Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's Substack diary entry for November 2.
It summarizes Trump's ridiculous "closing argument for the midterm elections," his speech at the Reflecting Pool, where he rambled on about the pool for 16 minutes, then turning to the usual lies and wild exaggerations he's been spouting at every one of his rallies lately.
Being a historian, she compares today's situation -- where "a small group of men has rigged the system to funnel the wealth produced by ordinary people into their own pockets. With that wealth, they have bought power and undermined democracy in favor of themselves" -- with similar situations the country has been in since its founding.
She starts with the push of settlers across the Appalachian Mountains into "the miraculously rich resources of the land to the west" discovered by Daniel Boone. She says the settlers "quickly discovered that equality was not the inevitable result of economic freedom. Some men settled on better land than others, some had family money, some were just lucky, and quickly, those men accumulated more than others."
Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, "which was designed to prevent wealthy men from dominating the new western lands. However, "over the next fifty years, a handful of wealthy enslavers tightened a stranglehold on the South. After 1854, when their intention to control the whole nation became obvious, Americans from a range of political parties came together to oust them from power. They created a government that worked to develop the economy from the bottom, educating young men and giving them land to farm. They tried to make America into a land where every man, regardless of race or background, could rise through hard work. They abolished human enslavement except as punishment for crime, then gave freedmen the vote to enable them to protect their own economic interests."
After the Civil War, "Money and power again began to concentrate at the top of society, among those who became known as “robber barons.” When their control of the government helped to crash the economy in 1893, the American people once again came together to oust them from power, and the Progressive Era recreated a government intended to work for everyone."
But then "The same old pattern of demonizing Black Americans and immigrants for supposedly stealing tax dollars repeated. Men determined to control the country insisted that government regulations and taxes took away a man’s liberty to run his business as he saw fit and undermined the individualism that made America great. In the 1920s, they convinced American voters to turn the government over to businessmen, whose policies, once again, concentrated wealth. When the bottom fell out of that system in 1929 with the Great Crash, Americans came together to demand government work for all Americans, rather than a privileged few."
The result was FDR's "New Deal," and "and most Americans thought the system that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights was so popular it would last forever."
But starting in 1980, Reagan began to undermine that system. Blaming "socialism," the Republicans cut regulations and taxes, helping money—"more than $50 trillion—move upward to the richest 1% of Americans. With it moved political power"
And so the U.S. finds itself in a situation today where voting is suppressed while billionaires pump money into the electoral system -- Elon Musk has spent at least $446 million, an astounding sum for a midterm election -- to buy Republican control of Congress.
However, it seems the pendulum is swinging again: "the open looting of the government in Trump’s second term appears to have revealed to a majority of the American people that the policies the Republican Party has enacted since 1981 benefit only a few. Once again, it seems, Americans are coming together, ready to follow the pattern of the past and rebuild a government that works not just for the wealthy, but for everyone."
