A little after the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, editor emeritus Lewis Lapham discusses three essays he wrote during the George W. Bush era: “The American Rome” (August 2001), “Cause for Dissent” (April 2003), and “Going by the Book” (November 2006). With fine prose and razor-edged contempt for war, lies, and complacent members of the commentariat, each article captures a distinctive historical moment.
SHOW NOTES
[1:43] The Ballad of the Green Berets
[3:52] Quote from Charles Krauthammer, No power since Imperial Rome had commanded the world to the extent of the American power in the year 2001.
[4:12] Charles Krauthammer’s 2001 TIME Magazine column
[8:27] Madeleine Albright saying “it was worth it” for 500,000 Iraqi children to die of malnutrition during the Iraq war
[10:00] “The American Rome” (August 2001)
[15:30] “Cause for Dissent” (April 2003)
[17:06] Al Gore in 2001 on Americans living in a police state
[21:35] Walt Whitman’s “Drum-Taps”
[25:05] Network, a movie released on the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence
[26:55] Jacque Rousseau’s The Social Contract
[31:04] Thomas Paine quote
[31:20] Tocqueville quote from 1831
[32:26] Toni Morrison’s Stockholm speech, December 7, 1993
[37:59] Money and Class in America by Lewis Lapham
[38:52] Veblen’s theory of the leisure class
QUOTES
I think the invasion of Iraq was a stupidity based on a delusion. The Americans were pleased with the thought that they were the rulers of the world.
But one of the distinctive characteristics of the American establishment, or what we now call the deep state—the plutocracy—that’s been an office in Washington since the arrival of Reagan… one of their distinctive characteristics is to speak in a language that means nothing. To say nothing, that is the great art of self-advancement in Washington. I tend to see the characteristic in both the Republican and the Democrat.
Americans lack a tragic sense of life. The doctrine of American exceptionalism, which has been with us since the 1820s—a parting gift of Thomas Jefferson—has excused us from committing any crime.
The Eighties are distinguished by—and this starts with Reagan—with more laws, protecting the rights of property and fewer laws protecting the rights of people. It’s the free market that ignores any value that can’t be translated into cash—that doesn’t recognize human value, endeavor, worth.
Justice Louis Brandeis 1941, talking to Roosevelt about the New Deal, says we can have democracy or we can have concentrated wealth in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both. He’s wrong. We can’t not have both the plutocracy and democracy of permanent members of the human condition. Neither of them can be deplatformed or canceled. And it is the separation of their powers, the selflessness of democracy, a check on the selfishness of plutocracy. That is the American experiment with a combustible element of freedom. People in power are always afraid of freedom.
People in power are always afraid of freedom. Terrified of it. I mean, the American ruling class today are paralyzed with their fear of the American people. This brings out of course, responses. I mean, the more frightened you are, the more violent and vicious your attempt to do away with your fear. I mean, that’s why we’ve got heavily armed police all over the country, right? And the Americans, we don’t have a tragic sense of life, and therefore we can’t get over our fear of death. In my view, that’s the great challenge.
One of the consequences of the [COVID-19] epidemic was to give people time and space to think about other meanings in life, than the ones offered by money. And there are hints of that, in all different kinds of ways: less people going back to work, more people going back to work for lesser money in return for more time to themselves, learning to not gorge themselves on the food and drink and so on. I mean, lived democracy instead of rhetorical democracy.
I think if you kind of look at American history, you can sort of see the theme between democracy and plutocracy weaving its way throughout the whole of the American experience. And sometimes one of the other is in the ascendance. You know, it’s like music. I mean, it’s the minor and major key, and they switch places. Since the 70s, that plutocracy has been the dominant theme. And here there are indications of some kind of resurrection of the Democratic music.
Democracy isn’t a form of government. Rousseau says that. I mean, he says that in The Social Contract, he says that democracy is so short lived, it can be said not to exist as a form of government. It’s a feeling, it’s a wave, it’s an emotion. It’s other than the rational clock like universe of the Enlightenment. It’s romantic. It’s Beethoven. And it doesn’t last long, and it can’t, because it’s hard to hold it together.
