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May 26, 2017

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Crisis of middle class constitution: How inequality threatens the US

IN this timely book, Professor Ganesh Sitaraman argues that the dramatic wealth inequality in the United States threatens the very nature of its constitutional structure.

He observes, “Throughout history true conservatives have sought to preserve the status quo and maintain continuity with the best traditions of the past.” But today’s so-called conservatives are different for they, instead, seek to impose “an ideological vision on the country and the world,” forgetting that classic conservatives understood that periodic reforms were essential.

As Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Those who oppose all reform … will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism.”

“The wisest patriots of Madison’s day,” Sitaraman observes, understood that “power follows property, and they knew that America could not be a republic without relative economic equality.”

He demonstrates that for much of American history “the fear of power extended beyond tyrannical government to the accumulation of private power and in particular economic power.”

This fear of economic power, coupled with a belief that America’s citizens enjoyed relative economic equality, was central to the Founders’ design of the Constitution.

Professor Sitaraman shows that, throughout history, states addressed the delicate problem of how best to structure the social/political order — the opposing wishes and actions of those with power and wealth would be balanced by those of the mass of citizens — by crafting what he calls class warfare constitutions.

Such provided these opposing class interests with chambers of sufficient power to counter each other’s potential excesses, such as in Great Britain’s House of Commons and House of Lords.

America’s founders, however, believed that they could fashion an alternative constitutional structure precisely because America enjoyed, from the colonial period to the present, a general equality of economic, social, and political status.

The rich merchants and wealthy landowners coexisted with a far greater number of yeoman farmers, the middle class of that time, whose widespread ownership of small parcels of land made them relatively economically self-sufficient, not subject for their livelihood to their wealthier neighbors.

The US Constitution, therefore, was crafted not in order to balance varying social and economic classes but, instead, to guard against any faction — however conceived — being able to accrue disproportionate power allowing it to seize control of the Republic. The goal was to protect minority rights while also defending against potential harmful excesses by the majority.

It did so by placing the major powers of government into separate bodies, the executive, legislative, and judicial.

In retrospect, it is clear that the Founders drastically underestimated the ability of the wealthy elite to capture control of government at all levels, including within the federal and state branches.

Recurring struggle

Sitaraman’s overview of US history illustrates the recurring struggle between those with wealth seeking greater political power and the resisting forces of the laboring and farming masses.

In the latter 19th century, a time in many ways much like our own, federal and state legislatures were in thrall to the moneyed interests while the larger cities fell sway to powerful urban political dynasties.

In a time of excitement and turmoil, rural populists, primarily farmers indebted to large banks and at the mercy of the terms set by the monopolies of the time, joined urban workers angered by difficult and unsafe working conditions, long hours, and insufficient pay, to challenge entrenched class tyranny.

Many of their key demands were also embraced by a progressive surge at the turn of the century that achieved remarkable reforms that placed some restraints upon the worst features of industrial capitalism.

Many of these advances, however, were overturned as a consequent of World War I and the ensuing Red Scare of the early 1920s. That unsettled decade included a renewed rise in economic inequity, resentment towards “foreigners” (especially immigrants), a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, racist riots, and mob lynchings of black men. During these years the wealthy elite saw their fortunes swell to levels not reached again until the current day.

The Great Depression and the Second World War, however, eroded much of that accumulated wealth so that, from the 1940s through the early 1970s, the United States enjoyed the most egalitarian status since the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

No more ‘good times’

By the 1990s it was becoming abundantly clear that the “good times” enjoyed since the end of the Second World War had clearly come to an end.

Not only had the wealthy elite once against surged far ahead of the majority of Americans — an inequity that continues to widen each year — but their harnessing of allegedly impartial “think tanks,” the rise of far Right media (including, in our own time, those on the Web), and their extremely skillful use of hot button “social issues” has allowed them and their political minions to capture effective control of not only all branches of the federal government but also those of several of the states.

They continue to expand those efforts today by seeking to place like-minded jurists in the positions of state supreme-court justices, state attorneys general, and in district judgeships.

This is precisely the kind of tyranny the Founders believed would follow if a permanent faction seized effective control of the government.

Sitaraman suggests some very interesting strategies that could be employed to restore the United States to republican health, including the proposal that a future, saner Congress, in forcefully confronting the question of what level of wealth disparity is acceptable in a healthy republic, would enact proactive legislation that would come into effect only when that “acceptable wealth disparity target” was exceeded. Such legislation would automatically trigger the levying of much higher income taxes on the wealthy, including on their savings and investments, and impose a significant estate tax.

Then, once these measures had succeeded in reducing economic disparity again to the “acceptable” level, they would be successively relaxed.

Unfortunately, neither the present Congress — nor, frankly, any likely in the foreseeable future — is going to consider, let alone pass, anything of this nature. For, the truth is, while the United States retains the form of a republic, it has actually become an oligarchy.

 

The author was a member of the Iowa State House of Representatives and also served in the Iowa executive branch. He retired in 2004. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.




 

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