Opinion | An insidious ideology propagated by the

morbidly rich has stopped progress dead in its tracks

By Thom Hartmann - Commentary
Published May 23, 2022

Ronald Reagan painting (Edalisse Hirst/Flickr)

10 10
Listen to this article now
Powered by Trinity Audio

00:00

This article was paid for by Raw Story subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go
ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.

Americans aren’t getting what a majority of us want, even when we show up in

majority numbers to vote.

The problem is that we’ve trusted the rich to run things here in America for 42 years
now since the Reagan Revolution, and it’s not working.
 g , g

The morbidly rich and their political and bureaucratic factotums, along with the
media and a considerable retinue of hangers-on, are converging on Davos,
Switzerland this week for a conference themed around “History at a Turning Point.”

At this meeting 42 years ago, Henry Kissinger warned about the Soviet Union’s
nuclear weapons and the first serious rumblings of neoliberal “free trade” policy were
rolled out, arguably bringing America today’s offshored jobs and supply chain crises.

IN OTHER NEWS: Trump is facing an embarrassing defeat – but here's why it might
not matter

Political scientist Samuel Huntington coined the term “Davos Man” to disparagingly
describe its attendees, although the group played a positive role in ending apartheid
in South Africa and preventing a war between Greece and Turkey, if media reports
from the time are to be believed.

From rock stars to heads of state, the global elite appear to believe they have it all
figured out.

After all, doesn’t their wealth prove their brilliance? And doesn’t brilliance at busting
unions and destroying competitors translate into the right stuff for guiding the fate
of nations?

For example, Elon Musk, who’s the richest man in the world on some days, has
announced that he’s tossing in with the GOP, tweeting that:

“In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But
they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and
will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold … ?￢
ﾀﾝ
READ MORE: 'Why didn't Trump stop it?' GOP voters stumped when questioned on
claims that Antifa was behind Jan. 6

Cynics argue it was a preemptive tweet so he could claim the sexual harassment
allegations that he knew were soon coming out against him were just “dirty tricks”
from the party he’d spurned. But I’m inclined to believe Musk really does heart the
GOP; after all, they’re the party of union-busting, privatizing NASA, and a 3% top
functional income tax rate for billionaires
functional income tax rate for billionaires.

Bill Gates is invited onto talk shows to pontificate about education or infectious
diseases, when his main claim to fame is having bought a computer operating system
for a song and turned it into a near-trillion-dollar enterprise.

Howard Schultz tried to become President of the United States, but is now back to
ordinary billionaire union-busting at Starbucks.

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos, occasionally the world’s second richest man, is tweeting about
politics, too, prompting some in the media to wonder out loud if he’s on the verge of
following other morbidly rich men like Donald Trump, Mitt Romney, and Mike
Bloomberg into politics.

Whether it’s the Kochs and DeVos’s of the world content to sit quietly in the
background and pour money into politics, a hobby the Supreme Court handed them
on a platter with its Citizens United decision legalizing political bribery, or hedge
fund/private equity multimillionaires like JD Vance and David McCormick actually
running for elective office this year, more and more wealthy people are jumping into
politics with both feet.

WATCH: Conservative Alice Stewart humiliated after trying to tell a Catholic how
Catholicism works

And Americans — unlike Europeans who still have an echoing memory of the horrors
of 1000 years of feudalism when a tiny class of very rich people literally owned and
ran everything — seem to love it.

Even when it means we don’t get what we want, we still embrace wealthy people in
politics and tolerate politicians who are openly owned by particular wealthy
industries.

How can that be?

Ever since the first warlord kings used brutality and armies to seize lands and enslave
their people, the rich and powerful have claimed that their right to rule comes from
God.

In most cases, they also proclaim that the privileges they’ve seized for themselves
must roll over to their children and grandchildren, whether through birth, class, or
caste.

Many British coins have the inscription “ELIZABETH II : D G REG : F D” on them, an

abbreviation for the Latin Dei Gratia Regina Fidei Defensor which roughly translates
to: “She rules [Britain] and defends the faith by the grace of God.”

The American version of this comes via the followers of the 16th century protestant
reformer, John Calvin, who fled European religious persecution and populated the
east coast and Michigan in the 17th and 18th centuries. Central to the precepts of
Calvinism are the doctrines of “total depravity” and “unconditional election.”

Calvinism asserts that because we are each born out of a woman’s womb, we’re all
“dead in sin” (totally depraved) and unable to save ourselves. Instead of salvation
coming from confession or good works, Calvin taught, only his god could decide
(unconditionally elect) who would be saved and who would eventually rot in hell…
and that was determined before we were born (predestination).

