Farmers and Tyrants

Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, provided the piercing insight into how politics works that perhaps can only come from an outsider (according to Wikipedia, Diamond’s fields are physiology, biophysics, ornithology, environmentalism, ecology, geography, evolutionary biology, and anthropology, but not politics).

As noted earlier, Diamond described governments as kleptocracies that transfer net wealth from commoners to those running the show. Blunt. Amazingly accurate. He added that government chiefs, in order to retain power,

1. Disarm the populace, and arm the elite.
2. Redistribute tribute in popular ways.
3. By maintaining order, make popular the use of force.
4. Create a religion or ideology that justifies kleptocracy.

Civilization is around 10,000 years old. Industrialization yielding a healthy population mostly living in or near cities is less than 100 years old; 1/100th of 1% of history. Therefore, almost all political philosophy is about farmers, a governing class dependent on taxing farmers, and a sub-class of slaves (serfs, indentured peasants) with no rights. When Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal,” he was asserting the rights farmers held against their oppressive king. He drew the battle line that marks American politics today.

The Federalists believed in a strong central government, Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans in limited government and the rights of free farmers. After the civil war, Republicans restricted government’s power to interfere with farming, finance, and industrialization, but also kept farmers support by building railroads that took their harvests to market.

Democrats, the "out" party, focused on the Republican-run society's ills. They itched to take over government and put it to doing good. Which they did, under Roosevelt during the Great Depression and World War II. Democrats became the party of Federalists, believing in a strong central government, and Republicans became heirs to Jefferson’s anti-government farmers, gathering together those worried about government trampling on their individual rights.

How do Diamond’s four levers of power look today?

1. Disarm the populace, and arm the elite.

Whoever controls government controls the elite’s use of force. Democrats enhanced government’s power from 1941 to 1968 by pursuing an internationalist foreign policy that took us into World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. But Vietnam was a disaster, costing Democrats the White House and killing their taste for war. Now Democrats are the party of peace, the mother party, determined to disarm and pour resources into domestic “wars” against poverty and inequality. Republicans have by default become the party of war, the father party, the only party that takes overseas threats seriously, and the party the U.S. military gravitates toward (which makes Democrats even more anti-war).

2. Redistribute tribute in popular ways.

Democrats believe government is good, and set out to prove it every time they are in power. As we found, Democrats are increasingly comfortable with the word “socialism.” Democratic socialism became the norm in Europe after World War II; it was an acceptable counterweight to the Fascism that had destroyed the continent and the Communism that threatened Western Europe after 1945. Faced with totalitarianism, socialism emerged as the democratic alternative, distributing tribute to labor unions that controlled European electorates. To Democrats, the U.S. trails Europe. They want national health insurance on the European model. Republicans don’t like government buying off working class votes, and prefer to limit government to its more basic functions.

3. By maintaining order, make popular the use of force.

Democrats are evolving an ideology that employs government coercion to suppress dissent in the name of “political correctness” and putting down “hate speech.” Today’s Democrats are the opposite of the Democrats of the 1940s-1950’s, who fought a heroic battle against Communist infiltration of their ranks and subsequent McCarthyism. Republicans are more inclined to support police power to maintain order, especially when the disorderly elements come out of the Democrats’ natural constituency groups.

4. Create a religion or ideology that justifies kleptocracy.

Before the Depression and again in the 1950s, Republicans used Protestantism's stress on individual salvation ("the Protestant ethic") to support the party's agrarian/small-town values power base. Overthrowing Protestant values was part of the Democrats' expanding federal control; it helped drive most religious people toward the Republicans. But religion isn’t exclusively the province of Republicans. Democrats use the “social gospel” interpretation of Christianity to justify government helping the disadvantaged, and the Democratic elite ever increasingly approaches environmentalism as its secular religion.