How a little-known 1970s court ruling crashed today's democracy

House Speaker Mike Johnson says that California Gov. Gavin Newsom should be “tarred and feathered” because he’s going along with protesters who object to Donald Trump’s fascist behavior.

The vast majority of political violence over the past 15 years has been committed by rightwing goons and assassins, culminating in Minneapolis last weekend with the shooting dead of a Democratic state representative and her husband and the wounding of two more Democrats.

In Los Angeles, Trump is inserting Marines into an American city against the will and wishes of the mayor and that state’s governor. In Washington, he just rolled out a North Korea-style military parade. Next, he wants to give billionaires another $5 trillion tax gift funded by borrowed money you and your children will have to pay back.

And now he’s changed the Veterans Administration rules so doctors and nurses can refuse to provide services to veterans who are registered as Democrats. Seriously, I'm not making that up.

How did we get here?

When, in 1978, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court first ruled that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as free speech, that Bellotti decision authored by Lewis Powell (of Powell Memo infamy) first set America on the road to oligarchy.

At that time, Congress was still regularly passing legislation that benefited average working class and poor Americans, and the morbidly rich were doing just fine. The previous 46 years since the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 had seen legislation passed and signed into law that included:

• Legalizing unions
• Minimum wage
• Banking protections (Glass-Steagall)
• Reforesting America (Civilian Conservation Corps)
• Major power projects (Hoover Dam, TVA, etc.)
• Subsidized electricity to rural areas
• Social Security
• Unemployment Insurance
• Aid for Dependent Children
• Public Housing
• 40-hour week and overtime rules
• Ending child labor
• Survivor’s benefits for orphans and widows
• Job Corps
• VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America)
• Head Start
• Food stamps
• Outlawing discrimination in public accommodations and education
• Outlawing discrimination in the workplace
• Federal funding for public schools
• Medicare
• Medicaid
• Voting rights
• Pell Grants and other college subsidies
• Housing and Urban Development Act
• Child Nutrition Act (school lunches)

By 1978, America was largely a functioning democracy, as both women and racial minorities were guaranteed the right to vote. But the Bellotti decision (and its 1976 Buckley predecessor) opened the door for billionaires and corporations to legally buy politicians, enabling Ronald Reagan to float into the White House in the 1980 election on a tsunami of corporate (mostly oil and banking) money.

In the 44 years since that Reagan Revolution, on-the-take Republicans (and a large handful of on-the-take “problem solver” Democrats) have passed a total of two pieces of legislation that exclusively or primarily benefited average working class or poor people:

• Low Income Home Energy Assistance Act (LIHEAP)
• Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA)

I know it sounds mind-boggling when put in those terms, but I’ve been running a contest on my radio program for 22 years offering a prize to anybody who can name even one single piece of legislation that was written by Republicans, signed into law by a Republican president, and benefited primarily the average person — and nobody has won.

Even Obamacare was originally written by the billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation as a trillion-dollar gift to the health insurance industry, which it certainly has turned out to be.

Thus, when President Jimmy Carter told me in 2011 that the 2010 Citizens United decision that doubled-down on and expanded Bellotti had finally and completely turned America into an oligarchy, he was right on the money.

Since the Reagan Revolution, and particularly since the Citizens United decision, America has been run at the federal level almost exclusively by, for, and to the benefit of the morbidly rich; the needs and desires of the bottom 99 percent of us have been largely ignored.

CEO pay, for example, has gone up 1,209% since 1978, while worker pay has gone up a mere 15.3%. Housing in the 1950s cost about twice the average annual salary; today it’s closer to ten times as much.

In the years from 1933 to 1980, the middle class saw their income and wealth steadily increase; Reagan put an end to that, so completely that fully $50 trillion (with a “T” — 12 zeros) has been transferred from the pensions, savings, homes, investments, and paychecks of the middle class into the money bins of the morbidly rich since he took office in 1981.

So, we’re now living in an oligarchy. And that’s the danger.

Oligarchy, as I described in detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchyand told Ali Velshi yesterday on MSNBC, is an incredibly unstable form of government; it’s always transitional. The reason is simple: When working class people finally figure out how badly they’ve been and are being screwed by the morbidly rich, they rebel.

At first, that rebellion typically takes the form of a populist uprising, and whichever politician first figures it out and plays the role of the populist who’ll restore things to their former order typically takes power.

If the neoliberal Clinton machine hadn’t sabotaged the Sanders’ candidacy in 2016, that would have been Bernie; instead, Trump played the role of the great defender of the middle class in that year’s election and middle-class outrage at oligarchy carried him into the White House.

The crisis we face today is grounded in the fact that Trump is not — and never has been — a defender of the middle class. His appeals to race and misogyny have given him the patina of one, at least with white men, but at core he’s an oligarch himself and his policies exclusively benefit his wealthy peers.

Thus, as Americans rise up to fight against oligarchy, the oligarchs face a simple binary choice: back down and restore economic fairness and the social safety net, or crack down with an iron fist.

This is the critical moment we’re facing today, one that’s been repeated over and over throughout history in other countries.

Tragically, it’s extremely rare that oligarchs back down without an overwhelming crisis; America’s oligarchs only surrendered power in the 1930s — one of the few exceptions to the rule — because the Republican Great Depression was so severe they didn’t think they could pull it off (although they tried with the failed plot to kidnap and kill Roosevelt in 1933).

When Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, el Sisi, and other oligarchs faced similar populist anti-oligarch revolts by their own countrymen, they brought down the hammer. The free press, free speech, the right to protest, and meaningful political opposition have vanished from all of those countries and dozens more who’ve trod that same path.

So, Trump now faces that same terrible choice.

Does he go along with the wishes of the people and stop catering exclusively to his billionaire buddies, letting their taxes go back up and stopping Republican plans to further gut the social safety net?

Or does he begin arresting protestors, jailing politicians and judges, and shutting down the press?

America is thus today balanced on a knife’s-edge.

And the only force that can stop a further slide into tyranny is us, the voice of the people. If we’re strong enough, the united Republican front supporting Trump’s headlong race toward dictatorship will crack and he’ll be forced to back down.

On the other hand, if Trump continues to exclusively listen to his hardcore rightwing billionaire buddies and Republicans retain an united front in Congress, get ready for bloodshed, overflowing prisons, and the end of the American experiment.

To the extent that we still have agency, that we still have our voices, that we can still reach out to Republican politicians and have some influence on their behavior, that choice is now also ours.

The phone number for Congress is 202-224-3121. Join your local progressive activist group and show up for meetings of the Democratic Party in your community. Speak up and speak out in every venue you can find.

We have a hell of a lot of work to do.