The song that was inspired by this article is available here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is available here.
“If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.”
—Thomas Paine, The Crisis, December 23, 1776
Marjorie Taylor Greene told Republicans at the RNC this week that Donald Trump “will make us wealthy.”
What’s she really saying? And who is “us”?
A lot of words get thrown around to describe what we can expect with a MAGA Republican administration at full strength. From “authoritarian” to “fascist” to “Christian Nationalist” and worse, however, most of these words and phrases have — for most Americans — no specific meaning and so are often just considered either a cheap slur or hyperbole.
But the reality is that the MAGA wing of the GOP (now fully in control of the Party) and the rightwing billionaires who fund the think tanks and networks that keep it alive do have a very specific idea about how America should be governed.
And there’s nothing new or modern about it.
It’s the second-most ancient form of governance humanity knows (behind democracy), described in detail in works both modern and ancient, dating all the way back to ancient Sumeria, China, Mesoamerica, and Europe; some countries incorporate it into their official names to this day.
It’s called “kingdom.”
Most people, when they think of a kingdom, think of a king: a ruler with absolute power over his subjects. Absolute immunity for all official acts. A monarch accountable to nobody except his own whims. A man who must be obeyed under all circumstances, lest dreadful consequences befall those who defy him.
And, of course, six Republicans on the Supreme Court just this month granted that very sort of power to the American presidency, an abomination completely at odds with the form of government our Founders and Framers created and generations of Americans fought and died to preserve for us, our children, and our grandchildren.
But kingdoms are also economic systems. In many regards, in fact, the economics of a kingdom are more essential to understanding how power is acquired, wielded, and held over time by the sovereign and their class — in defiance of the majority of the people — than any other single factor.
In a kingdom, like in a democratic republic, there are essentially three economic classes: the rich, the middle class, and the poor. They’re organized quite differently in these two systems, though, as history tells us.
For example, when Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol he introduced us to two of those three economic classes. Ebenezer Scrooge was part of the United Kingdom’s small middle class, made up of doctors, lawyers, and small business owners. It was probably less than 3-5 percent of England’s working population.
Dickens draws a contrast between middle-class small businessman Scrooge, with his single employee, and the mayor of London, who drew his role in society from wealth and nobility (the 1 percent of the day), when he wrote:
“The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor’s household should…”
In that same paragraph, Dickens describes the poor-working-class tailor’s wife as “lean” (the result of hunger) and two chapters later describes the poor-working-class lighthouse keepers thus:
“But even here, two men who watched the light had made a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed out a ray of brightness on the awful sea. Joining their horny hands over the rough table at which they sat, they wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog; and one of them: the elder, too, with his face all damaged and scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship might be…”
We’ve been reading, seeing, and hearing that iconic story for most of our lives, but few Americans ever realize how dedicated Dickens was to describing life in a kingdom where the ability to rise into the middle class was narrowly circumscribed and the working class was virtually 100% “the working poor.”
Public schools as we understand them were non-existent; only the tiny middle-class and very wealthy could send their children to attend quality private schools or university.
Sickness condemned a working-class-poor family to lifelong debt, as Dickens told us how Tiny Tim, who “bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame,” kept his family in such deep poverty that his father wore “his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed, to look seasonable…”
Not only was there no minimum wage in the United Kingdom in Dickens’ 1840s; there were maximum wage laws designed specifically to prevent working poor people from rising up through the economic ranks into the middle class.
The inability to repay debt meant prison and forced labor (Dickens’ own father had been sentenced to a debtor’s prison when Charles was a child), unions were non-existent, and only the wealthy had any access whatsoever to political power or any say in the direction the nation would take.
Meanwhile, the Lord Mayors, the members of the extended royal family, and the fabulously wealthy — the one percent of the Victorian era — lived lives of opulence and wretched excess.
While they didn’t have the ability to buy multiple 700-foot yachts or shoot themselves into outer space on giant penis-shaped rockets, they certainly had the equivalent of that time.
And they rarely paid taxes. As English economist Arthur Young wrote in 1792:
“The nobility and clergy have for centuries been exempted from taxation… The nobles and clergy, by their privileges and exemption from taxes, threw all the weight of the state expenses on the people.”
This week the Republican Party is endorsing a billionaire for president and a multi-multi-millionaire hedge fund guy — the protégé of another billionaire — for vice president. If Trump and Vance are elected, under the rules defined by Republicans on the Supreme Court they’ll become our first king and king-in-waiting.
To accomplish this, their platform and other efforts include extending and increasing massive tax cuts for the very rich, gutting public schools, purging the military and academia of the “radical left,” and throwing over 10 million people into concentration camps.
Forty years of Reaganomics have taken our middle class from almost two-thirds of us in 1980 to fewer than half of us today; Republicans want to further impoverish working class people by gutting unions, crushing small entrepreneurial businesses through blocking enforcement of anti-trust laws, and eliminating minimum wage laws altogether.
They’re so dedicated to keeping working class people poor and locked into their social strata they even went all the way to the Supreme Court to prevent President Biden from lessening the burden of student debt, a problem that literally does not exist in any other developed nation in the world.
Similarly, last year there were about a half-million families destroyed by medical debt bankruptcy across the entire developed world; nearly every one of those was here in the US. When President Biden proposed simply blocking credit agencies from downgrading families with medical debt, Republicans immediately opposed his effort.
When five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery — opening the door to billionaires like Musk giving $45 million a month to Trump’s election efforts — they guaranteed that what remains of our democracy (we’re the only developed country in the world that allows such corruption) finds itself under continuous assault.
As Thomas Jefferson (who died in bankruptcy) wrote about the monetary obsessions of the morbidly rich to John Adams (lifelong member of the middle class) on January 24, 1814:
“You might as well, with the sailors, whistle to the wind, as suggest precautions against having too much money. We must scud then before the gale, and try to hold fast, ourselves, by some plank of the wreck.”
Call it what you want, the GOP is nakedly zealous about turning America from a democratic republic into a kingdom. And the rightwing billionaires and their corporations are doing everything they can to make it happen.
Our last chance to rescue democracy may well come this November. Vote!
