Class Warfare: Who does democracy belong to?

The question of “class warfare” is entwined in the current debate over how to pull our nation out of recession. Today’s news is reporting Republican Congressman Paul Ryan saying he opposes class warfare, and that Obama is engaging in it by going after the wealthy with tax increases. The problem is that the congressman recognizes class warfare only when the underclass fights back. He does not acknowledge that the wealthy have already taken and hold the offensive advantage in their effort to control the battle. War does not start when the disadvantaged rally in defense.

There are class interests in any and all societies, of course. In a democracy, all levels have an investment, supposedly for the mutual benefit of all. Our original fight for national independence was guided by the goal of setting up a political system that allowed an open field for all citizens to make their case for fair treatment. “Fair” does not mean any group should be allowed to “control” if it can prove to be more powerful, and the underpowered group should accept the consequences of their disempowerment. That is not the democracy our founders had in mind. James Madison cautioned us about the “tyranny of the majority.” The word “fair” means (check your dictionary) just, honest, average, respectful, courteous, tolerable, with equal prospect for all. Our Founders had both the poor and the rich in mind (read the documents). They knew from participatory experience that Americans were willing, fully capable and energetically desirous of standing up for themselves, whatever their social standing. So they composed a Constitution that both assured the value of the rich folk’s investments and protected the hopes and integrity of the poor. The Constitution, except on the unresolved question of the “institution” of slavery, made internal “warfare” unnecessary, while giving an open field for “familial” squabbling.

The essential meaning of democracy is that we are all in this together for the mutual benefit of all. The people are king. No matter how lowly and uncharming I am, I am a proud family member with an equal claim on the family inheritance. The Constitution is my power of attorney. Fighting over a will is not class warfare.

I recently received an email that included an interesting quote of Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged) that is pertinent to today’s highly charged debate between Republicans (read, tea partiers) and Democrats over our national recession troubles.

"When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you...; you may know that your society is doomed."

Ayn Rand is talking here about the lower working class who labor for wages but are not real producers of “goods,” also those who profit from “graft“ rather than real work. And she complains that our laws work to protect these spongers and cheaters, the implication being that those who really benefit the country and promote a healthy, growing economy are the wise and knowledgeable capitalist entrepreneurs. In other words, the working class is mean and shortsighted while the business leaders are the ones who should write the laws if our nation is to endure.

I respond: This is an unbalanced, therefore flawed, perspective. Our country is not divided between good guys and bad guys. Rand turns the debate into class warfare, and the underclass is the enemy.

In my view we are a democracy, and an informed survey of our history is a study of how the populace has always contended over these social and economic issues. There is no good guy/bad guy split. A democracy has both good and bad guys at every level. Both lower and upper class have practitioners and spokespersons that seek advantage by accusing the other of everything bad imaginable. It has always been this way from 1776 until 2011. Our history is one of glowing contention. In listening to the current hot debates we should not let exaggerated charges fog over the legitimate complaints of those who do not agree with us, as if the “other” side were disingenuous and out to ruin the country. (Welfare queens and doctors who defraud Medicare will sit next to each other in the great sauna hereafter.)

A good rule of thumb to follow would be to automatically discount any statement by the debaters on either side that impugns the other person’s integrity, loyalty, religion, intelligence, or associations. These considerations thrive on bias, misinformation, anecdotal innuendos, and prejudice. You might object that to eliminate these kinds of assessments doesn’t leave much to go on because this is all that the media (including especially the internet ) give us. Note that I did not say “eliminate” these considerations, just seriously “discount” them. Suspect everything that bases its argument on my above list of hot air balloon talking points. I am not saying go ahead and vote for a sinful, crooked fool. I am suggesting we recognize the red flags of bias and slander, particularly when they are accompanied by empty rhetoric and misinformation without providing historical perspective for judging what democracy (the most Christian of political philosophies) is all about. Real democracy is tolerant, inclusive, fair, cooperative, unfrightened, forgiving, yielding and hopeful. It is also loud, vociferous, energetic, and shameless; but let’s not lose our good sense and hoary wisdom in pushing our favorite projects. I love competition, but when the game is over I want still to be able to hug and compliment my opponent for his vigorous challenge, without which I would not have risen to my best effort, nor would he. Any other scenario is a sign of sickness in the body--the kind of sickness that we set out to expel from our body politic in 1775.

If we let it, good history can help us understand whether today we are on the same track as our fabled founders. Are our current heroes leading us astray or are they calling us to uphold the vision of those who gave us our democratic heritage? If our actual history does not appeal to us, then we need to acknowledge that we are charting new and different waters.

I recommend an article by William Hogeland entitled “Tea Partiers Have a Very Mixed-Up Notion of What the American Revolution Was About.” You can get it on the internet but as encouragement for you to read it I have copied it for you here. It should add to the hoary wisdom available to us heirs of the great democratic experiment.

For the sake of brevity, I have abridged the article, and for quick reading have put in bold type the parts pertinent to today’s economic debates. ( You can get the whole article at http://www.alternet.org/story/150097/tea_partiers.)

"Memo to Tea Party: The major political battle during the American Revolution was over the proper uses of money and credit. Not getting government out of the economy. . . .

