The Boot on Our Necks
On the immorality of wealth, the radicalness of Abraham Lincoln, and how to not be a bootlicker
Last week, this infographic made the rounds on the social media feeds of people plugged into Oklahoma politics, and of those plugged into the debates around public education in Oklahoma1:
This news hit the households of Tulsa teachers in the midst of their annual contract negotiations, which look like they will yield a pay raise well below the current cost of living adjustment you would expect. Teachers, as you would expect, are angry that they are getting a pittance for managing every increading classroom sizes and teaching burdens, while enduring deeper and deeper cuts to supply budgets and support staff, while the alleged leader of the Oklahoma public school system will get to add $125,000 to his already bloated salary. Oklahoma has a massive teacher shortage, as highly qualified teachers2 flee the state for others that will pay them like the highly trained professionals with years of training, education, and experience they are.
Of course, on social media comment sections, the battle raged, between teachers rightly outraged at this kind of news, and scores of regular Oklahomans - fellow working class folks, neighbors and friends - admonishing teachers for being upset about their low pay, about the ridiculous burdens they are saddled with, about these massive pay hikes for our state elite. Listening to my wife read these comments from our fellow citizens - those people who are in the same struggles we are - I commented that I understood better the term “class traitor” when I read working class people attacking the aspirations of other working class paper.
I also noted that, on the left, we call these kind of people “bootlickers.”
All this was injected into the discourse while we were sitting with the reminder that the recent SNAP cutoff gave everyone, that 10% of Oklahoma families depend on help to put food on their tables. This news, of course, also led to plenty of bootlicking activities from other Oklahomans who don’t realize they aren’t in the same boat as the billionaires running and ruining our state and our country. I’m continuously baffled how they think they are.
This all was swirling in my head this morning as I listened to Heather Cox Richardson’s most recent letter. Richardson used her letter to draw the threads together on elitism and aristocracy in America today, providing as she does the usual relevant historical examples we need to put our present moment in context. In particular, she noted the recent revelation of a group of modern elites, manuvering to saddle America with a post-MAGA elite:
On Tuesday, November 4, Elizabeth Dwoskin of the Washington Post described the ideology behind this world. She profiled Chris Buskirk of the Rockbridge Network, a secretive organization funded by tech leaders to create a network that will permit the MAGA movement to outlive Trump. Dwoskin wrote that political strategists credit the Rockbridge Network with pushing J.D. Vance—one of the network’s members—into the vice presidency.
Dwoskin explains that Buskirk embraces a theory that says “a select group of elites are exactly the right people to move the country forward.” Such an “aristocracy”—as he described his vision to Dwoskin—drives innovation. It would be “a proper elite that takes care of the country and governs it well so that everyone prospers.” When he’s not working in politics, Buskirk is, according to Dwoskin, pushing “unrestrained capitalism into American life.” The government should support the country’s innovators, network members say.
Richardson is right in her letter in drawing the connection between this kind of elitism and the Epstein affair roiling politics right now:
As David Smith of The Guardian put it, Epstein’s in-box painted a picture of “a world where immense wealth, privileged access and proximity to power can insulate individuals from accountability and consequences. For those inside the circle, the rules of the outside world do not apply.”
Aristocracy and elitism is the antithesis of democracy. It is also, despite the best whitewashing of our history, central to the story of our nation. From the beginning, despite the ideals we are founded upon, we have had a group of economic elites who wish to be more like old Europe, with a permanent class of “betters” making decisions and distributing resources for the vast majority, rather than allowing us to truly govern ourselves. They do this in the name of “efficiency”, of “rationality”, of “morality.”
But there is nothing more inefficient, irrational, or immoral than the existence of the obscenely wealthy in a democracy of equals, in a nation where so many are still struggling to put food on the table and pay the bills and have the basic necessities of life. Democracy rests upon the Truth that all people are created equal, and all are deserving of equal rights and equal opportunity to succeed in life. The hoarding of wealth and power among a few stands against this, no matter the best intentions of that select few. Being born and bred in elite circles, away from the lives and needs and priorities of working people, they have no way of truly knowing what the average person wants or needs.
