What to do about the coup? Pt. 1 Tax the Rich
My first subscriber left me a request.
A Request
Blame Cannon’s first paid subscriber passed away last Monday night.
She was my aunt Clarice Zillmer. I loved her dearly. I wrote an obituary for her here and I’ll write more about her life and her death when I’ve had time to reflect.
Clarice read all these screeds and scribbles and enjoyed them, especially when I mentioned her. A few months ago she asked me to write more about what I thought we as Americans or Virginians or humans should do about the changes around us. I’ve written a little about the possible future of Charlottesville, but she wanted more of that and maybe more about the country as a whole.
Now this is Blame Cannon, not Solutions Cannon, and part of why our country is in trouble is we keep hoping our current political-economy is sustainable. But if my favorite aunt and paying subscriber asks for a post and then dies, I have to give it a try.
So for Clarice I’m interrupting our regular posts this week to offer three policy objectives essential to the future.
Yes, but are we fascists yet?
I turned 18 too late to vote for Ronald Reagan, but I would have, because middle-school me thought Jimmy Carter was a wimp. I became disillusioned with Reagan,1 spent some years in apathy, and then embraced Bill Clinton. I loved the Clintons. Their New Democrat/Third Way approach perfectly flattered by prejudices and pretenses.
Today, of course, I would reverse all those judgments. I now think Reagan was terrible, Carter good,2 and the Clintons, in finishing what Reagan started, the worst of all.
Whether you agree with my assessments or not, my point is, I’m in no position to throw stones at the fools who voted for Donald Trump since I’ve also been a fool.
But fools they certainly are. Already the Trump administration has:
Issued an inaugural “meme coin” to enrich Trump himself.
Appointed a billionaire to a made-up office—“DOGE”—that has no legitimacy in the Constitution or by any act of Congress.
Allowed “DOGE” to cut jobs and programs that were created by Congress.
Issued innumerable “executive orders” as if they were laws despite the Constitution explicitly restricting legislative authority to Congress.
Threatened annexation of foreign territories in violation of explicit treaty obligations.
“Pardoned” a corporation, an action with no validity in the Constitution.
Kidnapped and deported legal residents of the U.S. without due process and promised more—all in violate of the Constitution and immigration and residency laws passed by Congress.
Allowed an agency of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement— “ICE”—to operate without regard to the Bill of Rights or even basic Anglo-American common law.
Threatened universities.
Targeted law firms.
Imposed and repealed tariffs under the pretext of “emergency powers,” when tariffs are a legislative responsibility according to the Constitution
Ignored the rulings of courts.
All this blatantly violates the Constitution. Maybe you don’t care because you consider the Constitution sexist, racist, capitalist, bourgeois agitprop,3 or because you want to replace the United States with a white ethnostate, but everyone else should remember that presidents take a public oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. That’s a president’s actual job description. Not to serve America or the American people or to do what he thinks is best for everyone; Trump explicitly swore to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.4 Yet Trump voters are such fools they imagine a guy who won’t do what he publicly takes an oath to do, will still do what’s best for them.
Why do people support him? For some it’s just a cult of personality, but that isn’t enough people to win an election. For far more they really hate what the Democrats are offering so they convince themselves the party out of power must be better. It’s like the Totonacs and Maya allying with Hernán Cortés when he landed in Yucatán in 1519 because, Hey, these Spanish gotta to be better than the Aztecs, amirite?
The Loyal Opposition
Now it’s turning out Cortés is worse, so what do we do? Can our leaders allow a corrupt man and his goons to rip up the Constitution just to achieve some tariff policy goals, silence some Israel critics, and/or stick it to the woke liberal elite? Surely, the rest of our vaunted checks-and-balances government will stop this, right?
Sadly, the other Republican leaders aren’t going to do anything. Their only two questions about Trump’s rampant illegality have been, Is it time for us to jump again, sir? and “How high?” The Republican Congress explicitly supported Trump’s “emergency powers executive orders” pseudo-lawmaking, a blatant shirking of their rights and duties.
But what of the rest of the right, those outside the corridors of power? Surely they are unscented by the sweat of obsequity! Surely, those prudent, Edmund Burke-reading conservatives and their principled libertarian friends will rise as their teacher would demand!
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent. Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
—Edmund Burke
A few conservatives and libertarians have indeed been willing to criticize, but few is the key word. Most “Burkean Conservatives” and their fellow travelers possess the flexibility of mind to generate all the excuses needed to preserve their self-image as the wise and unshrill while saying nothing.5 Trump is a means to an end, Trump has a secret plan, Trump is no worse than the others, Trump is a symptom not a cause, At least Trump is sticking it to the libtards. (In the conservative mind it’s always the fault of the liberals, even when conservatives control all three branches of government!)
