1/4/2014 6:12 PM
A quickie while doing some year-end cleaning…
Because of family visits and travel, my wife and I agreed
that the New Year starts Monday.
Did some New Year’s Resolutions with her earlier, and now I’m
doing a bit of office cleaning.
While straightening and culling the books on my dresser,
where (supposedly) I keep the important or ‘to read soon’ books, I pulled out
my Library of America copy of de Tocqueville’s “Democracy In America.” I broke it open to refresh my memory of the
book, which I’d read twenty years ago or more, in paperback, unabridged. Both
volumes. Took me a year.
I recommend everyone read at least the first volume. Damned
near any federal judge has read both. It’s the most referenced non-law book,
and certainly the most referenced foreign publication, in the history of our
Supreme Court’s rulings. Because even in 1835, this aristocratic Frenchman did
the best description and analysis of our country, of how it’s set up, how it
works, and why, of any author before or since. (This includes our founders.)
I broke it open to his opening line, in the Introduction to
Volume 1. This young, over-pampered French aristocrat wrote, “Among the new
things that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none
struck me more forcefully than the equality of conditions.” Two paragraphs
later, on this equality, he writes, “It stood constantly before me as the focal
point toward which all my observations converged.” He compares the “extreme of development
it had attained in the United States” to how it is “advancing rapidly toward power in
Europe.”
If equality of condition actually was “the original fact”
that underpins the the facts of how America is and how it works successfully,
then we’ve been doing something horribly un-American for the last 40 years or
so. We’ve been actively creating an aristocracy, a social class that has never
missed a meal or a mortgage payment, whose beds are made by others, and whose
incomes come from interest earned on other people’s money, whether inherited
monies or those of their renters and workers.
These people have always existed. Some started at the bottom
and worked their way up. Some jocularly remark on buying and selling apples at
a profit in their childhood, until the y finally inherited 300 million dollars
when their father died.
Then, they were individuals. As a disorganized group, they
owned maybe twenty per cent of America’;s wealth. But they now run the country,
not just by leveraging a minority percentage of America’s wealth, but by
actually owning a majority of it, both in real property and in total annual
income. They wield so much financial power that they now own all three branches
of our federal government, as well as, often, entire state governments. (Read
up on the current Secretary of the Budget Pope, in North Carolina.)
Without even turning the first page of de Tocqueville’s
introduction, I read where he notices them too, from way back in 1835. “[N]ot everyone
judges [this “democratic revolution”] in the same way. There are those who
regard it as something new and, believing it to be an accident, still hope to
arrest it”.
I could name names. Bet you could name a few, too.
And as Americans who believe in our democratic revolution,
we have to stop them.
1/4/2014 6:45 PM