But sooner or later, even the best of oligarchies rot in the sun. They return to the great truth that their first care becomes caring for themselves…And that is the plutocracy that develops in the United States, and the one which we are now privileged to see comfortably settled in Washington—that is the swamp.
TRANSCRIPT
Violet Lucca: Welcome to The Harper’s podcast. I’m your host, Violet Lucca. The twentieth anniversary of the Iraq War quietly slipped by a month ago. Or at least it was quiet for most Americans who have no connection to the violence and pain that’s been wrought across the Middle East, or on the soldiers who went there under false pretenses. I vividly remember the morning of March 19, 2003. I had graduated from high school a semester early, and I was working as a temp in the radiology records department at St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. While the hospital played the same tape of inoffensive muzak throughout the halls every day, there was one room where two very wonderful middle aged women worked, where our radio was always tuned to one of the local country music stations. I happened to be in that room as the DJ read out the announcement. The invasion of Iraq had begun. He then put on the Ballad of the Green Berets. For those who haven’t heard the song, it begins:
Fighting soldiers from the sky, fearless men who jump and die. Men who mean just what they say. Bold, brave men of the green berets.
Violet Lucca: It was chilling, and enraging. I’ll never forget that moment. And a little over 1,000 miles away from me, there was Lewis Lapham at his desk in The Harper’s offices. He was probably smoking a cigarette. Harper’s was one of the very first publications to come out against the war in Iraq, and it remained consistently critical of everything the Bush administration did. The magazine also depicted people beyond the green zone of Iraqi Pashtun, Kurdish, Mandaean, Christian and Muslim lives that were torn apart by freedom and nation building. So in honor of this painful, absurd, tragic anniversary, I spoke with Latham about three of the many pieces he wrote during the Bush era. I’ve linked them in the show notes. Each is unfailingly clear eyed and prescient.
Violet Lucca: Knowing what we know now, so you know, every tell all every expose, between every line of every memoir, and hagiography over, you know, released since the start of the Iraq War. Yes. How has your understanding of why we invaded Iraq changed? And if it has, what was the change?
Lewis Lapham: I don’t think it’s changed. I mean, I think the invasion of Iraq was a stupidity based on a delusion. The Americans pleased with the thought that they were the rulers of the world. In the words of Charles Krauthammer, one of the leading voices of Christian crusade was that, “No power since Imperial Rome had commanded the world to the extent of the American power in the year 2001.” He actually wrote a column for Time magazine in the summer of 2001, a few months before the fall of the Trade Towers in which he said that we make our own reality. What we say is, is real. We will set all the rules. We will run hotels and ministries of information and decide who is American and who is not. Extraordinary. And this kind of tone appeared throughout the established American news media. And what the real reasons were for invading Iraq in 2003, I still don’t know, nor am I assured that the Bush administration knew then or now.
Violet Lucca: What makes you say that—that they don’t even they don’t know?
Lewis Lapham: They don’t. They declare a war against all the world’s evil. And you can’t win that kind of a World War because that’s a war against an unknown enemy and an abstract noun. I mean, maybe their objective was to control the oil production. Maybe it was to run the equivalent of a pentagon trade show with live ammunition. Maybe it was to satisfy some egotistical sense of the American self on the part of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. But one of the distinctive characteristics of the American establishment, or what we now call the deep state, the plutocracy that’s been an office in Washington since the arrival of Reagan… one of their distinctive characteristics is to speak in a language that means nothing. To say nothing, that is the great art of self-advancement in Washington. I tend to see the characteristic in both the Republican and the Democrat. I find the narcissism of Obama as revolting as the narcissism of Trump. And what the real motive is, there’s never a specific objective. It’s also paranoid, the American nomenklatura always casts itself as the victim. Yes, Americans believe it is believed or by definition, innocent. Yeah. Constantly under attack by foreign agents, various ideologies, disease, acid rain, trouble coming at them from all directions at all times. And because they are convinced that we are forever innocent, that allows them to respond with brutal means. I mean, if you are by definition, innocent, and just that gives you permission to kill without mercy and do what is necessary. Madeleine Albright who was, I believe, Clinton’s Secretary of State, and she was on television—it was pointed out by the correspondent that 500,000 Iraqi children died of malnutrition or starvation because the Americans had imposed embargo, the delivery of medicine, baby formula milk to Iraq. Albright simply said, “It was worth it.”
