If we are, indeed, on the brink of a second Civil War, itâs already being waged as a âcold war,â with the occasional armed skirmish being provoked by the so-called alt-right movement. And, as in the past, this will be a war by the very, very rich against the rest of America.
This is not the first time weâve faced such a crisis as a nation.
Each time, forces of massive accumulated or inherited wealth have nearly succeeded in taking full control of our nation, replacing a democracy, where the will of the people is accomplished through their elected representatives, with a form of government where most government functions reinforce the power, wealth and control of the morbidly rich.
This system of government is among the most ancient, stretching back 7,000 years, and is known to political scientists as oligarchy. Aristotle put it in context: âTyranny is a kind of monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only; oligarchy has in view the interest of the wealthy; democracy, of the needyâŚâ
For oligarchy to totally take down democracy, only three things are initially needed:
- Control of (or substantial influence over) a critical portion of the media
- Legalization of bribery of public officials, so oligarchs can achieve majority control of the legislative process
- Control of the most critical parts of the court system so they can control legal processes
A fourth element, once the oligarchy is well established, is the formation of a police state, principally using selective prosecution against those agitating for a return to democracy.
Arnold Toynbee is said to have noted that âWhen the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable.â Most warriors are in their late teens or early 20s; by the time theyâve died, three more generations have come of age, suggesting, if Toynbee was right, a four-generation gap between âgreat wars.â
In their book The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About Americaâs Next Rendezvous With Destiny, William Strauss and Neil Howe apply the theory to the United States. The Revolutionary War began in 1775; 86 years later in 1861, the Civil War began; 78 years later in 1939, America was combatting âthe twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II,â write Strauss and Howe, adding: âSometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate withâ these crises.
The three crises did not simply come out of nowhere; cycles of events had been building for the preceding generations to create the context for each.
In the 1770s, foreign-aligned oligarchs controlled what we now call America; believers in democracy fought a war to overthrow that British oligarchy.
Four generations later, in the 1850s, massive wealth was controlled by a few thousand very large plantation oligarchs in the South. The South was politically and police-wise run as a full-blown oligarchy, while the North was still largely democratic (the âGilded Ageâ Northern oligarchs wouldnât fully emerge for another 30 years). The Civil War could thus be recast as a war between oligarchy and democracy, where democracy won by a whisker.
About four generations after that, in 1921, Warren Harding and his oligarch supporters took control of our federal government, leading to the âRoaring Twentiesâ (in which working peopleâs wages stagnated, but people at the top made out like bandits), and the Great Crash of 1929. The Republican Great Depression (what they called it until the 1950s) opened the door to Franklin Rooseveltâs âwarâ against the âeconomic royalistsâ (oligarchs), which succeeded in putting them, at least temporarily, in a box despite their explicit efforts, exposed by Marine General Smedley Butler, to overthrow him by force.
In 2019, itâs been about four generations since that battleâand the groundwork has been laid for another crisis.
In the 1970s, Americaâs oligarchs succeeded in getting enough of âtheir guysâ placed on the Supreme Court to, in 1976 and 1978, legalize political bribery for the first time in American history. This opened the door to oligarchic control of all three branches of government via the Reagan Revolution.
All that was left was to get the populace to support a final transition to oligarchy, a task undertaken by oligarchs who controlled the media, largely Clear Channel/Rush Limbaugh and billionaire Rupert Murdoch with Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.
As a result, we are no longer a functioning democratic republic; we are now operating as an oligarchy.
The argument for oligarchic control is the same argument thatâs been made by âconservativesâ through history, from Thomas Hobbes to Sir Edmund Burke to Warren Harding and Donald Trump:
âWith us in charge, we will keep you safe and happy and you really donât need to concern yourself with the complicated work of governance. You donât want to âtear downâ or âshake upâ the system: having a stable group of very wealthy people control the government has always led to the greatest level of stability and peaceâlook how stable Europe was for a thousand years when royal families and their landed gentry ruled. Weâre the ones chosen by God or a brilliant DNA lineage to lead. Just go shopping and leave things to us.â
Starting in the 1980s, oligarchy was sold to us by âconservativeâ religious figures (âSaint Reagan,â G.W. Bush was a godly man, Trump is King Cyrus, John Calvin was right that being rich is a sign of Godâs blessing so nations are best run by rich people), as well as oligarch-owned media.
