Keep them poor and they won't have time or strength for politics

A week ago I wrote about an article posted by Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community. In that one he wrote that we are in the final stages of Reaganism – the course set in motion when Reagan significantly cut the taxes on the rich, coupled with the Supreme Court of the time loosening donations to political campaigns. Hartmann posted again, this time asking whether the rich are weakening our democracy just to amass more money, or is there a deeper issue. When an article begins that way the logical guess is to say, yes there is something deeper. However, I think there is something even deeper that Hartmann missed. Back in the 1950s conservatives began to write about America having too much democracy. Yeah, that’s telling. Conservatives – mostly the rich – were becoming alarmed at the growing size of the middle class. The previous article said that the middle class had reached two-thirds of the population. The fear was that the middle class was growing faster than the rich class and when people reached the middle class they would have enough leisure time and financial cushion to be politically active. Hartmann reviewed some of the influences of conservative thinking. One was the book The Conservative Mind by Russel Kirk. His first chapter discussed Edmund Burke of close to the turn of the 19th century. Burke’s book (not named) discussed Britain’s restrictions on democracy – who could vote and run for office, and the British maximum wage. No, that’s not a typo. Limit how much a person is paid, keep them on the edge of poverty, and they wouldn’t have time or strength to get involved in politics. The middle class certainly did have time to get involved in politics. In the 1960s there was women’s liberation, campus protests against the Vietnam War, black people demanding Civil and Voting Rights, and the labor movement flexing its muscles and calling frequent strikes.

The Republican/Conservative “solution” to the “national crisis” these movements represented was put into place with the election of 1980: the project of the Reagan Revolution was to dial back democracy while taking the middle class down a peg, and thus end the protests and social instability.

Hartmann then listed many things Reagan did to attack the middle class. I’ve already mentioned the tax cuts on the rich. Reagan also raised taxes 11 times on the middle class, plus adding taxes on Social Security income, unemployment benefits, and tips. He disallowed deductions for credit card, car loan, and student debt interest. He declared war on unions. His VP brought in his son George W. to build bridges with fanatical evangelical Christianity because they also opposed women’s rights and Civil Rights. And he attacked the idea that government should provide some amount of care for its citizens. Among his successes is an entire generation of students so saddled with debt they aren’t willing to jeopardize their future by “acting up” on campus. About the depth Hartmann missed. He said the goal of conservatives was to end “social instability.” So what does that mean? Hartmann didn’t clarify. So I’ll give it a try. Conservatives are highly invested in the social hierarchy with, of course, themselves at the top. “Social instability” is anything that might disrupt their position at the top or, even worse (for them), do away with the need for a social hierarchy. Hartmann says there is a way out from under conservative control: mobilize. He quoted a phrase both Sanders and Obama were fond of saying: “Democracy is not a spectator sport.” The comments to Hartmann’s post were indeed lively. One I thought was worth repeating is by Al B Tross, who wrote:

Capitalism knows no morality. Capitalism, an economic system, or society, where the only motivator is greed, and the only measure is money. We have become a transactional, not a civil, society.

I’ve written little about the United Methodist Church in the last couple years. Back in 2020, just before the pandemic hit the US I attended a gathering of progressives getting ready for the 2020 General Conference, the denomination’s legislative body. The major piece before that Conference was a carefully negotiated proposal for an amicable split – conservatives would get help forming their own denomination that would allow them to keep LGBTQ people out of leadership roles and the progressives who stayed would then have the majority to fully welcome LGBTQ people. Of course, that GC 2020 was postponed a year, then canceled. The next GC won’t happen until 2024. In the meantime the conservative denomination was formed, called the Global Methodist Church, and congregations began to disaffiliate from the UMC, many to join the GMC. All that was done without the financial help the big 2020 proposal would have supplied. So much happened the progressive parties who had negotiated it pulled out. And I haven’t paid much attention to it all. I occasionally look at articles Rev. Jeremy Smith writes for his blog Hacking Christianity, though it has been months since I’ve looked. A post from earlier this year is about Methodism 2.0. To describe it he uses the metaphor of the spider and the starfish. A spider has a head that makes all the decisions. Kill the head and you kill the spider. A starfish has a nervous system spread through the body. Chop off a limb and it will regrow. That comes from the book The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. Change comes from the bottom up, not top down. Smith applies that to United Methodism. At the 2012 GC (which I attended as an observer and which did not go well – see blog entries from the end of May that year) the big push for an LGBTQ inclusive church was defeated, yet Bishop Talbert started a movement when he called for Biblical Obedience over the denomination’s rule book prohibiting LGBTQ pastors. His ideas spread in spite of the leadership. But as for the denomination...

In short, traditionalists required a super-majority to finally excise progressives from United Methodism, which they didn’t have. And progressives needed a majority to excise the sin of antigay polity from United Methodism, which they didn’t have. So, stalemate.

But within a span of three years the traditionalists, the spiders, lost their power. First, they won a draconian policy at the special 2019 GC, which led to considerable blowback. Second, by forming the GMC they lost credibility with the Judicial Council, the denomination’s court, which turned against them. Third, all of the traditionalist bishops have been replaced with the most progressive and diverse class. And fourth, with 2000 congregations having disaffiliated, traditionalist no longer have a majority in many state conferences. And now all five American jurisdictions – including the most conservative South East – have passed a statement supporting LGBTQ inclusion. Meteor Blades of Kos wrote the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court ruling that permitted a ban on bump stocks. These are devices that essentially turn a semi-automatic rifle into an automatic rifle. Yes, the case will go to the Supremes, where they will eventually rule in favor of death. My interest isn’t so much in the details of the case, and Blades provides plenty. Instead, I’ll look at Blades’ quote of Elie Mystal, written for The Nation:

But the legal wrangling about the technical function of how these things are designed to kill us highlights a larger problem: the legal futility of one-off weapon bans. It’s a bitter pill for people to swallow, because bans focused on specific weapons are practically effective and feel politically achievable. But legally, their impact is fleeting. They don’t offer permanent solutions to our problems. Gun bans are a temporary therapeutic, not a long-term cure to our disease of gun violence. That’s because the gun industry will always produce a newer, better bump stock. It will always make different, more deadly weapons. It will always refine the speed and killing power of firearms. And the plodding regulatory process simply will not, and likely cannot, keep up with whatever gunmakers do to murder people next. ... Our gun laws are a deadly joke. They will continue to be jokes as long as we try to solve this problem one weapon at a time. It’s folly to try to regulate which particular overcompensation machine aggrieved men are allowed to smuggle into their trousers. Instead, we should regulate the category of people allowed to purchase any weapon, of any kind, at all.

NPR posted a story about the history of abortion rights last June before Roe v Wade was overturned. I missed it then. They aired it again this morning. In it host A Martínez talked to Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah hosts of the NPR history podcast Throughline. Before 1860 there were no laws in America banning abortion. Horatio Storer didn’t think abortion was good, so he started his campaign by writing a letter pretending to be the president of the American Medical Association. In it he condemned abortion on moral grounds. At this point in the story I’m already thinking this has something to do with one group of people believing they are more superior than another. All abortion laws in the 20th century revolve around that. And I was right, though the reason was not just the oppression of women. Storer’s reasoning was fairly straightforward. The birth rate for Protestant white women had been declining over the 19th century. His fear was there wouldn’t be enough Protestant white babies to stay ahead of the babies by the incoming migrants, the Catholics, the newly freed black people, and the Chinese. So Protestant white women had better take one for the team and stay home and have babies. Along with criminalizing abortion Storer saw a chance to knock out the doctor’s competition – midwives, who he slandered as unclean. That required women to get their care from male doctors.