect minority rule.

Responses: tools for protecting and enhancing equal political opportunity

• Demand a new fairness doctrine - distinguish between fact and fantasy - applicable to internet and broadcast media.
• Rule of law instead of cult of personality.
• End unlimited dark money for campaigns.
• Voting - reduce divisive partisanship by breaking power of primaries in single-party states.
  • Repeal sore-loser laws.
  • Ranked-choice voting. Traditional politicians claim that it's confusing. The only thing they are confused about is how they could continue to support minority rule if the majority is enfranchised.
  • Multi-member districts combined with ranked-choice voting. These render gerrymandering useless.

Challenges: tools for protecting and enhancing minority economic power

• Job's-Friends-ism is the doctrine that "if you are poor or sick, it's fine because it's God's will to punish you for your sins." It's the true religion of many of the rich and powerful in many times and places, no matter which creed they nominally profess. It's convenient because it implies the rich should not be taxed or otherwise inconvenienced for the benefit of the poor.
• That includes not taxing inherited wealth, so wealth can accrue in families over generations and ultimately produce a hereditary nobility - like our current libertarian billionaires, the Southern planters, or the English Cavaliers.
• Opaque taxation laws are essential for public relations, so billionaire tax relief has to be as hard to decipher as possible. Poster child - the pass-through deduction. The IRS summary of that provision ran over 50 pages. Not quite as complicated are provisions like real estate depreciation, 1031 exchanges, carried interest, depletion allowances, etc., that most taxpayers still couldn't define, much less benefit from. And more generally, one can find provisions in the Federal Income Tax code that are so complicated that it's hard to believe that they could apply to more than one taxpayer. And quite often, that's the correct conclusion - the provision is return on investment for a megadonor's investment in dark campaign money.
• Cripple tax enforcement so it can't afford to go after the worst tax avoiders - which seem to coincide with the GOP megadonor class to a remarkable extent.

Responses: tools for protecting and enhancing equal economic opportunity

Equal economic opportunity does not mean guaranteed equal economic outcome. But it does mean outcome more closely related to talent and effort than to heredity.

• A simple flat tax on discretionary income is the fairest kind of tax. Instead America suffers a pseudo-progressive tax system that is actually quite regressive - considering the effects of provisions like real estate depreciation, 1031 exchanges, carried interest, depletion allowances, etc., that most taxpayers couldn't define, much less benefit from. Worse, the GOP has done its best to cripple IRS enforcement so it can't afford to go after the worst tax avoiders - which seem to coincide with the GOP megadonor class to a remarkable extent.
• A simple universal basic income for all voters would be an easy way to eliminate many complicated welfare programs and, combined with the right flat tax, would provide an economic incentive to states to get as many citizens as possible registered and voting. It would be a politically-palatable way to provide reparations that does not appear to favor one ethnic group over another.

Last Resort Response: Regional Federalism

If the beneficiaries and enablers of minority rule are as tenacious as their Confederate ancestors - whether descended by the flesh or by the spirit - they will never voluntarily weaken their grip on minority rule. In that case it might be necessary to agree to Regional Federalism, where America remains one nation but undergoes a voluntary regional trial separation between red and blue. Each region makes most of its own rules. This can be accomplished without any Constitutional changes with regional interstate compacts. Red states and blue states will stop trying to impose their values and taxes on each other - and will no longer depend on each other for economic assistance and disaster relief. The Federal government will pretty much shrink to the Defense and State Departments, with corresponding reduction or elimination of Federal income and payroll taxes.

The red states will probably repeal their income taxes on the megadonor class, and sell off their public lands and resources instead - until they run out. It should take about a generation to find out if this libertarian paradise is what the red state voters really wanted - or just what Musk and Thiel and Koch and Mercer told them they wanted. After all, only 27 percent of registered voters identify as liberal.

So wouldn't they be glad to give up the things that the blue state voters enjoy?

• 62 percent of Americans want to raise taxes on millionaires
• 71 percent approve of labor unions
• 83 percent support raising the federal minimum wage

"Democrats exist because the country belongs to all of us, not just the 1 percent. With this guiding principle in mind, everything else becomes easier - picking fights that focus the media spotlight on a game that's rigged in favor of the rich; calling the bluff of right-wing populists who can't stomach a capital-gains-tax hike; corralling activists in support of the needs of working people; and, ultimately, putting power back in the hands of ordinary Americans."

"There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them."

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