Starting in the past decade, this sales pitch has extended itself to a massive social media ecosystem majority-owned by a handful of American oligarchs, some of whom have expressed confusion about democratic governance and all of whom have directly or indirectly bought control of large numbers of local, state and federal legislators.
This led us from the âoligarch-friendlyâ President Reagan, to the conversion, in 1992, of the Democratic Party via the Democratic Leadership Council to become âoligarch-friendlyâ itself (a legacy itâs today struggling to undo). In 2016, oligarchs like Robert Mercer and Charles Koch finally put an oligarch himself, Donald Trump, in the White House.
When, in 2015, I asked former President Jimmy Carter what he thought the consequences were of Supreme Court decisions like Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United that made all this possible, he replied:
âIt [the Citizens United decision] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now itâs just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and Congress members.âSo now weâve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the electionâs over.â
That same year, then-Vice President Joe Biden said, âyou have to go where the money is. Now where the money is, thereâs almost always implicitly some string attached. ⌠Itâs awful hard to take a whole lot of money from a group you know has a particular position, then you conclude theyâre wrong [and] vote no.â
As former Vice President Al Gore wrote in his 2013 book The Future: âAmerican democracy has been hacked. ⌠The United States Congress ⌠is now incapable of passing laws without permission from the corporate lobbies and other special interests that control their campaign finances.â
And, in 2015 while campaigning for the Republican nomination for president, oligarch Donald Trump candidly said, âI gave to many people, before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me.â
In 2014, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (Princeton, Northwestern) demonstrated that we ceased to be a functioning democracy by classical definitions sometime in the late 20th century, and have been, as President Carter said, an oligarchy (my term, not theirs: they call it âEconomic-Elite Dominationâ) since then.
The difference between now and the 1860s is that the oligarchic control is no longer regional; itâs national. Instead of the North and the South fighting each other, itâs now Free Speech TV viewers facing off with their Fox Newsâviewing neighbors.
The Koch oligarchy machine, for example, has branches in every state, and pretty much every county. Oligarchy-supporting media are ubiquitous.
And now Very Serious People are talking about the possibility of a second Civil War.
What theyâre not pointing out, though, is that it wonât just be a war of white supremacists and Trump cultists against the rest of us, as they generally narrate, but a war between those comfortable with oligarchy (indeed, embracing it, as it promises them safety and stability) versus those who believe in democracy.
This is a crisis point for our nation as real and critical as those we hit in 1776, 1861, and 1932. In each of those three casesâroughly four generations apartâthe oligarchs lost the battle. This time they could win.
America needs an honest discussion of whatâs really going on in this country right now, what the real conflict is, and who the real players are (and why theyâre playing). The conflict is playing out on a series of meta-layers (race, class, religion, regionality), all designed to conceal the real war the oligarchs are waging against democracy itself, and those conflicts will continue to intensify until one side or the other has won what is now still a âcold war.â
Then comes the threat of a real Civil War breaking out, and an informed populace is the best defense against it.
If the forces of democracy can succeed in seizing enough power to temporarily hobble the oligarchs, then they need to immediately restore local control to the media (undoing the 1996 Telecommunications Act and breaking up the media conglomerates) and reinstate a ban on the ârightâ of oligarchs to own politicians and political parties by overturning several Supreme Court decisions since 1976. Repairing the damage done to our court systems will take longer, but needs to begin immediately.
On the other hand, if the oligarchs decide to promote an actual âhotâ Civil War on the forces of democracyâas Southern oligarchs did in 1861âthen parts of America that are still functioning democracies (California comes to mindâthere has been discussion of various âcompactsâ between the three West Coast states, possibly joining with a few Eastern Seaboard states) must consider some form of independence, whether it be âsoft independenceâ like California declared when they established their own air quality standards or some form of partial independence or succession.
This moment of oligarchy-caused crisis is a time of great danger to America, and, thus, also to still-functioning democracies all over the world.
As oligarchs reach out and extend their control over nation after nation (now having seized, in just the past few decades, either soft or hard control over Russia, India, the Philippines, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and dozens of other nations) the battlegrounds are shifting to Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France.
Because the oligarchâs campaign is now international, a third world war is not impossible, particularly as China allies itself with the oligarch-controlled nations against those that are still functioning or nearly functioning democracies.
The stakes couldnât be higher.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America and more than 25 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