This solved a big problem for many of the royal families of Europe in the Middle
Ages: how to use Christianity (denial of which was then a capital crime) to justify
their absolute rule over their subjects.

If Calvin’s god decided who was to be saved and who was to burn even before birth,
how then could mankind separate the “saved” good people who really should rule the
land from the “sinners” and the born-wicked who aspired to political positions?

The answer was simple, Calvin’s followers concluded: the outward sign of God’s
election or salvation was wealth.

Since his god controlled everything and man was without agency, then through
“irresistible grace” (the fourth of five Calvinist doctrines) Calvin’s god was telling us
all who he’d preordained for political power.

People were rich and in charge, many Calvinists believed, because they were blessed
by God and, as Paul wrote in Ephesians 1:4–6 and Calvin loved to quote, chosen by
Him “before the foundation of the world.”

God determined the order of secession in Calvin’s mind; more modern day
conservatives would replace the role of God with science.

William F. Buckley and George Will advocate a secular version of Calvinism: instead
 y g
of a distant god determining who should rule, DNA would do it.

The smart should be in charge while the dumb should keep their mouths shut and,
preferably, not vote or participate in politics at all.

And how do we know who’s so incredibly smart they should run the government
either directly or through the politicians they own?

Those who have the most money are the smartest, best, most wise, and moral…as are
their heirs!

Herbert Spencer, in his 1842 treatise The Proper Sphere of Government, made
essentially this argument, suggesting that while happiness and safety in society were
the goals of political activity, governments had to be guided by people who had the
best DNA. (He also argued in the same treatise that government should never
provide poor people with education or health care because of their inferior genes:
Spencer was a conservative ahead of his time.)

Spencer’s ideas led directly to Francis Galton’s invention of the word eugenics in his
1869 book Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences. Eugenics
held that sterilizing or even killing “defective” or “substandard” people would clean
up our gene pool and improve the overall intelligence and fitness of the human race
for both current and future generations.

Eugenics was enthusiastically adopted by Winston Churchill, who tried

unsuccessfully to make it law in Great Britain in 1912.

As I write in The Hidden History of the War on Voting, American President Woodrow
Wilson picked up the mantle and promoted it heavily in the United States during his
presidency, leading every state in the union to put compulsory sterilization laws or
policies into effect.

Adolf Hitler, of course, picked up Churchill’s and Wilson’s slogans almost verbatim
and applied them to Jews, Gypsies, the mentally disabled, and homosexuals (in that
order of aggression), leading Germany straight to the Holocaust.

But even the Holocaust didn’t dissuade America’s political right from asserting that
governance should be the exclusive realm of the wealthy because of their superior
genes, proven by the size of their money bins.
George Will has argued, for example, that if voting is easy and widespread we’ll
experience a sort of reverse social Darwinism causing people of poor quality and
intelligence to vote and thus screw things up. As he wrote in an article for The
Washington Post in 2012, “As indifferent or reluctant voters are nagged to the polls—
or someday prodded there by a monetary penalty for nonvoting—the caliber of the
electorate must decline.”

We’ve come a long way from believing gods want the wealthy to rule over us,
although that sentiment and Spencer’s conflation of poverty (and race) with “bad
DNA” ripple as a persistent undercurrent through conservative American politics.

This nation was founded, however, on the rejection of hereditary aristocracy, and
we’d be wise to return to the precept that the will of the people — rather than the
will of the rich — must determine public policy.

For governing our nation, I’ll take a Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders over a Jeff Bezos or
Elon Musk any day of the week, as the old saying goes.

Wisdom, insight, experience, understanding of the consequences of policy, a deep

grounding in the history of the United States and of democratic institutions around
the world: I see almost none of these things in most of our nation’s morbidly rich
who aspire to public office.

America’s “General Welfare” and the will of the people must again become superior
to the will of organized money, like they were here before the presidency of Ronald
Reagan stopped America’s progress dead in our tracks.

That pre-Reagan time is when we created Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, federal
aid to education, debt-free college, our national highway system, NASA, modern
nonprofit hospitals, quality public schools unrivaled anywhere in the world, and a
unionized middle class where working-class people could take an annual vacation,
buy a car and a home, and save enough for a decent retirement.

Only when American government is again run by politicians who put working class
Americans first can popular policies like a national healthcare system, debt-free
college, well-funded public schools, and a clean environment — all supported by
more than half of Americans but opposed by the morbidly rich — become American
realities.
 NOW WATCH: Jan. 6 panel will reveal bombshell evidence against Trump in six
public hearings -- starting and ending in prime time

Jan 6 panel will reveal bombshell evidence against Trump in six public hea…
hea…

Jan 6 panel will reveal bombshell evidence against Trump in six public hearings
www.youtube.com

Stories Chosen For You