Thom Hartmann has a warning for the billionaires supporting Trump: You endanger yourself if he wins.
He writes:
America’s rightwing billionaires are freaked out about communism and, in their paranoia, they are funding and encouraging the rise of a form of fascism that will eventually turn on them, too. Will they wake up in time?
Louise and I just finished watching the extraordinary Showtime series, A Gentleman in Moscow, which takes place in the years and decades immediately after the Russian Revolution of 1917. A wealthy aristocrat (he was a count) is basically imprisoned in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow and has a front-row seat to observe how the well-intentioned revolt against the excesses of the Romanov dynasty turned into a brutal dictatorship, ultimately headed by a sociopathic Joseph Stalin. The banality of evil.
It flashed me back to the 1960s and a number of conversations I had as a young teenager with my father and heard on TV shows that we watched together like those moderated by William F. BuckleyJr. and Joe Pyne. The fear those days was that Soviet-style communists were plotting to take over America, confiscate all the wealth from the morbidly rich, and then line them up against a wall and shoot them as Lenin and his followers had done in Russia.
It was a fear that, at the time, seemed rational to many Americans.
Fred Koch, the founder of the Koch dynasty, had made his first big money “building refineries, training Communist engineers, and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure” for Stalin. He saw up close and personal how violent the USSR really was, and apparently never forgot it.
Koch Industries — and thus the Tea Party and the best of today’s Republican infrastructure — would never have happened were it not for the money Stalin gave Fred Koch for his services. Neither would the John Birch Society, which Koch heavily fundedin the wake of the “communist” Brown v BoardSupreme Court decision, have ever acquired the influence it did.
The Republican Party fully embraced anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s in a misplaced effort to regain political power after being shattered by the Republican Great Depression. Republican rule (and Harding’s massive tax cuts) during the 1920-1932 era led directly to the Great Crash and everybody back then knew it; the GOP didn’t regain serious control of Congress until the 1990s, when most who could have remembered were dead.
Republican Senator Joe McCarthy led the charge in the 1950s, warning America that “communists” had infiltrated the Army and the State Department and were preparing to take over our country on behalf of Khrushchev’s Soviet Union.
When I was 13, my father gave me a just-published book he’d gotten from a friend in the John Birch Society titled None Dare Call It Treason. A major national bestseller and political bible for Republicans and Birchers, it posited that the US State Department was riddled with communist sympathizers, largely based on circumstantial evidence and the “investigations” conducted a decade earlier by Senator Joe McCarthy.
There was no such conspiracy: the failures of communism were becoming evident, and Americans who publicly proclaimed the need for Soviet-style communism in the United States were few and far between.
But that didn’t stop the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, from frequently and loudly suggesting to the press that there were millions of American communists just waiting to be activated by the right leader. It was one of his favorite ways to label, target, and disempower people like Martin Luther King Jr. and union leaders who were simply petitioning for civil or workers’ rights.
While today there may still be a few actual advocates of Soviet-style communism in the US, to quote Eisenhower about rich rightwingers, “their numbers are small and they are stupid.” But that reality hasn’t stopped as many as a hundred of America’s roughly 800 billionaires from claiming — and probably sincerely believing — that calls for social and economic justice really mean that one day liberals will rise up, come out about their secretly harbored communism, and do to the American rich what Lenin did to the wealthy in Russia in the second decade of the 20th century.
Their kneejerk reaction to progressive policies like high income taxes on the rich and strong social safety net policies for poor and working-class people has been to label those efforts as, essentially, early stage or camel’s-nose-under-the-tent communism. Out of that fear, they fund reactionary rightwing politicians like Trump and Johnson who promise to end the social safety net and keep their taxes below those of average working people.
This is an old model. Hitler rose to power promising to end the “threat of communism” in Germany: he went after communists before he went after Jews. As Pastor Niemöller famously wrote, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out…”
Tragically, the result of the policies pushed by these reactionary, radical Republicans has been the opposite of what they say is their goal of stabilizing American society to ensure their own safety. Republican tax cuts have thrown the nation into over $34 trillion of debt, gutted the middle class, and produced a reactionary embrace of classical fascism as a solution to the crises of debt, offshoring jobs, and a lack of social and economic mobility.
Donald Trump is now promising to turn America into a “unified Reich.”
As Les Leopold brilliantly points out, the main result of the 1980s Republican (and, to some extent, Democratic) embrace of neoliberal policies — driven in large part by the billionaire Davos set — has been to destabilize the American working class and drive them into the arms of the racist and neofascist movement that rose up and took over the GOP with the Trump presidency.
In that regard, the billionaires funding the Trump movement, Project 2025, etc., are now working against their own best interest. While Republican tax cuts and deregulation have produced an explosion of wealth at the top, they’ve also produced wealth inequality that’s led to an armed insurrectionist movement that threatens the kind of social and political instability that actually could lead to a civil war and a resulting Lenin-style backlash against the rich.
