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| Demonstrator Randall Grey protests a taxation of the wealthy during a rally at Occupy Wall Street San Diego on Oct. 13, 2011 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Sandy Huffaker/Corbis via Getty Images) |
A new book argues that the Constitution's framers believed that vast constitutions of wealth were the enemy of democracy - so what happened?
A constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic
theory,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in 1905. Holmes
was dissenting from the Court’s majority opinion in Lochner v. New York,
which held that the New York State Legislature had violated the right to
freedom of contract when it passed a law setting a maximum workweek of 60 hours
for bakery employees. In his dissent, Holmes insisted that there had been no
violation: Because the Constitution was indifferent to economic matters, New
York’s legislature was free to regulate the state’s economy as it thought best,
and it was not the court’s job to second-guess it.
Judges invoked “freedom of contract” to overturn many labor laws
and other economic regulations between the 1880s and the 1930s. But three
decades after Lochner, during the pitched
political battles over the New Deal, the courts stepped aside and allowed state
legislatures and Congress to pass sweeping regulatory laws: minimum wages,
maximum hours, statutes for unionization and collective bargaining, and much
more. Holmes’ lonely dissent proved prophetic and entered into the canon of
constitutional writing, and it became a touchstone for progressives in
particular.
Ganesh Sitaraman’s new book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution,
argues that Holmes’ famous dissent got it backward: The Constitution does
“embody a particular economic theory,” just not that of free-market
libertarianism. According to Sitaraman, who was a staffer in Sen. Elizabeth
Warren’s office and now teaches at Vanderbilt Law School, the Constitution was
written and adopted with the understanding that the political system it
established could only work in a fairly equal economy, with no vast
concentration of wealth and power at the top, no wasteland of poverty and
exploitation at the bottom, and a big mass of the “middling sort” of people at
the center.
Although the Constitution says very little about economic life,
Sitaraman shows that plenty of people in the period of the nation’s founding
believed that political power reliably followed the distribution of wealth. In
nations where land and resources were concentrated among the few, political
power was concentrated there too; in nations with a large middle class, power
was more evenly distributed and democracy could thrive. This was why the
American founders believed the United States could become a republic of
self-governing citizens. Land was widely available, and most white men could
find a place in the country’s economic life. For that reason, they could also
find one in its political life. But if American wealth ever grew as
concentrated as it was in England and other aristocratic societies, a republic
would prove impossible: Welcome to the oligarchy.
This fear of large concentrations of wealth and power came to
fruition in America’s first Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century,
and it has again today. It is the present-day oligarchy that led Sitaraman back
to earlier egalitarian visions in search of an alternative path. While he gives
us a large sweeping historical narrative, Sitaraman speaks unabashedly to the
present moment. He believes his book’s argument — that America cannot be
America without a strong middle class — is essential to understanding the world
we live in today and in particular the politics of people like Elizabeth
Warren, Bernie Sanders and even the plutocrat in the White House. (Trump’s
victory came along late enough that it receives only a hurried note in the
book, but Sitaraman refers frequently to the Founding Fathers’ warning that
extreme inequality is the breeding ground of demagogues.)
As Sitaraman acknowledges, his argument isn’t new; instead, he is trying
to recover an American tradition as old as the country itself, one that gets
revived whenever economic inequality becomes central to our politics.
The main points of this tradition are familiar ground for
students of constitutional history, but they are worth revisiting. After
discussing figures like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Daniel Webster, who
argued that a broad distribution of property would keep the United States from
becoming an oligarchy, Sitaraman hurries through the age of Andrew Jackson to
the decades after the Civil War, when the country began to look as it does now.
The 13th and 14th Amendments
abolished slavery and established universal citizenship. The closing of the
frontier brought the end of open land, and the rise of an industrial economy
moved the basis of wealth increasingly from land to factories.
Those factories produced enormous concentrations of wealth, and
factory work meant that millions of citizens would never enter the Jeffersonian
idyll of yeomanry and own their own land; America soon started to take the form
of an oligarchic political system. The US Senate, whose members were appointed
by state legislatures, was full of wealthy friends of the new monopolies. The
Supreme Court, which heavily represented corporate interests, stood ready to
strike down any law that interfered excessively with laissez-faire principles.
William McKinley’s operatives raised millions of dollars from big corporations
to help defeat the populist William Jennings Bryan. Adjusting for inflation,
the country had become a billionaires’ republic.
Please continue this article here: http://billmoyers.com/story/a-billionaires-republic/
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