It can be hard to envision an early America seething with conflict between ordinary, hardworking Americans, stifled in their efforts to get ahead, and the rich, predatory Americans who stifled them. Prevailing historical fantasies of pre-Revolutionary America conjure a modestly thriving yeomanry, along with craftsmen, small business people, and merchants participating together in a representative civics. In this fantasy, income and wealth disparities look minor and manageable; slavery and women’s subjugation are terrible deviations from an ethos of liberty shared more or less democratically by free Americans of all types. The main problem for everyone is the restrictive influence of the British elements in government. The rosy narrative has it that a revolution dedicated to freedom of trade and thought and the proposition that all men are created equal will launch this society on a grand progress, embattled but irresistible, toward a democracy that includes everybody. . . .

Across the political spectrum, fuzziness about founding-era economics, credit and monetary policy persists. The fuzziness helps today’s populist right cast nativism and unfettered markets as essentially American.

The possibly startling fact is that the major social battle raging before, during, and after the American Revolution was over the proper uses of money and credit in American life. For ordinary people of the period, these were hardly abstractions. The only real money in 18th-century America was metal — silver and gold coin from England, Spain, and Mexico — and for long, terrible periods, money was rarely seen by ordinary people. Small farmers and artisans, wanting to survive and improve their lot, had to borrow. Merchants, gaining access to metal through imperial trading networks, used their money to make money, becoming lenders. Well before the Revolution, Americans defined themselves in practical terms either as “debtors” — poor and working people in small-scale enterprise — or “creditors” — well-heeled merchants growing their money by lending it.

Workings of the debtor-creditor relationship will sound unpleasantly familiar. Merchants had the money supply conveniently sewn up. Small farmers and artisans had to post the land and shops they hoped to develop as collateral for the credit they needed. Merchants might set interest rates as high as twelve percent — per month. Default, often predictable at the loan’s outset, subjected borrowers to foreclosures, which in bad times were epidemic. Families became indigent while their land, tools, and homes were snapped up at bargain prices, often by the merchants themselves, who speculated in land as well, and were building immense parcels. The rich got richer.

Is it any wonder that ordinary people viewed this disastrous economic predicament not as some incidental fallout from vigorous free-market competition, but as an egregious, systemic injustice with political, moral, even spiritual implications? They were being held back, exploited, and even ruined by a monopoly on money and credit. And unlike today’s populist right, founding-era Americans did not imagine that government’s simply leaving markets alone would create new and exciting opportunities for them. They believed their governments should make laws to restrain the overwhelming power of the creditors’ metal and protect those who labored and produced goods from those who planned dynasties of descendants living in luxurious idleness.

And remember: unless people had property in excess of certain amounts, they couldn’t vote. Whig elites — the ones who became patriot leaders, lionized today — axiomatically equated the right of representation with property. It took even more property to run for office. Legislatures erected counties to ensure that representation favored the rich and the cities. They placed cash fees on every imaginable transaction, paralyzing working people’s efforts to pursue legal recourse and enriching lawmakers’ friends and families appointed as collectors and administrators. Roads and other infrastructure built at public expense (and by coerced labor taxes) served the merchant interest, not the people’s. Hardly an embryonic American democracy, representative colonial governments were monopolized by forces that small-scale debtors and tenant farmers could only view as a creditor conspiracy to exploit their labor, prevent their participation, and take what stuff they had.

So they organized in vociferous protest. “Mob” is a loaded term; “crowd” is perhaps more fair, and early American crowd action should be understood as a tactic, in the absence of access to the franchise, for pressuring and even changing government. One of the most famous outbreaks occurred in the 1760’s in North Carolina, when ordinary people briefly had a few champions in the legislature. They forcibly closed courts, tore down corrupt officials’ homes, and finally went to war against the provincial government. Royal Governor William Tryon put that rebellion down — but the King’s appointee was more sympathetic to the people’s plight than upscale American legislators and merchants were.

Crowds could be flamboyantly scary and even violent, but they did not run amok, merely venting. In carefully organized disruptions, people moved en masse into courthouses where debt cases were heard, shutting down a judicial process they considered unjust. They felled huge trees across roads to prevent sheriffs from repossessing homes. They enforced no-buy covenants when foreclosed property went up for auction. They staged daring rescues of prisoners held on debt charges. Serving on juries in debt cases, they refused to convict. Well before the famous Stamp Act riots and other acts of resistance to new British trade laws, American life involved orchestrated crowd actions to prevent financial injustice and push government to act on behalf of ordinary people. After the Revolution, the event known as Shays’ Rebellion became only the most famous of the debtor uprisings that continued the people’s struggle in a new political context.
While emulating Shaysite and other debtor crowd actions today would pose an interesting counter-demonstration to Tea Party efforts, the question this history really raises has to do with what Americans want from their government. . . .

Tea Party history insists ordinary, hard-working Americans of the founding era wanted nothing more than to reduce government and keep it out of economic markets. But what those Americans really wanted can be gleaned from their terminology. The rich called them rioters. The people called themselves regulators.

[Any U.S. history survey textbook will tell about the Regulator Movements in the colonies. I doubt, though, that many, if any Presidential candidates know about them.]