But I understand these excuses because I concocted similar nonsense about Reagan and Clinton. (Luckily, that was before the internet so the evidence is gone.)
Few smart people will take the risk of admitting they were wrong. It undermines either their claim to smartness or worse, the claim of the importance of smartness when judging politics.
Many Americans, however, without being conservative or smart, easily see Trump’s feckless illegality and cruelty. Many understandably think of Hitler, the scary evil they are most familiar with, and if they squint the right way he might look a little fuhrer-ish.6 In some ways our times do resemble the rise of fascist regimes of Italy, Germany, and Spain. (The “emergency powers” nonsense is straight out of the fascist playbook.) But our times more resemble the imposition of the one-party rule which brought white supremacy to the Southern states in the 1890s and 1900s. And there are echos of the strongmen and juntas of Latin American history too.
But mostly, our times resemble Russia and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union.7 Trump is not militaristic nor collectivist as the fascists were; he doesn’t come out of an army faction as Latin American strongmen; nor is he deploying explicit racial doctrines to ensure one party rule as happened in the American South. Trump is just an oligarch aligned with other oligarchs and no clear agenda other than exploiting the opportunities created by the misgovernance of a collapsing state.
Like in the Eastern Bloc the reforms that could have prevented this have been too little too late. Back in 2008 rescuing homeowners from bad mortgages and a true public option in health care would have kept the country stable and happy. The “left” begged for these obvious things, but the centrist big brains of the Democratic party didn’t want their finance industry donors to suffer, their insurance industry donors to have to compete with the government, or their global markets sullied.
So the country sank further. By 2016 Bernie Sanders Medicare for All, free college, repeal of trade agreements, and a tax on billionaires would have satisfied the restive public and Sanders polled much better against Trump than Clinton. But the centrist big brains in the Democratic party treated the mild Sanders as a frothing radical. His ideas would estrange their donors, after all. Dem leaders still wouldn’t concede the need for more than they did in 2008.
So the Democrats lost and America got Trump I.
But Americans took to the streets immediately and kept up the pressure, and along with the horrors of Trump’s allies (See Charlottesville 2017), Trump was defeated in 2020 and Biden was carried to victory. By this time Americans needed more than the 2016 Sanders program. Instead Biden gave us maybe a slightly better version of what Obama offered in 2008.8
So welcome to Trump II: The Revenge Tour.
Storms Ahead
Worse, for the Democrats—and since they’re the only opposition, worse for us—the windows of opportunity in 2008, 2016, and 2020 have closed. Demographics in the years ahead look bleak, so that the predictable Trump backlash, which is all the current Democrats are counting on, won’t be enough to win an election. Now the same hapless Democrats with their sclerotic, septuagenarian leadership, who couldn’t stomach Bernie’s tepid 2016 program would have to pull off an entire continent-wide political realignment.9
Contemplating such things would make conversations with donors at art openings awkward and might imperil their kids’ prestigious summer internships. To keep the donations flowing they will instead double-down on the feeble, corrupt Reagan-Clinton approach that got us here. They’re still not ready to admit to what was needed in 2008. In their minds they’ve done everything right and we racist, sexist, deplorable voters just keep screwing up. In their minds we citizens should have learned our lesson. Why can’t non-Ivy League Americans just vote Democratic, celebrate diversity, and learn to code?
So while I am optimistic about the long-term future of America, things are going to be terrible for the next couple of decades. Really terrible. Protests can slow things and draw attention to issues and bring people together, and vent—humans have a right to vent—but protests without a functioning opposition party leadership pushing innovative legislative and policy agendas just can’t accomplish much.10
Ordinary citizens today have no power bases to challenge two awful political parties neither of which has the capacity or interest in reform.
To prove my point today I’ll list the first of three essential—and obvious—federal policies that we absolutely will not get in the near future.11 The fact that such policies barely even get discussed shows how far we are from “resistance” that isn’t escapist fantasy.
Tax the Rich
The first, most important goal, of any competent reform movement must be to tax the rich.
I like the rich. I hope to be one someday. They’ve always been good to me. But any effective government must tax its rich people. Not because the government needs money and the rich have money (That’s a bonus we’ll get to in a future post) but because left unchecked the rich people end up becoming the rulers.