Violet Lucca: Yes, I remember this very vividly.
Lewis Lapham: Yeah, the Americans are always doing good in the world. They apologize for nothing. George Bush said that—the older George Bush said that one Navy prior to the first Gulf War shot down a civilian airliner over the Persian Gulf, killed 200-odd Iranians and Bush said, “We never apologize. And nothing we ever do is wrong.” Americans lack a tragic sense of life. The doctrine of American exceptionalism, which has been with us since the 1820s, a parting gift of Thomas Jefferson, have excused us from committing any crime.
Violet Lucca: Let’s stay with innocence for a second because something that irritates me is someone who lived through this time, you know, through the war on terror, through war on Iraq, is this revisionism. And part of the revisionism is that something changed after 9/11. What changed? No one can say, but something changed. And you know, In August 2001, Harper’s published your essay called the American Rome, on the theory of virtuous Empire, which gets into this question of innocence, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the vestiges of the Cold War infrastructure. It doesn’t have anything to do with the victory of World War Two. And it’s not something specifically vicious about George W. Bush. It’s this part of the American character itself. And I think I think that’s very true. And you can see that with Trump supporters, this feeling of being aggrieved of being an innocent of needing retribution. What allows you to sort of pick that out of all these other historical facts and say that this is what undergirds it all?
Lewis Lapham: Well, I don’t know if that’s right or wrong. It’s just the way it’s just the way I see it. And it’s what I hear in the verse. I mean, look at Trump. Trump is constantly portraying himself as a victim. Yes. And George W. Bush was doing this, you know, did the same thing. I mean, it’s the American. It’s the lie that it tells itself that allows it, America, the administration, the government, the Defense Department, whatever you want to call it, to do as they please. I find that again, in the voice of Obama, the voice of Biden, you know, Biden’s reasons for spying on their own citizens, their willingness to set aside the Constitution, not listening to other people. I mean, and it’s one of the reasons that Trump got elected, was saying that when he was campaigning in 2016, saying to crowds all across the country that, “I’m rich, I can do anything I wish, and so can America.” His audience, whose experiences of the 1980s had been one of downwardly mobile passage. The 80s are distinguished by—and this starts with Reagan—with more laws, protecting the rights of property and fewer laws protecting the rights of people. It’s the free market that ignores any value that can’t be translated into cash—that doesn’t recognize human value, endeavor, worth. And that array enrages people, to be treated like that, to be treated as objects instead of subjects. And that, of course, is what the Biden Administration—I mean, this is neither left nor right. I mean, this is both. This is plutocracy. America was not founded as a democracy. America was founded on the dream of riches, just the way of Zuckerberg’s Facebook or Rockefeller Standard Oil. I mean, the pilgrims that arrive and Salem in 1620 are they’re in search of riches—spiritual, temporal, animal, vegetable, mineral.
Violet Lucca: Not human.
Lewis Lapham: Yeah. Over three generations, they make what they call “A righteous friendship with Mammon.” That’s their phrase. And one of the points of their puritan theology is that the world is a storehouse of what they call venerable wonders, which is to be exploited to the fullest possible extent, also conquest. The massacre of the Indians is doing due diligence for setting up of them profitable real estate deal. But this was part of their theology. And again, the Constitution in Philadelphia, I mean, 1787 it’s to set up a safe space for wealth and the wealthy. It’s not like Magna Carta, it’s not a sharing of a bountiful wilderness. It’s a government of prosperous merchants in the north and slaveholding planters in the south setting up a government buying men of property, a government hospitable to the acquisition of more property.
Violet Lucca: Yeah.
