The 1%’s Playbook
The previous post discussed how class warfare has led to a cycle between autocracy and democracy/republic in the past few thousand years. This post is about how that class warfare is fought, particularly in modern times and in the USA.
Most who have paid attention to the US government’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent economic issues have noticed that the wealthy have gotten the better end of the deal. The same was true in the 2008 Recession, and has been true in the US for several decades. This is the result of the elites winning the class war. The elites have the advantage of wealth, power, and ownership to impose their will on the world, while the commoners simply have the advantage of numbers, as a vast majority of people are commoners. In order for the commoners to fight for their own wellbeing, it’s important for them to recognize how they’re being taken advantage of, which is what I hope to show in this post.
I’ll start with a quote from the previous post:
There are definitely people who excel for altruistic reasons, and can do a lot of good for others once they become elites. However, it’s naive to think all, or even most, of the elites are this way. It’s extremely difficult to make it to the top of any hierarchy - political, economic, fame-based, etc. - and the people that measure their success purely based on standing in a hierarchy are more likely to make the sacrifices necessary to make it there than people with more altruistic priorities.
With this in mind, there are two kinds of policies that most ultra-wealthy people support:
Those that benefit the ultra-wealthy
Those that keep in power the people who support the policies in [1]
The only reason [2] is necessary is because the US is a democratic republic, which is a political system designed to benefit commoners by giving “power to the people”. In reality, [2] is just a “necessary evil” to the elites to allow more of [1]. Here are some examples of each:
Economics
This is the most obvious category, as it’s how you can most easily benefit the elites. The USA’s tax rate in the highest bracket was 91% for over a decade leading up to 1964. Today, the highest rate is 37%, meaning wealthy people take home 7 times as much of their income over ~$300k, and can thus get much wealthier. It also means commoners pay a larger share of the taxes. This clearly benefits the elites, and in a vacuum, no commoner would support it in their self interest. Enter trickle-down economics. The basic idea was that putting more money into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy through tax cuts and deregulation of industry would ultimately lead those people, who are often business owners, to pay their employees more, thus allowing the wealth to “trickle down”. The problem is, trickle-down economics is easily shown to be a lie, created to convince commoners to support economic policy that hurts them.
Another tactic used in relation to economics is negative rhetoric about taxes in general. Things like “Do you want your hard-earned money to go to funding lazy people who don’t work?” make taxes seem like an evil idea, when in reality they can help fund a better standard of living, which is really the best thing money can buy (lists of highest taxes and wellbeing feature the same countries). Again, this rhetoric is also intentionally misleading in that most instances of raising taxes to provide a public good do not result in more money spent for the majority of the population (e.g. medicare for all). It doesn’t matter that the change is only felt by the ultra-wealthy; fear is still a valuable tool in preventing others from supporting it, so the 1% can benefit.
The current economic climate is particularly relevant here, because times of turmoil are the easiest times for elites to make power grabs. For example, the post-9-11 PATRIOT Act ushered in a more autocratic government. Recently, while average Americans got a $1200 stimulus from the CARES Act, 43,000 of the wealthiest Americans got an average stimulus of $1,600,000. The response to the 2008 Recession also disproportionately favored the elites.
The final point on economics is about how wages to the commoners can be reduced over time without too much pushback. Because people tend to move up in income percentile during their career, it’s possible for wages to reduce for commoners on the whole, while an individual’s wages increase. This is shown in the diagram below, where the Income vs. Percentile curve changes in favor of the elites during some time period. If, in that same time period, someone moved from percentile P0 to P1, their income would increase, but would also be less than it would have been if the income curve didn’t become more unequal. I suspect that this effect plays a role in older generations not seeming to notice, as much as younger generations, the problematic increase in inequality going on: they make more money now than 30 years ago, so how could things be worse? Lack of understanding of inflation also contributes to this.
Figure 1: Stolen Wages due to Increased Income Inequality over Time
Education
This is a little bit of both types [1] and [2] of policies, from above. First, by funding schools less, you can get away with fewer taxes - the cuts from which will overwhelmingly go to the elites. Second, since the elites’ goal is to deceive enough of the population into supporting stances that benefit the elites and not commoners, it is better to not teach the population to think critically for themselves. As mentioned above, a quick look at the numbers destroys their economic arguments, so their best shot is to prevent the populace from knowing how to do so. The easiest way is to start with the education system. In addition to reducing funding to schools, they can give attention to unscientific ideas like Creationism over Evolution to sow doubt in science, as science is what can be used to disprove incorrect ideas.