A few political leaders over the decades have tried to tap into this, claiming to stand for the masses against the elite few. Donald Trump has tried to claim this mantle over the last decade, despite the fact that he was worth millions the moment he was born and has never had to live a normal life. Its evident in every choice he makes and word he says, like his recent admonition that he doesn’t want to talk about affordability anymore, or his choice during a time of rising prices and deep cuts to social services to build a golden ballroom for his billionaire friends at the People’s House, to throw a Gatsby themed party for his rich friends, to hold SNAP hostage in order to protect himself from his own sins committed with Jeffrey Epstein.
And yet, millions of regular Americans have been taken in by his schtick, convinced that Donald Trump somehow has their best interests at heart, that they are just moments from joining him in the billionaire class, if only all those damn immigrants/trans folks/liberals/hungry kids/teachers would get out of their way. Its the most ancient con job, the selling of solidarity between a rich few and the working many, and we still fall for it.
We’ve also had leaders who understood otherwise. As Richardson notes, Abraham Lincoln fought against the depredations of capital and extreme wealth in his time, even in the midst of his fight against slavery and secession. The fight to end slavery was, in fact, implicitly a class struggle, with those generating the capital and wealth being unshackled from those who unjustly and immorally stole the results of that labor and kept the working class from tasting even a morsel of the fruits they produced. Lincoln was one of the only genuine working class presidents this country has ever had, and one of the fewer who didn’t switch allegiances upon taking the reigns of power, but still stood with his fellow citizens against the elites and the interests of wealth. He showcased that clearly in making the case against slavery, showing that he too recognized the inherent equality at the heart of democracy:
In 1858, the year after the Dred Scott decision, rising politician Abraham Lincoln explained to an audience in Chicago what a system that set some people above others meant. Arguments that those deemed “inferior” “are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow…are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world,” he said. “[T]hey always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden…. [This] argument…is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.”
“Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent….”
Like many famous American figures, Lincoln’s memory has been sanitized and smoothed down. Most people don’t understand just how radical a figure and thinker he truly was.
The rich in this country hold an obscene amount of wealth. The numbers are so astronomical that I think it makes the project of getting people to understand the problem with it even more difficult. Consider: one billion is one thousand millions. One million is a thousand thousands. Here’s my favorite current illustration of the magnitude of wealth: if you were give $10,000 a day every day from the day the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, until today, you still would not have $1 billion. The other way of viewing that: you could spending $10,000 every day and not even crack a single billion in 250 years.
Yet, we currently have about 1,000 billionaires in the United States, many of them worth dozens or hundreds of billions. That is a giant waste of money, of resources that belong, in the end, to all of us. These few are hoarding what is by right ours. And, in doing so, they are completely out of touch with your average American, and the things that make up our lives:
Today, an ideology of “aristocracy” justifies the fabulous wealth and control of government by an elite that increasingly operates in private spaces that are hard for the law to reach, while increasingly using the power of the state against those it considers morally inferior.
Yesterday Arian Campo-Flores of the Wall Street Journal reported that the net worth of the top 0.1% of households in the U.S. reached $23.3 trillion this year, while the bottom 50% hold $4.2 trillion. Campo-Flores outlined a world in which the “ultrarich” are living in luxury and increasingly sealed off from everyday people. “They don’t wait in lines. They don’t jostle with airport crowds or idle unnecessarily in traffic,” Campo-Flores writes. “Instead, an ecosystem of exclusive restaurants, clubs, resorts and other service providers delivers them customized and exquisite experiences as fast as possible. The spaces they inhabit are often private, carefully curated and populated by like-minded and similarly well-heeled peers.”