Lewis Lapham: The Democratic element is in the Bill of Rights.
Violet Lucca: Which was gutted during the, during this very sad time in a way it felt very fast at the time, but by comparison with Trump, it was actually pretty slow. But such is the passage of time. And in, in this piece that ran the month after we invaded Iraq, and it’s called “Cause for Dissent: Ten questions for the Bush regime.” Obviously, you’re a student of history. And you quote key figures from the Truman administration, such as Dean Acheson, who was Truman, Secretary of State, who posited that all American foreign policy was nonpartisan. And if we can get the suckers to believe that we’ll never have anything to worry about, right? To what extent do you see a parallel between what the Bush administration did with things related to terrorism and creating that you like the color coded risk scale, and the civil defense, you know, these different programs that showed people they should be afraid, but not totally paralyzed? So they could still go to work and be American? Do their diligence?
Lewis Lapham: Yes. Do their shopping. In other words, you know, it’s the consumer society. I mean, the terror alerts are to instill the habit of obedience, you know, an early form of lockdown. I mean, the extent of the surveillance that comes out of the Patriot Act, I mean, it’s much more draconian then the British crown in the 18th century, I mean, Al Gore actually says in 2001, that we’re living in a police state. He says that in so many ways it true. But of course, this is all being done for our own good. Yes. You know, it’s just the way that I mean—They’ve now got the idea of using some form of cryptocurrency, subject to a social score, that the government will be able to decide what you can spend and what you can. You won’t have control of your own money. The move in that direction has been going on a long time. I mean, it actually comes out of the 60s. The 60s frightens the American ruling class to such a degree that the shutting down of free speech is already well underway and 70s. Freedom is a very, is a combustible element. Justice Louis Brandeis 1941, talking to Roosevelt about the New Deal, says we can have democracy or we can have concentrated wealth in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both. He’s wrong. We can’t not have both the plutocracy and democracy of permanent members of the human condition. Neither of them can be deplatformed or canceled. And it is the separation of their powers, the selflessness of democracy, a check on the selfishness of plutocracy. That is the American experiment with a combustible element of freedom. People in power are always afraid of freedom. Terrified of it. I mean, the American ruling class today are paralyzed with their fear of the American people. This brings out of course, responses. I mean, the more frightened you are, the more violent and vicious your attempt to do away with your fear. I mean, that’s why we’ve got heavily armed police all over the country, right? And via the Americans, we don’t have a tragic sense of life, and therefore we can’t get over our fear of death. In my view, that’s the great challenge. Look what’s going on now. I mean, no day goes by, without somewhere in the media, somebody announcing the end of the world—climate change crime, it just gets wall to wall streaming through the firmament of the media. And, you know, posted on all the walls. I mean, the dying animals, migration, rising seas, political collapse, autocracy, on the rise, birth rates going down. I mean, it’s, you know, one of the consequences of the epidemic was to give people time and space to think about other meanings in life, than the ones offered by money. And there are hints of that, in all different kinds of ways: less people going back to work, more people going back to work for lesser money in return for more time to themselves, learning to not gorge themselves on the food and drink and so on. I mean, lived democracy instead of rhetorical democracy, the democracy known to Whitman. You know, when Whitman was serving as a nurse in Civil War, is a wonderful passage, somewhere, I think it’s in “Drum-Taps,” where he’s talking, he says, he’s sitting next to these kids that are horribly wounded in Civil War hospitals, which were not hygienic. And he holds their hands and talks to them. And, and the, you know, he brings them an apple, or he brings them a pencil and a piece of paper to write home to their mother, brother, wife. And then sometimes he gives them money, but the money isn’t important to them. That spirit is still alive. I think if you kind of look at American history, you can sort of see the theme between democracy and plutocracy weaving its way throughout the whole of the American experience. And sometimes one of the other is in the ascendance. You know, it’s like music. I mean, it’s the minor and major key, and they switch places. Since the 70s, that plutocracy has been the dominant theme. And here there are indications of some kind of resurrection of the Democratic music.
