America's Inequality Counter to Founding Father's Vision
Thomas Jefferson’s view of equality under siege
By Harold Meyerson, WashPost, Published: July 3
On the 236th anniversary of our nation’s birth — squalling to the world in our very first utterance that all men were created equal and endowed with unalienable rights — the essence of our politics remains who exactly are those men who are self-evidently equal and inherently vested with those rights. Over the subsequent two-plus centuries, we’ve invoked the spirit of our primal shout every time we’ve expanded our definition of equal men — when we moved to popular elections, abolished slavery, gave women the vote, enacted civil rights legislation and today, when gays and lesbians are winning the equal status and unalienable rights that heterosexual Americans take for granted.
But the author of our founding declaration was concerned with more than legal equality. Thomas Jefferson envisioned a nation of yeoman farmers (and, to be sure, slaveholders like himself) and wanted it to remain chiefly rural to avoid the concentration of wealth and power that would come if the nation urbanized and if finance grew into a dominant sector. His great rival Alexander Hamilton feared that the nation would remain a backwater absent cities, finance and manufacturing. As Treasury secretary, Hamilton used the powers of the nascent republic to foster industry and development. As the United States grew into the world’s dominant economy, the concerns that Jefferson voiced grew more acute. How could the United States retain its formal equality and civic virtue in the face of towering economic inequality that enabled the rich to dominate our political system?
In the first half of the 20th century, both Roosevelts and their allies devised reforms to restore some of Jefferson’s egalitarianism in what was, by then, Hamilton’s America. Progressive taxation, the establishment of wage and labor standards and the legalization of unions reduced economic inequality, while the prohibition of corporation donations to political campaigns diminished, somewhat, the wealthy’s sway over government.
But that, as they say, was then. The war that the American Right and corporate elites have waged against the Roosevelts’ Jefferson-Hamilton synthesis for the past 40 years has largely prevailed. Taxes have grown radically less progressive, the minimum wage has declined as a percentage of the median wage and unions’ legal protections to organize in the face of employer opposition have eroded. In consequence, wages are at their lowest level since the end of World War II as a share of the national income, and U.S. median household income is at roughly the same level it was 20 years ago. The nation is richer and more productive than it was 20 years ago, but all that added income and wealth has gone to the top 10 percent, and disproportionately to the richest 1 percent.
(More here.)
On the 236th anniversary of our nation’s birth — squalling to the world in our very first utterance that all men were created equal and endowed with unalienable rights — the essence of our politics remains who exactly are those men who are self-evidently equal and inherently vested with those rights. Over the subsequent two-plus centuries, we’ve invoked the spirit of our primal shout every time we’ve expanded our definition of equal men — when we moved to popular elections, abolished slavery, gave women the vote, enacted civil rights legislation and today, when gays and lesbians are winning the equal status and unalienable rights that heterosexual Americans take for granted.
But the author of our founding declaration was concerned with more than legal equality. Thomas Jefferson envisioned a nation of yeoman farmers (and, to be sure, slaveholders like himself) and wanted it to remain chiefly rural to avoid the concentration of wealth and power that would come if the nation urbanized and if finance grew into a dominant sector. His great rival Alexander Hamilton feared that the nation would remain a backwater absent cities, finance and manufacturing. As Treasury secretary, Hamilton used the powers of the nascent republic to foster industry and development. As the United States grew into the world’s dominant economy, the concerns that Jefferson voiced grew more acute. How could the United States retain its formal equality and civic virtue in the face of towering economic inequality that enabled the rich to dominate our political system?
In the first half of the 20th century, both Roosevelts and their allies devised reforms to restore some of Jefferson’s egalitarianism in what was, by then, Hamilton’s America. Progressive taxation, the establishment of wage and labor standards and the legalization of unions reduced economic inequality, while the prohibition of corporation donations to political campaigns diminished, somewhat, the wealthy’s sway over government.
But that, as they say, was then. The war that the American Right and corporate elites have waged against the Roosevelts’ Jefferson-Hamilton synthesis for the past 40 years has largely prevailed. Taxes have grown radically less progressive, the minimum wage has declined as a percentage of the median wage and unions’ legal protections to organize in the face of employer opposition have eroded. In consequence, wages are at their lowest level since the end of World War II as a share of the national income, and U.S. median household income is at roughly the same level it was 20 years ago. The nation is richer and more productive than it was 20 years ago, but all that added income and wealth has gone to the top 10 percent, and disproportionately to the richest 1 percent.
(More here.)
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