"Registering them [the poor] to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country."
This sentiment was echoed by Rush Limbaugh, who wonders why poor people should be allowed to vote; and Judson Phillips, president of Tea Party Nation, who says that voting should be limited to those with property; or Walter Williams, who writes that he finds "democracy and the rule of the majority a contemptible form of government"; or Pat Buchanan who calls democracy a "childlike faith," and then goes on to quote John Adams,
"Democracy never lasts long. Its soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
But while they may hate democracy, the elites and those who serve them are not above using its trappings and traditions as cover for their own advantage. Our culture is infused with a populist rhetoric that ignores the fact that we live in an unprecedented global oligarchy, or rule of the rich on a global scale. We are constantly bombarded with a populist rhetoric that suggests we live in a radical (ie, populist) democracy that caters to the needs of the many, rather than the privileges of the few....
"Even though oligarchy reigns supreme, democracy is so revered in our society that it has become a new god. People are willing to die for it, launch wars in its name and bomb others in the hope of converting them to the true faith. The prevalence of this naive conception of democracy allows us to be hoodwinked by our ruling elites into supporting an agenda that serves the interest of the global oligarchy while pretending to be radically democratic or populist."
The elites and those who serve them have been waging class warfare for the past 40 years. Today's GOP remains determined to drown government in the bathtub; it is a movement that now requires its members to pledge an oath that they will never raise taxes. Today's GOP is the ideological offspring of the sainted Ronald Reagan's famous dictum "government is the problem," an ideology that is now totally loosed from its moorings. Today's GOP is based on the unrepentant and unassailable conviction that victory in the long struggle for power is at hand. And, like the evangelicals with whom they are allied, these are not people with whom you can reason.
Leading GOP commentators like Bill O'Reilly continue to advance the elitist agenda that taxation of "achievement" is unfair and unjust (the meritocracy argument), while Elizabeth Warren correctly put taxation and the social contract in their proper context when she said...
"There is nobody in this country that got rich on his own. Nobody."
And in an excellent commentary on the social contract, Paul Krugman refutes the idea that the meritocracy of the monied class absolves them of any responsibility to share in the burdens of society, even as they happily reap all the benefits it affords....
"Republicans claim to be deeply worried by budget deficits. Indeed, Mr. Ryan called the deficit an existential threat to America. Yet they are insisting that the wealthy -- who presumably have as much of a stake as everyone else in the nation's future -- should not be called upon to play any role in warding off that existential threat. Well, that amounts to a demand that a small number of very lucky people be exempted from the social contract that applies to everyone else. And that, in case you're wondering, is what real class warfare looks like."
If the Republicans are the most visible, shameless and outrageously outspoken in waging class warfare, they are not its only practitioners. While it is true that the GOP has become an "insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority," the Democrats are employed by the same corporate paymasters. They may lack the partisan zeal and cynical strategic vision of their rivals, but Democratic lawmakers understand the bargain they must strike in order to gain and hold power, and they have demonstrated their willingness to play the game.
At some point, though, as you trace the rise of money in politics, follow the history of deregulation and off-shoring and the gutting of the middle class, and read of the renewed (and farcical) angst over tax rates for the rich, you must ask the most basic of questions: Why?
Can it all just be simple greed? Can this most spectacular success of the monied elite be nothing more than a brilliantly conceived and executed heist? Well yes, it certainly is the money -- and enormous sums of it, to be sure. After all, 400 Americans now control more wealth than 150 million of their fellow countrymen combined, in what has become a new and perhaps more glorious Gilded Age.
But there's got to be more to it. Beyond these staggering financial gains engineered by the monied elite, there might also be a certain prestige in this victory -- a triumph for the ages that elevates these newest captains of industry (or Robber Barons, if you prefer) to the rarified status of an Astor, Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller or Vanderbilt.
Beyond the obscene piles of money, the "why" is really about a return to the natural order of things, where wealth is the mechanism that distinguishes the few from the many, and which then maintains that separation. From Plato to Alexander Hamilton to the conservative thinkers of today, rule by the elite remains, in their view, the natural order -- money and power in the service of money and power...
"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and the well born, the others the mass of the people...The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge and determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share of government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second." Alexander Hamilton, first Treasury Secretary of the U.S.
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