Robert Reich points out:
“813 US billionaires control a record $5.7 trillion in wealth. The bottom 50% of Americans control $3.7 trillion in wealth. When ~800 people control more wealth than half a country’s population, we have a very serious problem.”
In fact, the period from the end of WWII to the 1980s Reagan Revolution was one of the most stable — and successful — for American capitalism in our nation’s history. A top income tax bracket ranging from 91% to 74% that kicked in after a few million a year in today’s dollars, and clear laws against stock and wealth manipulation schemes like stock buybacks and private equity, caused a general and widely shared prosperity.
The working class grew in wealth at about the same rate as did the top one percent during that period before Reaganism gutted the union movement and thus the middle class; average workers with a good union job could buy a home and car, take an annual vacation, and put their kids through school with ease. When they reached old age, they had a good pension to supplement their Social Security, making retirement safe and comfortable.
That was, in fact, the story of my father, who spent his life working in a unionized tool and die shop in Lansing, Michigan. It was the story of every family I knew growing up in a working class neighborhood that was rapidly transitioning into a healthy middle class.
Nonetheless, Reagan and the billionaires financing him were convinced the union movement and calls to expand anti-poverty programs initiated by LBJ’s Great Society were the leading edge of a communist takeover that would ruin America and endanger the lives of the morbidly rich. The result of their paranoid policies is the social and economic wreckage of the middle class that drives today’s militia movements and is exploited by rightwing hate radio, Fox “News,” and similar outlets.
It’s not like we weren’t warned. Back in 1776, Adam Smith wrote in his remarkable tome on economics, The Wealth of Nations, exactly how rich people following their own greed inevitably destroy the very society from which they extract profits unless that society establishes strong guardrails to protect itself from them.
He argued that in “rich” countries — where the public good is well administered and there’s a more general prosperity — profits are ample to satisfy the business owners needs, but not excessive. When the rich seize control of most of the profits and wealth, however, and thus have the power to exploit society, he said, they always drive nations into poverty and ruin:
“But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.”
This year, America saw the highest level of corporate profit in the history of this country, and perhaps in the history of capitalism in developed countries worldwide.
A few sentences later, Smith elaborates:
“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this [wealthy] order [of men], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention.
“It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”
The simple reality is that markets, like traffic, work best when they’re appropriately well-regulated. The idea of a “free market” is as absurd as the idea of “free traffic” where everybody is welcome to ignore red lights, traffic lanes, and stop signs. It’s a rhetorical device designed to make average Americans accept changes in the rules regulating capitalism that will benefit the profits of the top one percent and nobody else.
And it’s killing us.
The European, Asian, and Canadian experience of the past 80 years or so has shown that strong union movements, a healthy social safety net (Medicare for All, free or inexpensive college, support for the deeply poor), and legislatures that answer to voters instead of donors (with strict regulation of money in politics) almost always produce general prosperity and social stability.
It’s why the “socialist” nations of Scandinavia — with the strongest union movements, highest income taxes on the rich, and most all-inclusive social safety nets — consistently rate among the happiest nations in the world. None are considering flipping into the Soviet model that fills the nightmares of so many of America’s rightwing billionaires.
While the rise of authoritarianism in post-revolutionary Russia is usually posited as a warning against communism’s forcible redistribution of wealth, in fact it’s a warning against any sort of authoritarianism. It proves that both the extreme left and the extreme right — communists and fascists — must embrace violence and terror to impose their will on a nation’s people.
In that regard, America’s billionaires — along with the rest of us — should be every bit as frightened of the avatars of fascism like Trump, Bannon, and Orbán as they are of the ghosts of the long-dead USSR.
Our current GOP is an extension of the fascism of the 1930s and 40s as well as the paranoia of the 1950s. Both parties adopted neoliberal policies that have contributed to massive income inequality. With manufacturing going overseas, the working class has struggled ever since. Unfortunately, desperate people will fall prey to demagogues. Trump wants to use them for cannon fodder while he feathers his enormous nest.
Democrats have an opportunity to reach out to the working class, but they need to go on the offensive. They do not have to lie or cheat, but they cannot act a though they are above the fray. They need to portray the GOP as Russian sympathizers and pawns of the billionaire class. They need to exploit Trump’s lies, distortions and failed policies directly in front of the cameras repeatedly. They need to tell working people what another Trump term will mean for working people, women, LGBT+, people of color, immigrants, the economy, our allies, social safety net and, most of all, democracy.
BTW “A Gentleman in Moscow” is the best show I have seen this year, and Ewan McGregor’s understated performance is my favorite to date. The show is prescient and relates directly to our current political quagmire.
The novel by Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow, was ennobling and exhilarating. And The Lincoln Highway, by Towles, was just as insightful and even more suspenseful.
Thanks for the recommendations!