Violet Lucca: Yes. Well, I wanted to read a little bit of one of the essays, “Cause for Dissent,” the ending.
Lewis Lapham: Yeah.
Violet Lucca: So I’m just quoting you, which is great. You have to listen to me read what you wrote to you. “So defined is a ceaseless process of change, democracy assumes the pain of contradiction and new discovery. Not only as the normal, but also as the necessary condition of existence. As has been said, a hard act to perform, and one that failed and was abandoned in nearly every country in Europe, in the generation between the First and Second World Wars, and place of truthful and therefore, possibly unpleasant argument. The Bush Administration offers warm and welcome lies, advising us to lay aside the tool of thought, and rest safely on the pillows of glorious and world encircling empire. We accept the invitation at our peril.” So fast forward, we did accept the invitation. But now we’re at a point where we reject it. There are very few people who are willing to defend the Iraq war now. And even there are some people who write it off as like the post-9/11 crazies or whatever. But where does American democracy stand now? And why can’t we learn from our mistakes? Because this seems like—the failure of the Iraq War—seems like such a perfect example of why you shouldn’t be extremely critical of all of these things.
Lewis Lapham: Well, that’s an interesting question. Where democracy stands now is with what I’ve just said, a little while ago with people coming out of the epidemic and understanding that there were more things in life than a new car and more money, right? And you’ve seen that, but I would actually go to the point where there was the movie that was released on the 200th anniversary of Declaration of Independence—Network. Yes. Howard Beale, I believe his name is, stands up at some point and says, “I won’t take it anymore. Open the windows. I won’t take it anymore.” And what was it that he was telling him not to take was the being locked down. And I think democracy asserting itself along those lines, was part of the response to the George Floyd death. Overnight that goes viral. And there are people standing around in the streets saying they won’t take it anymore all over the country—I think in 2,000 towns and cities. And not all of it is Black Lives Matter. I think it’s the democratic way of being. So, I think that the January 6 protest in the capital is the democracy. And that the wishing to convicted of treason is the plutocracy. In other words, I think that Nancy Pelosi, the woman from Wyoming—Cheney… god, I mean, the more you know about her father… a true criminal. And it’s the plutocratic reaction to the Democratic cry for freedom. Democracy isn’t a form of government. Rousseau says that. I mean, he says that in The Social Contract, he says that democracy is so short lived, it can be said not to exist as a form of government. It’s a feeling, it’s a wave, it’s an emotion. It’s other than the rational clock like universe of the Enlightenment. It’s romantic. It’s Beethoven. And it doesn’t last long, and it can’t, because it’s hard to hold it together. Again, this is the lesson that you see from the French Revolution. You have the emotions, overwhelming the best deal, but then the inability of the emotions to come together into anything other than ropes. Pierre’s reign of virtue was just as simply a more vicious form of the plutocracy the. And then of course, it’s also the question of the machine is the great passage in in Henry Adams, Henry Adams is looking at the Dynamo at the Paris exhibition of 1900. And he’s so in all of the dynamo, the power of relentlessness, that his instinct is to worship. The big theme of modernism is the war of man against machine. And the plutocracy, of course, is on the side of the machine. Is the machine. And that that again, is Mark. And the irony is that here in 1900, you have Adams, American conservative, grandson of one president, great grandson of another, agreeing with Marx on that point.
Violet Lucca: Well, I wanted to speak a bit about this piece from November 2006, that you wrote, which is called “Going By the Book.” And in it you quote some parts of this Council on Foreign Relations presentation that happened a little around the time of the fifth anniversary of 9/11.
Lewis Lapham: Yeah.
Violet Lucca: At this point, it’s very clear that the war is a disaster.
Lewis Lapham: Yeah.
Violet Lucca: It’s clear that nobody is actually being threatened by terrorists domestically.
Lewis Lapham: Right.
