We have reached a critical moment in our nation's history where five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have inflicted such severe harm that we are now facing an oligarchic takeover—essentially, a constitutional crisis. Donald Trump is brazenly defying court orders and threatening judges to such an extreme degree that even Chief Justice John Roberts has felt compelled to speak out.
American history has always been marked by cycles of progress followed by oligarchic backlash, leading to periods of hardship and stagnation—except for the morbidly wealthy.
The first eighty years of our country began with the American Revolution against an absolute monarch and the world’s largest corporation. However, the Founders’ vision was obstructed by Southern oligarchs who saw the abolition of slavery as a threat to their wealth and power. They had already transformed the South into a neofascist nightmare and then launched a war against America, which Abraham Lincoln ultimately won.
Following his victory, Lincoln initiated a series of progressive reforms, including the 13th Amendment, the Homestead Act, the National Banking Act, the Pacific Railway Acts, the creation of the Department of Agriculture, and the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act, which provided federal land for the establishment of over fifty colleges offering free education to young Americans. He was also the first president to speak favorably of "unions" at a time when their presence was so rare that newspapers put the word in quotation marks.
The second eighty years saw a fierce right-wing backlash against Lincoln’s reforms, beginning with the corrupt bargain that ended Reconstruction after the contested election of 1876. President Grover Cleveland captured the essence of this era in his 1887 State of the Union address:
“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”
The response was the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1891, which progressive presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft aggressively enforced, breaking up monopolistic giants like Standard Oil. Another key measure was the Tillman Act of 1907, which prohibited corporations from contributing money or valuable resources to federal candidates.
History reminds us that each era of progress has been met with resistance from the forces of concentrated wealth and power. Today, we find ourselves in another such battle, where the stakes are nothing less than the future of American democracy itself.
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