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When a majority of deer are pointing toward one particular watering hole, they all move in that direction.
Randerson saw instances where the alpha deer was actually one of the last to move toward the hole rather than one of the first. Roper said that his colleagues were telling him that from ants to gorillas, democracy is the norm among animals. Thus, we discover, this close relationship between the middle class and democracy is burned into our DNA—along with that of the entire animal kingdom an ironic term, given this new information.
Instead the group is ruled by the vast middle—what in economic terms we would call a middle class. A true democracy both produces a middle class and requires a middle class for survival.
Sheldon and Anita Drobney read my article online, and as Sheldon noted in his book The Road to Air America: Breaking the Right Wing Stranglehold on Our Nation's Airwaves in which he reprints the article , it became the first template for a business plan for that ultimately ill-fated network. It may Framing 95 even include deceased relatives, like my father and my grandparents. What a frame will disclose, however, and very powerfully, is how to think about a certain set of people. He has studied ancient democracies 7 8 Part I: We the People all over the world, including the Iroquois Confederacy, which inspired Jefferson. First, agriculture is more efficient at generating calories than hunting.
Like the twin strands of DNA, democracy and the middle class are inextricably intertwined, and to break either is to destroy the viability of both. In human society as well, to have a democracy we must have a middle class.
And to have a true middle class, a majority of the people in a nation must be educated and economically secure and must have full and easy access to real news so that they can make informed decisions. Democracy requires that its citizens be able to afford to take care of themselves and their families when they get sick, to afford a decent place to live, to find meaningful and well-paying work, and to anticipate—and enjoy—a secure retirement. When there is no American Dream, when there is no middle class, there cannot be real democracy.
He worried that if a small group of citizens became too wealthy—if America became polarized between the very rich and the very poor—democracy would vanish. Our democracy depends on our ability to play referee to the game of business and to protect labor and the public good. As Franklin D. Roosevelt pointed out in , the rule of the many requires that We the People have a degree of economic as well as political freedom. When We the People are given the opportunity to educate ourselves, earn a living wage, own our own homes, and feel confident that we have good child care, health care, and care in our old age—in short, when America has a thriving middle class—America also has a thriving democracy.
Without this strong and vibrant middle class, democracy cannot exist; instead it becomes a caricature of itself. On the one side are those like Thomas Jefferson who believe that a free people can govern themselves and have the right to organize their government to create a strong middle class—which will, in turn, keep the government democratic. On the other side are those like Thomas Hobbes who believe that only a small elite can and should govern and that the people should be willing to pay the price of poverty in exchange for security.
They understand that such policies have, and always will, bring about a strong and vibrant middle class that will, in turn, both demand and create a more democratic society. Who are these people who want to undermine the middle class? He was glad the government provided safety nets like Social Security and Medicare and made unionization possible. My dad, and most of the other real conservatives I have known, believed in the middle class and believed in democracy.
The battle we face in America today is not between liberal and conservative, nor is it between big-D Democrat and Republican. The battle we face today is between those of us who want to protect our The Story of Carl 23 democratic heritage and the cons who want to create an America that benefits only a small elite organized around corporate power and inherited wealth.
The Con Game Two types of cons have worked together to screw the middle class. Call them the predator cons and the true believer cons. Predator Cons Predator cons are simply greedy. They are not conservatives in any true sense—they are not interested in conserving American values or even in keeping American wealth in America.
They have conned America into believing that they care about the American economy when all they care about is making money for themselves. Free-trade agreements lower wages for American workers—they do not create well-paying jobs in America. They create record trade deficits.
Agreements like these—such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement CAFTA —are passed now by a single vote in the Senate in only because corporate America needs them to reap tremendous profits from the low wages they extract in nonunionized, nondemocratic, and socially disorganized countries; predator cons succeed in passing 24 Part I: We the People these agreements by threatening to withhold campaign funds from anyone who dares to oppose them.
True Believer Cons The second type of con is perhaps even more dangerous than the predators. Just as true believers in communism brought about the death of tens of millions in Russia from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution until the fall of the Berlin Wall, so too the true believers in laissez-faire capitalism believe that if only government would go away, everything would be just fine. Employers would become benevolent, employees would be enthusiastic, and bureaucratic inefficiencies would vanish. Like Thomas Hobbes, the true believers assume that society will run best when run by the small elite that comes out on top.
Ronald Reagan was a true believer. In fact, the fundamental goal of business—to maximize assets and profits while externalizing costs and liabilities—is often destructive to the public good. This becomes particularly obvious when business owners do not live or otherwise participate in the same society and culture as their customers.
The same is not true, however, for multinational corporations.
Saying this sort of thing out loud loses elections, so these conservatives have learned to con the public by hiding their agenda behind euphemisms and double-speak. The Bush Jr. Our nation was wracked by the classic scourges of poverty—epidemics of disease, crime, and riots— and the average working person was little more than a serf. The concepts of owning a home, having health or job security, and enjoying old age were unthinkable for all but the mercantile class and the rich. America seemed to be run for the robber barons and not for the thousands who worked for them.
Democracy in America was at its lowest ebb; our nation more resembled the Victorian England that Charles Dickens wrote of than the egalitarian and middle-class-driven democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville saw here in All that changed in the s, when Franklin D. His programs worked, creating what has been called the Golden Age of the middle class. During these years, from the s until Reagan took power, democracy in America resurged along with the middle class. Over the past five years, the US economy has experienced the slowest job creation since the s, with fewer privatesector hours worked in than in For the first time since the Great Depression, in American consumers spent more than they earned, and the government budget deficit was larger than all business savings combined.
Without democracy there can be no middle class; and without a middle class, democracy will wither and die. Whether our economy benefits billionaires or the rest of us is determined by how we handle economic policy. It depends especially on a fundamental grasp of two concepts: classical economics and an internal government-spending stimulus. Classical Economics For more than years—until Ronald Reagan became president— economics was not hard to understand.
Everyone could figure out that when working people have money, they spend most of it. When extremely wealthy people have money, they save most of it.
Consumer demand in turn creates business opportunities, and that creates jobs. In Reagan introduced America to trickle-down economics, also called by George H. Kings throughout history had simply claimed the divine right of kings. Even though voodoo economics had never been tried, Reagan was able to convince average Americans that it would work, and got it pushed through Congress.
To institute his voodoo economics, Reagan slashed top marginal income tax rates on millionaires and billionaires from 70 percent to 50 percent in and all the way down to 28 percent by Rather than create income, the Reagan tax cuts dropped the United States into the greatest debt in the history of the world.
Reagan turned to his conservative friend Alan Greenspan, who suggested that Reagan could hide part of the debt by borrowing a few hundred billion dollars a year from the Social Security Trust Fund. Additionally, as would be expected, the rich got fabulously richer under Reagan. From to , the income of the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans rose by 25 percent while the income of the bottom 40 percent stayed absolutely flat.
The Story of Carl 29 Although trickle-down economics did produce millions of jobs, they were almost all outside of the United States, while at the same time good US manufacturing jobs vanished. The only accomplishment of trickle-down economics was to produce a nation of peons. The alternative is to return to classical economics. When working people have money to spend, they create a demand for goods and services, which allows entrepreneurs to start businesses to meet that demand.
The entrepreneurs employ more working people, who then have more money to spend. The middle class grows. Think about it.