Screwed the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class (3 page)

And then there are most of the rest of us, who have good jobs but still don't feel secure about the future. Ralph and Sally both get health insurance through their jobs, but their mortgage eats up more than 60 percent of their income, and the clothes and the necessities they buy for their two kids consume whatever might be left after groceries and utilities. They have health insurance but no pension. Their retirement is based on the few thousand dollars a year they can put into their IRAs. They wonder how they will be able to send their kids to college and afford to retire.

Today a man like my dad couldn't support a family of six on one paycheck. The middle class my dad belonged to is on its deathbed. Meanwhile, sitting around the pool, waiting for the dividend checks to roll in (while paying a maximum 15 percent income tax), the corporate class grows even wealthier.

How can this be?

How is it that companies could sell asbestos when they knew it would kill people? Why do people go hungry in America, the world's wealthiest nation? Why is it that people like you and me who work long, full days cannot afford to get sick, cannot buy houses, and cannot send their kids to college? What's happened to the middle class?

These questions are about our economy, but the answer is about who we are as a country.

The most ancient form of democracy is found among virtually all indigenous peoples of the world. It's the way humans have lived for more than 150,000 years. There are no rich and no poor among
most tribal people—everybody is "middle class." There is also little hierarchy. The concept of "chief " is one that Europeans brought with them to America—which in large part is what produced so much confusion in the 1600s and 1700s in America as most Native American tribes would never delegate absolute authority to any one person to sign a treaty. Instead decisions were made by consensus in these most ancient cauldrons of democracy.

The Founders of this nation, and the Framers of our Constitution, were heavily influenced and inspired by the democracy they saw all around them. Much of the U.S. Constitution is based on the Iroquois Confederacy—the five (later six) tribes who occupied territories from New England to the edge of the Midwest. It was a democracy with elected representatives, an upper and lower house, and a supreme court (made up entirely of women, who held final say in five of the six tribes).

As Benjamin Franklin noted to his contemporaries at the Constitutional Convention: "It would be a very strange thing if Six Nations of Ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union and be able to execute it in such a manner, as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble, and yet a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies."

The Framers modeled the oldest democracies, and the oldest forms of the middle class, and thus helped create the truly widespread and strong first middle class in the history of modern civilization.

Back in Europe, however, the sort of democracy the Framers were borrowing and inventing, and even the existence of a middle class itself, was considered unnatural. For most of the seven thousand years of recorded human history, all the way back to the
Gilgamesh Epic,
the oldest written story, what we call a middle class is virtually unheard of—as was democracy. Throughout most of the history of what we call civilization, an unrestrained economy and the idea of hierarchical social organization has always
produced a small ruling elite and a large number of nearly impoverished workers.

Up until the founding of America, the middle class was considered unnatural by many political philosophers. Thomas Hobbes wrote in his 1651 magnum opus
Leviathan
that the world was better off with the rule of the few over the many, even if that meant that the many were impoverished. Without a strong and iron-fisted ruler, Hobbes wrote, there would be "no place for industry . . . no arts, no letters, no society." Because Hobbes believed that ordinary people couldn't govern themselves, he believed that most people would be happy to exchange personal freedom and economic opportunity for the ability to live in safety and security. For the working class to have both freedom
and
security, Hobbes suggested, was impossible.

Our nation's Founders disagreed. They believed in the rights of ordinary people to self-determination, so they created a form of government where We the People rule. They declared that all people, and not just the elite, have the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." (In that declaration, Thomas Jefferson replaced John Locke's famous "life, liberty, and property" with "life, liberty, and
happiness
"—the first time the word had ever appeared in the founding document of any nation.) They believed that We the People could create a country founded on personal freedom and economic opportunity for all. The Founders believed in the power of a middle class; and in defiance of Hobbes and the conventional wisdom of Europe, they believed that democracy and a middle class were the "natural state of man."