Violet Lucca: And you quote these, these very authoritative, very scary men. And it’s completely—it’s so funny. Someone asks them about the ports. And the presenter says that really dangerous threats are the hypotheticals, the ones we don’t expect and can’t predict. So it’s like what? Well, why are you here? Why are we listening? So I mean, and then you just sort of go on to connect how they’re blaming private companies for failing to spend enough money on anti-terrorism. And this is the government, right? The government doesn’t believe in itself. To what extent do you feel like your reaction to the Iraq War, the War on Terror was shaped by the fact that you were in New York, and you had a front seat to some of the most absurd displays of patriotism, of statecraft, of all of these different things?
Lewis Lapham: Yes. When you really get into a dangerous situation, you know, catastrophe, the democracy that shows up and not the plutocracy. In other words, the government response to 9/11 was very weak, slow, and, and fearful. Whereas you have volunteers coming from all over the goddamn country. And they’re there as soon as they can, and it’s the people caring for each other. That is democracy. That’s the way that’s what Tom Paine says the government is never gonna give a goddamn. I mean, government doesn’t isn’t interested in protecting the American people, the government is interested in protecting American private property. Seriously, I mean, Tocqueville says that, whatever that is, 1830–31 is he sees it as the gift for association. Here are people living in small communities, even in small towns throughout the Middle West. And they help one another, there’s no central government, there’s no national currency. They do what they do, like God, I mean, I mean, they help they’re not thinking of self promotion. They’re not thinking of a tax angle, because if they don’t do it, nobody else will. It’s a beautiful passage. And Tocqueville, actually, but again, it’s like the passage in Whitman. It’s also like, numbers of passages in the in Lincoln. But the thing is, you have to understand democracy as emotion, intuition, as discovery. I mean, Einstein talks about that too. And has to do with language. There’s a great passage in Toni Morrison’s Stockholm speech where she says that we die. And that might be the end of life. But when we do language we live and that is the meaning of life. That’s not exact quote, but it’s close. But it’s like Shakespeare, I mean, you know, capture the love, in words. But it you understand, I mean, the way the plutocracy is hoping that it can get all those worked on. Freedom is work and that their hobby can be done by AI. I don’t think that works. Because that’s not consciousness. I mean, Alexa can read the books, but she doesn’t know what the words mean.
Violet Lucca: Right. So much of consciousness. Are these contradictions?
Lewis Lapham: Yeah.
Violet Lucca: The higher functions of our being are predicated on things computers can’t do because they have rules to follow. Yeah. And speaking of rules, it’s difficult not to draw parallels between Saddam Hussein—former US ally, and Vladimir Putin—former US ally.
Lewis Lapham: Yeah.
Violet Lucca: You know, America seems to have given up on the Middle East, and now once again, we’re focused on China and Russia.
Lewis Lapham: Right.
Violet Lucca: So do you think the naiveté—that innocence we were talking about at the start—does that have to do with this turn toward this Cold War thinking, or is it something else?
Lewis Lapham: I don’t know. I think they’re trapped in Cold War thinking. That’s, that’s my… I mean, somebody once said about the French Bourbon Dynasty that they never forgot anything and they never learned it, right? And I think Biden’s mindset is somewhere back in 1950. First of all, I think, to imagine that Putin intends some onslaught into Europe to reestablish the make believe Russian Empire. It’s just that makes no sense. I mean, we brought on the Cold War out of our own paranoia. IThe Russians in 1945-46—half of them were in absolutely in no position to overrun Europe. I mean, they lost something like 15 million casualties. Most of their transport was horse drawn, and we make up this notion of a Russian horde empire overwhelming Europe. I mean, that’s paranoia. I think the same thing now. I mean, one thing, Putin is shown to be true with his attack on Ukraine is that his army is in no shape to take over much of anything, right?
Violet Lucca: Yeah.
Lewis Lapham: But Biden wants to think so. Or certainly, our defense contractors want to think so because they’re the ones who profit. We don’t know where the money is gone, we’ve given them $30 billion. But we do know that a major part of it will go into the American defense industry. Again, I mean, that’s a sterile and investment. I mean, that’s Eisenhower’s wonderful speech, about the military industrial complex, where to invest money and weapons is, is it’s sterile, it doesn’t produce anything. I mean, the meaning of money depends on the uses to which it is put. And if you put it to the use of funding the building of bridges and canals and infrastructure and people’s lives, it’s a good thing when you worship it, and use it to make weapons or, you know, buy temples to mammon, you know, $40 million apartments and so forth and so on. I mean, it’s, it’s useless.