If you think this sounds outlandish, take a look at how the Republican Party of Texas explicitly denounced the teaching of critical thinking skills in school. They argue it “challeng[es] the student’s fixed beliefs”, which is not only not a bad thing, but is actually one of the main purposes of education: if thinking critically about a belief makes you change your mind, then holding that belief was a bad thing. If your education doesn’t lead you to change that belief, you were done a disservice. In short, an educated populace is harder to deceive and exploit. This effect can be seen in action with Fox News, the news source with the second least educated viewership behind talk radio, being shown to make its viewers less informed about the world.
Additionally, a good education system will increase economic mobility (how easy it is to rise in the economic hierarchy). To most people, this is a good thing, but to elites, economic mobility means competition. It’s easier to stay at the top when those below you are disadvantaged. In that sense, economic mobility is a good indicator of who’s winning the class war. The US was ranked 27 in this ranking of economic mobility, behind most developed nations, indicating again that the elites are winning over the commoners.
Single-Issue Voters
An easy way for the elites to get commoner support is to look for single-issue voters whose one issue doesn’t get in the way of the elites’ agenda. The two biggest examples in the USA are abortion and gun laws. Being anti-abortion and pro-gun is a quick way to pick up a good number of voters in the US. The Republican Party supports someone who’s had three wives, and cheated on the third with a porn star, but when it comes to abortion will suddenly care about “family values”. They also support lax gun laws, except when it’s inconvenient, like when Republican-as-they-come Ronald Reagan banned open carry in California with the Mulford Act. These wavering stances indicate that the position isn’t actually that important to them, and is more likely a political tool to gain support from easily-swayed voters.
Drug Laws
It doesn’t take an economist to know that free labor is an easy way for elites to turn a large profit. The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, which made free labor more difficult to come by, but not impossible. The Amendment actually bans slavery “except as a punishment for crime”, which means more people in prison means more free labor. An easy way to do that is to have strict drug laws. We have plenty of data to show that incarceration doesn’t help reduce drug use, but it’s been believable enough thus far to tell people that these laws are to fight a drug problem. In reality, it just benefits the elites further by keeping the commoners (competition) down, and providing free/dirt cheap labor for elites to profit off of. The mere existence of for-profit prisons shows there’s an economic driver to imprison people. It’s also telling that the USA’s incarceration rate per person is the highest in the world, at a whopping 20% higher than the second highest, Russia, and over double the third highest, Ukraine. Despite this, the US still has the highest opioid usage per person of any country, at over one and a half times the second highest country, confirming our war on drugs isn’t working.
Energy
One reliable way to produce 1%-ers since the industrial revolution has been oil and gas. Many among the ultra-wealthy got their money from oil, so they don’t tend to advocate for alternative energy sources, as it would hurt their business. When the environment inevitably gets truly bad and people need to flee to safer locations, they’ll have plenty of money to do so, so they won’t be the ones hurt most by climate change. The commoners they rely on for power will be more impacted, so their strategy has been to deny that it will happen at all (see “Education”, and Exxon giving $30 million to fund climate change denial after their own scientists determined it was real).
American Exceptionalism
There are plenty of other democracies around the world that have higher standards of living and lower inequality than the US. Many have free college and health care. These are places where elites still exist, but are simply held more in check, and the general populace benefits as a result. A simple acknowledgement of that makes it a hard sell that the USA, the wealthiest country the world has ever seen, is unable to afford to treat its citizens as well as every other developed nation. Instead, rhetoric is once again used to shroud the reality of our situation. They call the USA “the greatest country on Earth” without much explanation beyond talking about how much “freedom” we have (just, uhhh, ignore that a 20-year-old has the freedom to buy a beer in every single Western country except the US). The US certainly has things to be proud of, but blindly assuming it’s better than everywhere else does nothing but make the populace easy to take advantage of. We should be looking outside the country to see where we’re lacking, but we won’t if we believe we do everything best, and that will make us fail to strive to be better.