As John Quincy Adams argued before the Supreme Court in 1841 on behalf of freeing rebelling slaves in the Amistad case, he stood before and pointed to a copy of the Declaration of Independence:

That DECLARATION says that every man is "endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights," and that "among
these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." . . . I will not here discuss the right or the rights of slavery, but I say that the doctrine of Hobbes, that War is the natural state of man, has for ages been exploded, as equally disclaimed and rejected by the philosopher and the Christian. That it is utterly incompatible with any theory of human rights, and especially with the rights which the Declaration of Independence proclaims as self-evident truths.

It turns out that the Founders knew something Hobbes didn't know: political democracy and an economic middle class is the natural state of humankind. Indeed, it's the natural state of the entire animal kingdom.

For example, biologists used to think that animal societies were ruled by alpha males. Recent studies, however, have found that while it's true that alpha males (and females, in some species) have the advantage in courtship rituals, that's where their power ends. Biologists Tim Roper and L. Conradt discovered that animals don't follow a leader but instead move together.
⁷

James Randerson did a follow-up study with red deer to prove the point.
⁸
How does a herd of deer decide it's time to stop grazing and go toward the watering hole? As they're grazing, various deer point their bodies in seemingly random directions, until it comes time to go drink. Then individuals begin to graze while facing one of several watering holes. 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.

When I interviewed Tim Roper about his research at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, he told me that when his findings were first published, scientists from all over the world called to tell him that they were seeing the same thing with their research subjects. Birds flying in flocks aren't following a leader but monitoring the motions of those around them for variations
in the flight path; when more than 50 percent have moved in a particular direction—even if it's only a quarter-inch in one direction or another—the entire flock "suddenly" veers off that way. It's the same with fish and even with swarms of gnats. Roper said that his colleagues were telling him that from ants to gorillas, democracy is the norm among animals. Just like with indigenous human societies—which have had hundreds of thousands of years of trial and error to work out the best ways to live—democracy is the norm among animals, and (other than for the Darwinian purpose of finding the best mate) hierarchy/kingdom is the rarity.

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). In a democracy there may be an elite (like the alpha male deer), but they don't rule the others. 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. 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 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.

This is the American Dream. It's the America my dad grew up in and the America I grew up in. It's the America that is quickly slipping away from us under the burden of crony capitalism and a political system corrupted by it.

When there is no American Dream, when there is no middle class, there cannot be real democracy. That's why when elections are brought to nations that are in crisis or that don't have a broad, stable, well-educated middle class—such as Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and the Palestinian territories—the result is aristocrats, "strongmen," or theocrats exploiting those elections as a way of gaining decidedly undemocratic power.

America's Founders understood the relationship between the middle class—what Thomas Jefferson called the
yeomanry
—and democracy. Jefferson's greatest fear for the young American nation was not a new king but a new economic aristocracy. 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 upon our ability to play referee to the game of business and to protect labor and the public good. It is both our right and our responsibility, Jefferson insisted, to control "overgrown wealth" from becoming "dangerous to the state"—which is, so long as we are a democratic republic, We the People.

When wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few and the middle class shrinks to the point where it's no longer a politically potent force, democracy becomes a feudal aristocracy—the rule of the elite. As Franklin D. Roosevelt pointed out in 1936, 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. There are leaders and elections and all the forms, but they're only for show; the game is now rigged.

There's a battle waging today in America that will decide the future of the middle class. 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.

Those who don't want democracy understand that a middle class will always work to create democracy, which is why they are so opposed to middle-class-creating government policies like free public education, limits on the concentration of ownership of the media, and social safety nets like universal health care and Social 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? They often call themselves "conservatives" or "neo-conservatives," but these people are not true conservatives. They don't want to "conserve" or protect the America the Founders gave us. I call them "cons" because they are conning America.

My dad was a staunch Republican all his life, but he didn't believe that a small elite should rule America. 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 democratic heritage and the cons who want to create an
America that benefits only a small elite organized around corporate power and inherited wealth.

Two types of cons have worked together to screw the middle class. Call them the
predator cons
and the
true believer cons.