Elon Musk is a perfect illustration of the immorality of the wealthy, of their inability to understand the lives of regular people, and blindness to the ways they cause irreparable harm to the rest of us. Musk, despite Tesla’s plunging stock price and lagging sales, was recently rewarded with a $1 trillion compensation package. (Remember one trillion is a thousand billions.) He gets this unearned wealth on the heals of his work earlier this year gutting USAID, making him responsible for an appalling amount of suffering and death of the most vulnerable people on the planet:
We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respected tracker of current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustain the programs that remain. As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.
Six hundred thousand people died this year, many hundreds of thousands more are suffering and will die, because billionaire Elon Musk deemed them unworthy of life, deemed them a drag on the “rational” and “efficient” world hellscape he envisions creating on earth. That is pure evil. If that doesn’t get you angry, then your soul may be broken.
And the worst part? It didn’t have to be that way. USAID cost each American a measly $24 per year. We’ve funded it fine for years. It’s not the driver of our massive deficit.
Think about it: why do we live in a time when institutions and organizations that once thrived struggle so mightily to fund even basic services and programs? Think about the stories you’ve seen, of closing libraries and museums, of underfunded schools, of crumbling buildings and unkempt city parks. It wasn’t always this way. We once had a broad enough prosperity to provide ourselves with the structures of a good civil society and interesting, prosperous culture. Even a modest income tax on billionaires would yield enough money to return us to such a time. But, since the Reagan revolution of the 1980s, we’ve given so much back to the wealthy elites, under the theory that if we did it would trickle back to us ten-fold, that we’ve bankrupted ourselves unnecessarily. And so many of us have rubber stamped it, gone along with it, because, in the words of John Steinback, “the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
My friend, you are not a temporarily displaced millionaire or billionaire. You are not one lucky break away from unimaginable riches. You will not win the lottery this month. The elites, our own immoral aristocracy, is not thirsting to pull you into their stratosphere. The politicians who serve their interests don’t give one damn about you, and would in fact feed you to the wood chipper for the sake of their donors, if they asked for it. It is far past time to stop being a bootlicker. The Epstein files, and the golden ballroom, and the myriad depredations of the rich and powerful should have awakened you to this already. The fight we are engaged in is not Republican vs. Democrat, or liberal vs. conservative, or urban vs. rural. It is the very few rich against the rest of us.
And, there are a lot of more of us than them. Their whole political strategy is designed to make you forget that essential truth. There always has been more of us. Together, we all generate so much wealth and capital and resources. We have so many skills, so much knowledge, such know-how, a kind of common sense that the wealthy are deprived of by the strangling power of their money and their toys and their own egos. A policy like universal health care is not the stealing of your wealth for the good of others. No, that’s the current system we live under, the one in which unnecessary and unaccountable middle men in the form of insurance companies suck up your dollars and ration access to care. A policy like universal health care - or public transport, or good roads, or public schools, or any number of public services that benefit us all - is us seizing back our power and our wealth from those who have stolen it, and putting it to use for the good of all of us, not just a few of us.
This is the essence of democracy: the collective decision making and use of resources to benefit each and every person, to create a society in which all thrive to their fullest abilities. Our elites cannot build that for us. They have neither the knowledge, nor the skill, nor the desire to do so. Only we can do that. Your enemy is not teachers wanting fair pay for the work they do. It’s not immigrants trying to make a life for themselves in a place they’ve been told their whole lives is the richest place on earth. Its not your fellow working Americans. We shouldn’t be fighting each other over the sliver of pie we get. We should be looking at the assholes holding the knife, asking them why they get so much while we all are left with so little. There is nothing they fear more than us realizing they are the problem.
Don’t be a bootlicker. Don’t be a class traitor. Stand with your fellow citizens against those who would impoverish us all in order to add another useless zero to their bank accounts. Stay true to the democratic spirit of Lincoln.
A conversation I’m privy to thanks to my educator wife, and my previous life as a teacher here in Tulsa.
Oklahoma, despite its poorly ranked schools and low pay, has one of the most stringent teacher certification processes in America. Oklahoma teachers are sought by other states because of this, with Oklahoma’s teacher certification accepted by dozens of other states.