Violet Lucca: Well, I wanted to ask one last thing, which is that revisiting these pieces? They’re quite funny. And even though it’s become maybe a little attractive, to quote Marx, but it’s still not the mainstream. But to do it in 2003, in the early 2000s, it was vaguely heretical, right? That you would, you would take this stance, and so much, every part of culture—even people, everyday people, they wanted this war in Iraq. They believe that we would be doing the right thing.
Lewis Lapham: Yeah.
Violet Lucca: What about your background, your education has allowed, like allowed you to see through all of this? To have such a very clear, sardonic sometimes, point of view about what the plutocracy is doing?
Lewis Lapham: Well, I begin to notice it at a fairly young age, right? I mean, I brought it up—put it this way. In 1989, I published a book called Money and Class in America. And I was attacked by David Brooks, then columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who said that nobody in his right mind could attack money. And the only reason that I was doing it was to make money.
Violet Lucca: Pretty clever.
Lewis Lapham: But I wasn’t. What I was trying to do was to rid myself of the habit of mind that judges a man’s excellence by his net worth. That phrase for us appears in Upton Sinclair, the novelist and poet also ran for governor of California in the 30s on a socialist ticket. Pecuniary decency. It’s also the ideas that appear in Veblen’s theory of the leisure class. So I grew up in a privileged neighborhood, in San Francisco, 1930. I was born in 1935, in Civic Heights. I’m the grandson and son in a family that owns oil companies and shipping companies. And I never heard my parents never speak about money. It was blasphemy. But I was given to understand that, you know, by the age of four, that any man worth a significant amount of money, deserved the respect the statue of George Washington. That money was the elephant always in the room, that ruled the world, right? It was the same lesson taught at prep school in Hotchkiss in Connecticut, and also at Yale and in the 50s that the headmaster or the president of the university giving the speech, telling you that you were the favorite few, and you are those to whom much has been given, much is to be expected. But you are, by definition—by birth. And money corrupts poor people, but ennobles rich people. I already knew something was wrong, right? And I didn’t buy into that. In fact, it’s a variation of the, the old Puritan theology, covenant of capitalism. But then I began to, you know, as a newspaper reporter, in both San Francisco and New York in the 50s—then again, in the 60s—I began to meet the elephant, and began to see through the idea that money could do no wrong. What I was trying to do with money and class in America was trying to rid myself of the illusions which you are presented with if you’re born into—what in America goes by the name of the ruling class—in most cases is nobody home. Aristotle says that all government, no matter what you call it, is of the few by the many. So all government is oligarchy. And it can start out as, as did the American oligarchies, coming out of the Constitution with the idea that it was, Madison says, So says that the government should be run by the people who are with the most wisdom to discern and the most virtue to pursue the common good of the society. And by that they meant men like themselves. Madison says, so Adam says, though, Jefferson says sound different words. And by we, the people, they mean, those of us with the wisdom to discern and a virtue to pursue. I mean, the poor, the Black women don’t have a hand in it. They’re not part of the, “We the people” in the Constitution. And this is a lesson I’m still being taught at prep school, in college in the in the 50s. And the thing is that yes, sometimes, you know, you can start out with an oligarchy that meets the specifications of virtue, many of the, in the original governments of the United States, men, dead men—Adams, Jefferson, I mean—these are people they’re learning. They have a genuine interest in the good of the society, and they are prepared to work at it. But sooner or later, even the best of oligarchies rot in the sun. They return to the great truth that their first care becomes caring for themselves. And Aristotle says, they become what he calls, “Government of prosperous fools.” Men so lost in the dream of riches, as they believe that there is nothing money cannot buy. And that is the plutocracy that develops in the United States, and the one which we are now privileged to see comfortably settled in Washington—that is the swamp.
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