Degrading Democracy
As stated above, the stances taken to attract voters are only needed because democracies and republics require politicians to have support from the people. Ultimately, the elites would like to do away with that necessity altogether, which means they need to destroy democracy in favor of an autocracy. In the USA’s case, an oligarchy (ruling by a select few: the elites) is the likely alternative. In fact, it’s easy to find people today who feel the USA is already an oligarchy. I like to think that as long as meaningful elections still exist (which may not be long), hope is not lost for retaining a democratic republic.
In order to move towards authoritarianism, the elites must degrade democracy to rig the system in their favor. There are a few reliable tactics the 1% has used for rigging the system. The first is gerrymandering to benefit their preferred politicians, which I won’t dwell on, since most people are familiar with it at this point.
The next is voter suppression, which worked well enough in 2016, that it’ll be used again in 2020. Recently, Trump opposed vote-by-mail, even during a deadly pandemic, because “you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again” if it was enacted. In other words, he’s outright admitting Republicans rely on voter suppression to retain power. Then there’s these three election security bills Mitch McConnell didn’t allow to even come to a vote in the Senate in 2019, presumably because they would prevent them from manipulating elections. Some of the tactics involve purging voter registrations in areas/demographics that you expect to vote for commoner-friendly politicians, requiring an ID to vote, and having fewer voting booths per capita in cities (again, likely to vote for commoner-friendly politicians), which can make the voting lines so long people decide not to vote.
I think this post so far has been pretty clear that the Republican Party does the bidding of the elites, but perhaps the most troubling fact is about the Democratic Party. Given our current electoral system, a two party system is basically guaranteed (unfortunately), and if we assume that’s true, then the Democrats are the best option for commoners to support their own interests. The problem is, even most Democrats favor the elites over the commoners, just to less of a degree. Obama had big corporate donors and was generous to Wall Street when handling the Great Recession. One of Clinton’s most well-known moves as President was signing the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (repealing Glass-Steagall), a pro-Wall Street move that got only one “yes” vote from Democratic senators, and zero “no” votes from Republicans. If he was actually for the people, he would’ve vetoed it, but he instead gave into the Republicans and elites. They both had policies that benefited the commoners, but also made sure to take care of the elites, who, being elites, really didn’t need any additional assistance.
This happens because corporate money is allowed in politics and those who take it are at a huge advantage for getting elected, and then must keep those donors happy with corporate-friendly legislation. It also happens because the wealthy own the media and can ostracize the politicians who do fight for the commoners. This was seen most prominently with the media repeatedly lying about or completely ignoring Bernie Sanders, as well as portraying him as radical, when his stances would be perfectly normal in any strong democracy in the world. This is concerning because the Democratic Party is clearly the more favorable party for commoners, and if even they fight more for the elites than commoners, there may be no way for democracy to get us out of our trend towards autocracy.
Path Forward
Luckily, there are still some politicians who are fighting for the commoners: the progressives. In today’s climate, even a more moderate, corporate-friendly Democrat like Joe Biden is much better than a Republican, but given the chance, we need to support the more progressive candidates. It’s hard to overstate how important it is to support candidates who don’t take corporate money and want to get it out of politics. Democracy Dollars, championed by Kirsten Gillibrand and Andrew Yang in the 2020 Democratic Primary, were unfortunately treated as the butt of many jokes, but are actually a good step in the right direction. Supporting that, as well as higher taxes on the wealthy, corporate regulations, UBI, free/cheaper education, and universal health care are necessary if we want to avoid handing this country over entirely to the elites.
The USA is by far the world’s wealthiest country, but isn’t anywhere near the top in average health or wellbeing metrics, and that’s largely due to inequality. We look well-off on average because a billionaire can make so much money that it compensates for millions of poor people in terms of nationwide measures of average wealth. However, that billionaire is still just one person with access to quality healthcare and food, which can’t compensate for the struggles and disadvantages of those millions of poor people in the wellbeing categories. One person can pull the average wealth up substantially, but they can’t pull the obesity rate down in the same way. In this sense, health and wellness rankings are a more accurate representation of the status of a country, and the US is not nearly as impressive when you look at those instead of wealth. If we want to change that, we need to look to help everyone, and not just the elites.
