Screwed the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class (16 page)

Because they traced their ancestry to Europe, the Founders believed they were altering the course of world history. In the entire history of Europe, there had been but one democracy, in Athens, and then only for a few centuries. The Founders believed that if they could marry to European civilization the sort of democracy they had found among the Iroquois, they could truly create a better world.

Thus the secrecy, the locked doors, the intensity of the Constitutional Convention. And thus the willingness to set aside economic interest to produce a document—admittedly imperfect—that would establish an enduring beacon of liberty for the world.

As George Washington, who presided over the Constitutional Convention, wrote to the nation on September 17, 1787, when "transmitting the Constitution" to the people of the new nation: "In all our deliberations on this subject we kept steadily in our view, that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, perhaps our national existence."

The Founders' decision to create a democracy in America was not easy. As John Quincy Adams said, "Posterity—you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it."

America was an experiment, and the rest of the "civilized" world assumed it would fail. The Founders not only had to fight for independence from England, they had to convince their peers in Europe that their theory of government could work.

They were a tiny group, and the British Empire was very large. How did they succeed?

Samuel Adams, the tavern owner in Boston who was instrumental in stirring up the Boston Tea Party, said, "It does not take a majority to prevail. But rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."

That's who the Founders were and what they did. they were revolutionaries who knew that a vital democracy lay in supporting the middle class and minimizing corporate power. And that's what we must be and what we must do.

Most Americans these days don't remember why (or when) we instituted a progressive income tax or why taxes even matter in society beyond the obvious issue of paying the cost of government functions like police and fire departments. They don't realize that the Founders of our republic had a visceral and intense concern about multigenerational accumulated wealth and the ability of great wealth to corrupt democracy itself.

Americans today know that none of the supposedly "rich" founders left great fortunes. The foundations that bear the names of people who lived in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries are the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation. There is no Jefferson Foundation or Madison Foundation. Americans know this—but they don't know why.

Most Americans also don't realize that a middle class is created and maintained by direct intervention in the marketplace by a democratic government, including laws protecting labor, defining minimum wage, and taxing great wealth.

Without these progressive laws, America would revert to what it looked like during the Robber Baron Era—the average worker earning the equivalent of around $10,000 a year in today's dollars and a wealthy elite so rich and powerful that every branch of government was under its direct or indirect control.

America's first middle class was based on land and the family farm—the agricultural nation that Thomas Jefferson idealized. That began to disintegrate after the Civil War, when the railroads were so omnipresent that they made it possible for large corporations to determine grain prices and drive small farmers out of business.

The Gilded Age that followed produced a progressive backlash, starting with the eruptions of the Grange Movement; it continued with the legislative work of the Progressive Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that brought us direct election of the Senate, the right of women to vote, laws protecting the right to unionize, the estate tax, and a progressive income tax.

These all set the stage for the second American middle class, which finally emerged when Franklin Roosevelt further raised income tax rates on the superrich to 90 percent and created the social safety net we know as Social Security. The middle class also benefited from the anti-poverty programs introduced a generation later by Lyndon Johnson, including Medicare, housing assistance, and food stamps.

A lot of folks believe that these pro–middle class policies were thought up in the twentieth century, but it was actually Thomas Paine who first developed these themes in their modern political context. He did so in his book
The Rights of Man
.

Thomas Edison is largely responsible for our knowledge today of Thomas Paine and his writings. In July 1925 Edison rescued Paine from the dustbin of historic obscurity when he wrote a widely read plea to return Paine to the public schools:

Tom Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen. Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a
deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, "the United States of America." But it is hardly strange. Paine's teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind.

We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the Weld were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen.

Washington himself appreciated Paine at his true worth. Franklin knew him for a great patriot and clear thinker. He was a friend and confidant of Jefferson, and the two must often have debated the academic and practical phases of liberty.

I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles. Although the present generation knows little of Paine's writings, and although he has almost no influence upon contemporary thought, Americans of the future will justly appraise his work. I am certain of it.