The word communism no longer has meaning. It is bantered about by the far right to get attention. The scary part is that too many pay attention. Our economy has turned into the ultimate pyramid scheme, grift, and ponzi scheme. The press proclaims we have the best stock market ever while fewer and fewer share in the largesse. Health care, education, and housing are now being taken over by private equity that has resulted in closed hospitals and 1 million homes sitting empty. If Trump loses, there will be violence, but nothing like the long term chaos that will result if he wins. Once the Tea Party MAGA realize they have been taken, the violence will be profound and someone smarter than Trump or his minions will potentially have the road map to absolute tyranny. MAGA is not just an American movement but a global cabal. This axis of greed and crime will turn on itself and many of the Corporate set will be the target. During the Greek Republic there were four civil wars led by an oligarchy that eventually won out and left the West with the devastation of 2 millennia of empire and monarchy. We are looking at similar circumstances compounded by tech bros who only value their own existence. The only saving grace is that the US is not like a captured Russian or Chinese population. We have thrived under governance that values the right of individuals and the value of humankind. The question is whether our collective muscle memory will allow us to correct course in November and then regain our sanity.
Paul,
The public looks back on the chaotic Trump term as good times, with low inflation and no big wars. They forget the scandals, the rapid turnover in staff, the two chaotic years of COVID, Trump’s claim that it would go away by itself, his embrace of Putin, his big tax cuts for the 1%, and the Jan 6 effort to overturn the election.
his abandonment of Ukraine; his abandonment of our allies, the Kurds, who helped us to defeat ISIS, to be slaughtered by Russia and Assad; his abandonment of the Open Skies and INF Treaties; his order that the Border Patrol randomly SHOOT unarmed, innocent asylum seekers; the fact that hundreds of thousands of Americans dies unnecessarily because of his nontreatment of the Covid crisis; his complete cutting of clean air and water protections; his raising of the federal deficit by 7.8 BILLION dollars.
Off the top of my head
That’s a worthy list for someone to compile: Trump’s list of horrible deeds.
To be specific: recommending that COVID can be stopped by injecting bleach. Dozens of others. Banning the term “climate change” from government documents.
And another: I remember when Trump met with the Russian Foreign minister and a Russian interpreter and would not allow any Americans in the room.
It is not widely known that he basically ended the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act and these had to be reinstated by the Biden Administration. He attempted to completely trash our environmental protections. He is such a complete idiot. No idea what he is doing.
Why his actions, there, are not more frequently commented upon, I am at a loss to understand. SO SIGNIFICANT!!!! Trump was and is a walking, talking, one-man environmental disaster.
The “public,” or much of it anyway, is made up of idiots who haven’t a clue what actually happened during the Trump maladministration. Democracy is dying in the darkness of their complicit ignorance.
Democracy is also a risk in a sea of right wing media that offers lies and propaganda. It is true to some extent that our freedoms have allowed these noxious groups like fascists, libertarians, Christian dominionists and billionaires to have an outsized influence on our policies. Now they have no tolerance for anyone else and want control.
RT, the fascist idea of “liberty” is to compel others to do as they say. They have the liberty, we lose ours.
Meanwhile, that we consider reasonable media does a poor job challenging the right wing disinformation campaign and often merely parrots the grievance. I cannot tell how often I encounter the false equivalency between left and right as if the radical power grab around the world is pursued by all sides. I am not ready to give up on the American public since most polls on reason, be it public schools, guns or health care, show a significant majority understands what we should be doing. The trick is convincing the majority that we need to reject the possible tyranny out of hand.
“reasonable media [do] a poor job challenging the right-wing disinformation campaign”
Substitute “the national Democratic Party” for “reasonable media.” The party should be running issue ads right now featuring clips QUOTING TRUMP attacking Social Security, attacking abortion rights, attacking people who serve in the military, and so on. USING TRUMP AGAINST HIMSELF. It needs to take the freaking gloves off. This “high road” bs needs to stop. The race is neck and neck. The Orange Menace could win. Biden’s disapproval rating is at 59 percent!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
These freedoms and checks on power, once lost, are difficult to get back. Consider Citizens United. Chevron will be the same. It’s truly frightening.
Meanwhile, that we consider reasonable media does a poor job challenging the right wing disinformation campaign and often merely parrots the grievance. I cannot tell how often I encounter the false equivalency between left and right as if the radical power grab around the world is pursued by all sides. I am not ready to give up on the American public since most polls on reason, be it public schools, guns or health care, show a significant majority understands what we should be doing. The trick is convincing the majority that we need to reject the possible tyranny out of hand.
When (I didn’t want to say “if”) Traitor rump loses in 2024 and ends up in prison for the rest of his life, those billionaires will still be there. And when they are gone, their generational wealth will also be there. Who will get that wealth? The Waltons, Koch brothers and Murdock seem to have raised children to continue that damage to the world and all life on it.
The Bible got it right when it talks about false prophets, greed (and the power wealth buys) and what it does.
Lord Acton was also right.
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.” “Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.”
Your moment of whatever the opposite of Zen is for 6.15.24:
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