There's only one way out of this mess

We’re now at the point where five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have harmed us so severely that our nation is facing an oligarchic takeover, aka a constitutional crisis. Trump is ignoring the courts’ orders and threatening the judges’ lives so blatantly that even Chief Justice John Roberts has been moved to speak out.

The history of America is the history of fits and starts of progress followed by oligarchic backlash leading to periods of pain and stagnation (except for the morbidly rich).

Our first eighty years started with the American Revolution against an absolute monarch and the world’s largest corporation. But the Founders’ idealism was rejected by the Southern oligarchs, who saw the end of slavery as a threat to their wealth and power; they’d already turned the South into a neofascist hellscape and then launched the war against America that Abraham Lincoln won.

Lincoln then embarked on a series of progressive reforms including the 13th Amendment, the Homestead Act, the National Banking Act, the Pacific Railway Acts, creation of the Department of Agriculture, and the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act that gave federal land for the creation of more than fifty colleges that would provide free educations to America’s young people. He was also the first president to favorably use the word “unions” back when they were so rare that newspapers put the word in quotes.

Our second eighty years saw the rightwing backlash to Lincoln’s reforms, starting with the corrupt deal to end Reconstruction in the election of 1876. As President Grover Cleveland proclaimed in his 1887 State of the Union address:

“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

The response was the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1891, which progressive presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft enforced ruthlessly, breaking up giant corporations and monopolistic conspiracies including Standard Oil. Another example was the Tillman Act of 1907, which forbade corporations from giving any money or thing of value to any candidate for federal office.

States across the nation also took on corporate power; here’s an example from a 1905 Wisconsin Law that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court struck down when they decided that corporations are people and money is speech (Section 4489a, Sec. 1, ch. 492, 1905). It explicitly said:

“No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer, consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office.” (emphasis added)

The penalty included a substantial fine, years in prison for individual executives, and the political death sentence of the corporation itself being forbidden from doing business in Wisconsin:

“Any officer, employee, agent or attorney or other representative of any corporation, acting for and in behalf of such corporation, who shall violate this act, shall be punished upon conviction by a fine … or by imprisonment in the state prison for a period of not less than one nor more than five years, … and … its right to do business in this state may be declared forfeited.”

Two years later, efforts to control bad behavior by rich people and corporations went federal with the Tillman Act of 1907. That law explicitly forbade any corporation from making “contributions in connection with any election to any [federal] political office.”

The rightwing reaction to that era (and the introduction of the estate tax by Teddy Roosevelt and the income tax by Woodrow Wilson) came with the 1920 election, when Republican Warren Harding became president and immediately dropped the top income tax rate from 90% down to 25% and began deregulating the banking and investment industries (among others).

That, of course, led straight to Black Tuesday of 1929 and the start of what was then called the Republican Great Depression. Out of that Republican disaster, Franklin Roosevelt kicked off a new progressive era in 1933 with Social Security, unemployment insurance, the legalization and protection of unions and workers’ rights, and the minimum wage.

Our third 80 year period began with the end of World War II and is ending now. Because Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt (and Congress and the Courts) had severely limited the power of big corporations and the morbidly rich from owning politicians, we got a lot done during the first 60 years.

President Eisenhower was re-elected on a platform of expanding Social Security and unionization, Kennedy called for a national healthcare system which led to LBJ passing Medicaid and Medicare, along with solidifying civil and voting rights.

The third great backlash to this progress began in the 1970s with the Powell Memo and Lewis Powell himself authoring the 1978 Bellotti decision, which confirmed that corporations are “persons” with rights under the Bill of Rights, including the right to free speech, which Powell defined as the ability to use money to buy campaign commercials.

That was amplified by the 5-4 Citizens United decision in 2010, which fully and finally rejected over a hundred years of congressional reforms that limited the power of billionaires and corporations; as a result, we’re now facing this existential crisis of democracy.

That decision, as I lay out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, was a breach of the trust of the American people on a level with their Dred Scott decision in 1856, which arguably led us straight into the Civil War.

This third backlash has reached its peak with the Trump/Musk administration gutting most of the institutions that were created by Teddy, Franklin, and Lyndon, kneecapping the ability of the IRS to hold rich tax cheats to account, and rewriting American history to exclude the accomplishments of women and Black and queer people.

Will this third 80 year period wrap up with a return to the progressive values on which America was founded like the first two did? Or will Trump and Musk succeed in ending our democracy, replacing it with an autocratic “illiberal democracy” like in Hungary and Russia?

Democrats in Congress came damn close three years ago to rebooting us into a new progressive era with the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act of 2022.

The former would have rolled back large parts of the Citizens United decision and its predecessors, putting limits on corporate and billionaire money in politics, ending gerrymandering, and solidifying multiple good government reforms. The latter explicitly said every American citizen has a right to vote, so we could only be purged from voting rolls by court order.

Both passed the House and had enough votes to pass the Senate, but were stopped by a Republican filibuster. Democrats had enough votes to break the filibuster, until Republicans reached out to two corrupt Democratic senators (Sinema and Manchin) who sided with them and killed the legislation. (Now they’re working on Fetterman.)

As a result, Elon Musk is expanding his use of his billions to threaten Republican politicians and defeat Democrats in ways that, prior to Citizens United, would have been crimes.

Americans are waking up and starting to fight back; Bernie and AOC drew 86,000 people to a handful of rallies in the Midwest last week, and more are planned. As the courts struggle to restrain Trump’s authoritarian impulses, there’s a very real possibility that his and Musk’s attacks on American institutions have so horrified voters that they’ll hand power back to Democrats in 2026 and 2028.

If so, reprising even more forceful versions of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act is an urgent priority. Money in politics has been — from the earliest days of our republic to today — a cancer in our political system. Musk is a symptom of that, although he’s only one of many rightwing billionaires who’ve effectively seized control of the GOP and, through it, our government.

But there is still hope. Abraham Lincoln told us:

“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed.”

Because our only salvation lies in again outlawing billionaires from buying politicians and political parties, the most important thing we can do right now is to participate in the kinds of demonstrations and support the politicians who are leading progressive public opinion.

They will give judges, law firms, and politicians who know what Trump is doing is wrong the backing they need to stiffen their spines and hold the line until the electoral process can return sanity to America.

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