There’s always corruption—personal ties between the rich and the rulers that inappropriately influence government law and policy—but there is a dramatic difference between the traditional corruption of rich people showing up with contributions to ask the politicians for favors, and politicians showing up with favors to ask the rich for contributions. When the rich were doing the sucking up both houses of Congress acted as deliberative assemblies. Members crafted legislation, debated, listened, argued, compromised, and voted. Politicians had the skills to write their own laws. That wasn’t a mirage. For 200 years Congress was an actual deliberate assembly that assembled, deliberated, and passed laws. Elected legislators governed the country and could have done so even if all the aides went on strike.
Once the power dynamics shifted during the Reagan-Clinton consensus, once congressfolk began to spend most of their time working the phones for contributions, Congress ceased to function that way.12 Votes and speeches were television spectacles at best. It’s been decades since there was a real debate that swayed voting. Committees still functioned until the 1990s or so, but now they too often have predetermined outcomes. Today almost all of what could be called government is done in offices and conference rooms. Laws are written by Congressional aides, bureaucrats, and lobbyists. (Until Trump, that is; Now “executive orders” are written by presidential aides, bureaucrats, and lobbyists.) Trump is not the barbarian overthrowing Congress; he’s the barbarian camping in its ruins.
The main problem isn’t wealth per se. It’s not to whom politicians are sucking up that matters. What matters is the sucking up itself, the bubble it creates. Think how absurd it would be if elected officials spent all their time sucking up to electricians, hanging out with electricians, asking what the electricians think about this or that, speaking like electricians, leaving office to work as electricians. There’s nothing wrong with electricians, I like electricians, and I’m sure America’s wiring would be improved, but think how distorting and alienating this would become for the tens of thousands of other jobs and professions. The same would be true of kindergarten teachers. Or to Lyft drivers. Having any small group of unelected people—however knowledgeable and interesting in their own sphere—dictate what gets done and how it gets done for the rest of us, will lead to a government that cannot effectively serve the country as a whole.
If that small group is the rich it’s arguably worse. Although the rich have often had the blessings of a decent education—which is a good thing—the rich get puffed up by their success. That they’re deferred to daily because of their wealth can mislead too many into thinking they’re naturally good at leadership. But the fundraising politicians have made this vastly worse by spending decades flattering the rich in order to get donations from them. It was inevitable that the rich eventually started believing what they were told, and decided they could skip the middle-man and just run the government themselves. This makes them much worse than kindergarten teachers or Lyft drivers because the rich, once they decide to run, have the money to self-finance their campaigns.
In short we didn’t have characters like Musk and Trump in charge when we taxed the rich.
So that’s why America is falling apart. Government was increasingly subordinated to a small, insulated group of people—the rich—until that group of people—the rich—became the de facto leaders of the state, the source of moral authority, the biggest influence on policy and perspective. A nation ruled by laws became a nation ruled by elites. Nations never can be both.13
Historically, when the rich can no longer be controlled things fall apart. That was the beginning of the English Civil Wars, the French and Russian Revolutions, and the fall of numerous regimes throughout the former Soviet Bloc. It’s just a basic bit of obvious Machiavellian reality. All competent leaders in history—legitimate or usurping; dictator, hereditary monarch, or elected functionar; acting out of benevolence or self-interest—all know that they must limit the power of rivals. With the rich that’s easy in a nation of laws, since their power comes from money and money can be taxed.
How much should they be taxed? Between 1965 and 1981 the highest tax bracket was 70%, so that works for me.14
Today it’s 37% and you can see the results all around us. Things won’t get saner until taxing rich is an ordinary part of policy discussions.
Why it Won’t Happen
Obviously, our political elites are interwoven socially and culturally as the kid brothers of the economic elites. Our politicians have long since succeeded within their parties by their skill at fundraising. Our activists are often tied to 501c3 non-profits that themselves depend on donations from the wealthy. Therefore few are going to even talk about taxing the rich.15
Trump certainly isn’t going to limit the power of the rich. He’s been craving acceptance from other rich people his entire life. That’s what the golden hotels and golf games were about. Being one of them. He’s no Caesar, using his wealth to champion the plebes. Rich people didn’t like him much during his 2016 term, but he never dissed them. Trump is already promising to cut taxes for the rich still further, and “DOGE” has gutted funding for tax enforcement, so Trump is giving the rich more money to buy up everything, everyone, and everywhere. He’s making it all worse.
All of this is nothing personal. Rich people aren’t evil any more often than electricians are kindergarten teachers. I’ve liked almost every wealthy person I’ve met. I always enjoyed listening to rich people talk about how they got rich and what they’ve learned along the way. Rich people are colorful, fascinating chunks in our national stew. But until our elected officials switch from begging to taxing America will continue to decline. For anyone who wants a policy framework to move the country in a better direction, taxing the rich should be first on the list.
