Embed Notice

The worst presidential choice prior to 2024 was James Buchanan in 1856.

Like Trump, Buchanan won both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

These two presidents are the lowest-ranked in an annual poll of American political scientists,
and Buchanan ranks last in a 2021 survey of American political historians
(though for some mysterious reason that one ranks Trump only fourth-worst).

Buchanan is reviled for fumbling Confederates’ threats to secede,
which of course led to the Civil War.

I would argue that the public also chose very badly in reelecting Richard Nixon in 1972 and George W. Bush in 2004
—and that in choosing Ronald Reagan in 1980, the party cleared a path that eventually led to Trump.

But 2024 may be the first election in American history in which a majority of United States voters specifically chose oligarchy.

This is terra incognita, but it turns out to be a problem to which our second president, John Adams, gave considerable thought.

None of the Founders fretted as much about oligarchy as Adams;
he was writing about its dangers as early as 1766,
and in 1785 he urged that the Pennsylvania Constitution permit sufficient payment to its legislators to allow ordinary people to serve,
lest “an Aristocracy or oligarchy of the rich will be formed.”

Six years after he ended his presidency (the weakest part of his legacy), Adams wrote that “the Creed of my whole Life” had been that
“No simple Form of Government, can possibly secure Men against the Violences of Power.
Simple Monarchy will soon mould itself into Despotism,
Aristocracy will soon commence an Oligarchy, and Democracy, will soon degenerate into an Anarchy.”

By this time in his life, Adams had come to believe that the ideal government balanced democracy against elements of monarchy and aristocracy.

Adams is widely judged (by the conservative writer Russell Kirk, among others)
to have evolved after the American Revolution into a conservative apologist for privilege.

Holly Brewer, Burke professor of American history at the University of Maryland, told me
“He became more comfortable with it.”

The carriages, pulled by six horses, were “modeled after how the king traveled in London,” Brewer said.

But there’s an alternative view.

C. Wright Mills identified Adams as a more incisive critic of the power elite than Thorstein Veblen
-- and Judith Shklar and John Patrick Diggins voiced similar opinions.

In the 2016 book John "Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy", Luke Mayville, a Yale-trained historian and co-founder of the grassroots group "Reclaim Idaho",
takes this argument further.

“In his letters, essays, and treatises,” Mayville writes, “Adams explored in subtle detail what might be called soft oligarchy
—the disproportionate power that accrues to wealth on account of widespread sympathy for the rich.”

Adams did not judge this attraction benign,
but neither did he believe it could be wished away.

The Framers of the Constitution, Mayville argues, believed in checks and balances among various government institutions,

but they did not consider any need to balance the power of government against the power of wealthy private citizens.

Adams thought otherwise.

“The rich, the well-born, and the able,”
Adams wrote in "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" (1787–8)
“acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense, in a house of representatives.”

Adams’s solution to this imbalance of power was to separate out
“the most illustrious” among this elite
and corral them into the Senate.

Jefferson and other Adams critics saw this as elevating the oligarchs.

But Adams judged it “ostracism” because it removed the rich from the sphere of self-interest.

A modern expression of this conceit would be that
“it takes a thief to catch a thief.”

Former Senator Jay Rockefeller was precisely the sort Adams had in mind:

knowledgeable and disgusted in equal measure about the tricks by which oligarchs
like his great-grandfather John D. Rockefeller
acquired and held power.

Other former senators in this mold included Herbert Kohl and,
to a lesser extent,
former Senator John Heinz.

But you can’t count on getting a Rockefeller or Kohl or Heinz.

Sometimes you get Rick Scott.

Jefferson understood this better than Adams.

In a letter to Adams, Jefferson argued that
“to give [oligarchs] power in order to prevent them from doing mischief,
is arming them for it,
and increasing instead of remedying the evil.”

(1/2)

https://newrepublic.com/article/189230/democracy-trump-musk-oligarchy-inequality