Thomas Edison was successful in moving the writings of Thomas Paine into the mainstream of American education, influencing a generation that a decade later brought us the many progressive reforms of the 1930s.

Thomas Paine wrote
The Rights of Man
as an answer to a debate he was having with Sir Edmund Burke, the famous British nobleman who is revered by modern conservatives (such as Russell Kirk, Barry Goldwater, and William F. Buckley Jr.) as the founder of modern conservative thought. In some ways it's a classic debate
between conservative and liberal worldviews, with Paine presenting the liberal side of the equation.

Although modern conservatives like to say that Burke was occasionally progressive in some of his opinions, it was a progressivism that never threatened his lifestyle or that of his wealthy and powerful British peers. He'd come around to supporting American independence, although he was skeptical of our potential for survival without an aristocratic class; he supported the British take-over of India through the East India Company but felt that British rule should be "benevolent" and so prosecuted a man who had "abused" Indian citizens (that trial was similar to the show-trial of Sgt. Charles Grainer for the tortures committed at Abu Ghraib—blame the soldier and not civilian command or national policy); as an Irishman, Burke supported Irish emancipation.

But in his heart and soul, Burke was a staunch supporter of the sort of hierarchical government that Paine rails against in
The Rights of Man
.

Burke and Paine were acquainted. After the Revolutionary War, Paine had returned to England, where he was hailed as the best-selling author of
Common Sense
and
Crisis
("These are the times that try men's souls") and heralded as one of the true fathers of the American Revolution. (It would not be an exaggeration to say that without Paine there may not have been a Revolution.) Paine had stayed at Burke's home, and the two corresponded.

When the French Revolution broke out, Paine went to France where, despite the fact that he spoke hardly a word of French (he'd dropped out of school at age twelve), he was elected to the National Convention. He was initially fortunate to be in France because during this time
The Rights of Man
was published in England, and the book was considered so radical that Paine was tried and convicted in absentia for seditious libel against the Crown.

But then he publicly crossed swords with Maximilien Robespierre and suggested that King Louis XVI and Marie
Antoinette should be exiled to America. For this he was sentenced to the guillotine and thrown into prison.

It was in prison that Paine wrote his book promoting deism and attacking organized religion,
The Age of Reason
. That book so infuriated churchgoing Americans that when Paine later escaped France and returned to America, he died in obscurity in Greenwich Village, with only six people attending his funeral. As Thomas Edison wrote,

His Bible was the open face of nature, the broad skies, the green hills. He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds—or on persons devoted to them—have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life. . . . If Paine had ceased his writings with
The Rights of Man
he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures of the Revolution. But
The Age of Reason
cost him glory at the hands of his countrymen—a greater loss to them than to Tom Paine.

Sir Edmund Burke promoted the worldview that animates today's cons: that people are essentially evil and need a strong external controlling force to prevent them from acting out their evil nature; that such a force should most appropriately come from those who have inherited or lawfully obtained wealth, religious power, or political power; and that a permanent large underclass with little power and a permanent small overclass with great power will produce the greatest social good because it will ensure social stability.

In 1790, following up on his conversations with Paine, Burke wrote a letter/pamphlet titled "Reflections on the Revolution in France." In it Burke laid out some of his most important philosophical points, many of which are still quoted by American cons.
Burke in particular noted his belief in the danger of true democracy:

The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler [candle maker], cannot be a matter of honour to any person to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suff ers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule. In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.

This so incensed Paine that he had to respond, and that response is the book
The Rights of Man
.

Paine has such a terrific argument in defense of democracy and self-government that it is worth quoting at length:

When I contemplate the natural dignity of man, when I feel (for Nature has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for the honour and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon.

We have now to review the governments which arise out of society, in contradistinction to those which arose out of superstition and conquest.

It has been thought a considerable advance towards establishing the principles of Freedom to say that Government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed; but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with.

The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.