Next: Cut the thing that actually ruins the budget.
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I came from a Republican family (“liberal Republican” as it was said back then, meaning pro-integration and pro-business—basically pro-Eisenhower) so there was that. What soured me on Reagan were the homeless encampments and Iran-Contra. Also, Iran-Contra shades into the 1980 October Surprise allegations, which while not proven are certainly more credible than I would like them to be.
It’s common to say Jimmy Carter was a bad president and a good man, but I think he was underrated as a president. He and Bush I were probably the best presidents in my lifetime. (Naturally they were both one-termers.) Bill Clinton batted clean-up on the Reagan-Clinton consensus. Bill Clinton also pushed the “Clintons” as a plural, that Hillary was governing with him. Hillary Clinton’s campaign introduced the whole toxic “will white working class vote for black Obama” trope that was the toxic beginning of Kenyan Socialist nonsense. Eight years later her campaign introduced the whole “bernie bro” slander and got the media to treat “superdelegates” as pledged, both even more toxic than the Kenyan stuff.
Frederick Douglass, who knew more than you do, thought differently.
This was always the problem with the Jan 6th riot. Most of those rioting weren’t in their own minds intending an insurrection, but Trump encouraged rioters to prevent the counting of the electoral votes which is specifically the process the U.S. Constitution requires for an election. That’s what an election is according to the Constitution, so by trying to stall that count Trump was violating his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. Of course, for Trump this was part of a larger scheme to create separate slates of electoral voters that would be substituted for those actually elected.
Conservative Oren Cass, whom I used to respect, is typical: “The idea that universities finally emerging from the DEI crusades, Covid lunacy, and antisemitic activism of the past five years are now ‘in chaos,” experiencing “particular distress,’ and facing ‘the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare…’” Student activists complaining about Israel is equivalent to masked men in vans jumping out and kidnapping people, you see. Note that Democratic would-be opposition leader, if there were actual opposition, Senator Chuck Schumer spent the last year writing a book called Antisemitism in America, so that’s where his attention is.
All humans organize life through stories of the past, and Hitler is the archetypal evil, so that’s where their minds go.
I’ve been writing about this for some time, including here, but check out Yasha and Evgenia over at Nefarious Russians who have been exploring this in recent posts. They focus on Russia itself with Reagan and Clinton serving a role like Gorbachev whose reforms financialized the Soviet economy and Trump being the clownish Boris Yeltzin who drove it all into the ground. In that way of thinking our Putin is yet to come.
Worse, Biden couldn’t even communicate what he was offering due to stroke, covid, or senility. Then he—with the collusion of his staff and leading Democrats—prevented a Democratic primary, so the party couldn’t even run an open contest for his replacement.
Most oldsters see the world through the framework they learned in their twenties and thirties. Democratic leaders, being oldsters surrounded by other oldsters and subordinate staff assume their bubble is reality. They think the world is still fighting the battles of the 1968 Democratic convention.
Consider how massive Black Lives Matter protests put enormous pressure on the government and changed public opinion, but the Democrats and their intellectuals failed to channel all that citizen effort into effective reform.
The Democratic Party has arguably been a positive force for change during three periods, during its Jeffersonian origins, during its Jacksonian phase, and, of course, during the New Deal. The Republicans have been a positive force for change once, during their early decades. So in the distant future either party could still contribute.
That isn’t all that happened. Only most of what happened. We’ll discuss empires and the rise of the intelligence agencies in the next post.
Law isn’t always good and elites aren’t always bad. Most of the terrible things America did before WWII were strictly legal and administrations expended a lot of thought trying to fit their preferred policy choices with the law. Of course, it was intelligence agencies that first began the long retreat from law. Intelligence agencies are almost the definition of rule by elite rather than law. I noted in the Spy Museum in D.C. there was no discussion of legality. War time espionage and peace time espionage were treated as equally valid.
From 1945–1963 it was 91% BTW. Handy chart here. There’s a myth that due to loopholes and accounting tricks the rich didn’t pay that much. There’s truth in that, but remember the IRS did a lot more audits of the rich back before Reagan-Clinton, and Musk’s DOGE is cutting tax enforcement further.
You saw how the feckless Democratic establishment suddenly snapped to attention when Bernie Sanders started talking about taxing the rich. Notice how the Democrats don’t seem to be as skilled at dealing with Trump.