First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Jon Stewart, June 2024

Abstract: On or about the Ides of every month except March, the Adams Institute will send two letters to prominent Americans whose words or actions are relevant to the proposed amendment, and whose contributions to the idea of democratic-republican government merit all of our attention. These letters will also carbon-copy other distinguished individuals who were somehow involved in the recipient’s words or deeds, or in our analysis thereof.

Our initial letters, along with correspondence explaining to copied individuals why they were copied, will be published as an open diary of correspondence in the hopes of inspiring discussion of our proposed amendment and emulation of the recipients’ good examples. PDF files featuring scans of all this original correspondence will be available for download, and the substantive content of each primary letter will be pasted in blog-post format.

June 13, 2024

Dear Mr. Stewart:

You joke and your audience laughs at events that are more horrifying than humorous to any serious student of history. Yet your comedic talent and fame couldn’t be put to a greater use than to help focus our polarized nation’s attention on the rising danger to our experiment in popular government. Nor has any project lent greater strength to the adage that the most serious things are said in jest. For what could be more serious than the question you’ve lately taken up, which is: Will we preserve the democratic-republican model of government established by our Founding Fathers? Or will our politics degenerate as Rome’s into that tournament of demagogues which must – as every tournament has but one champion – drag our republic back to the monarchy whence it emerged?

As we are both fighting the same war to preserve our democratic-republic and the Constitution which ordained it, we call upon history to reinforce your position in a battle that we can’t afford to lose: the battle to retrieve American conservatives from the populist demagoguery luring them toward dictatorship, and return them to the Constitution.

In this letter, we write to affirm your recent diagnosis that the chief causes of our present distress ultimately derive from middling insecurity. If the history of the world be our guide, then we know already that this country should have no hope for a new birth of reason or of patriotism unless we cure the disease of middling insecurity. If our task or any of the words to follow resonate with you, please call upon us.

The conservative part of the population, from which I hail and with which I agree on much, has historically been a bulwark of patriotism, veneration of the Founding Fathers, and fealty to the Constitution. Yet they’ve become so deeply disaffected by cultural anxiety and economic insecurity they are now found openly repudiating the Constitution’s core feature – separation of powers – uttering this compilation of insanities you featured on the March 11, 2024 episode of The Daily Show:

I’d rather have Donald Trump as a dictator for four years, absolutely.

This country needs a dictator. I hate to say that, but it’s the truth.

He could stand on the front steps of the White House and commit murder and I’m with him.

If he says it then I’ll go with it, and if he wants to be a dictator, then so be it.

To be fair, progressives say ludicrous things, too. To say nothing of the fact that the mainstream media often takes things out of context. But here you’ve committed no hatchet job. You’ve taken nothing out of context. For it is Donald Trump himself who has done more than any foreign propaganda minister ever could to exploit conservative anxieties and alienate conservatives from their constitutional heritage. He’s done this by attacking the Constitution’s procedures, baselessly refusing to accept an electoral outcome, and forsaking the Constitution’s principles, saying: “I only wanna be a dictator for one day.”

By flirting with the idea of dictatorship, the leader of the Republican Party has injected the idea of dictatorship into the mainstream of American thought. With reckless disregard for the Constitution, he provokes, stirs, and awakens George Washington’s nightmare vision of political faction, coaxing it out of the shadows and into our national reality:

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

As ironic as this may seem in the short view of history, however, it’s not surprising when taking the long view. It was the conservative faction under Sulla that first seized power by force in the Roman Republic. And in understanding the underlying causality of the forces threatening to reenact that bloody political contest, it’s useful to empathize with conservative angst even if you don’t sympathize with the outrage: Conservative despair over social and cultural change is more emotional than analytical. That things change is the supreme lesson of both the Hebrews and the Greeks.[1] New patterns of life are constantly replacing old ones. Change is inevitable, and that it must irritate conservative sentiments in every society is as predictable as being chased by the mother bear after stealing her cubs, or being swarmed by wasps after swatting the nest. It’s useless to mock the aggressor, gloat over their grief, or taunt them to greater rage in any one of these biochemical reactions. Whether or not its justified, conservative anger is real and as we can all now plainly see, is potentially lethal to the Constitution.

While alarm over social change and cultural change is one thing, alarm over regime change is quite another. You started last week’s edition of The Weekly Show[2] by focusing on the search for the systemic causes which are acclimating Americans to authoritarianism. And in your search, a little past half-way through, in your exchange with Ms. Meyer, you identified the culprit as economic change:

Jane Meyer: Why are these people having so many problems out in the country? Part of it has to do with, take a look at what’s happened over the last 40 years in terms of taxation and those tax bills that get passed by Congress, in the last 40 years, $50 trillion was transferred from the bottom 90% to the top one percent through taxation. So people are really feeling stretched on the bottom 90% of the country.

Jon Stewart: I don’t even know if there’s a bottom anymore. I think it’s the middle class, in those eras that you talk about, Jane, could have a job. Could buy a house. Could put their kids through school and they could do it all, not easily. It was always stressful, but not today. The middle class has no opportunity to do that.

You’re correct in your diagnosis. And it’s the same basic explanation that former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden gave on the relationship between middling insecurity and national security.[3] America’s culture wars, eliciting both a lunacy and a cacophony that is hard to ignore, will alone lead neither to despotism nor civil war. Though it’s true as James Madison wrote that “the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts,” political parties don’t usually become armies because someone has been misgendered.

The revolutions that do bring down superpower republics are instead fought over the allocation of their vast riches. As Madison also said, “The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.” A shared prosperity, when touching upon most households, tranquilizes the philosophical antagonism that always exists between permissive and traditionalist beliefs, whatever they may be. The observations of Aristotle and Tocqueville, witnessing first-hand the stabilizing effects that a predominant and independent middle class exerts upon political society,[4] can be summed up as follows: Where the middle class prevails, the people are too busy for demagogues and sensationalism, too optimistic for faction, too traditional for radical ideas, too independent for patronage, and too moderate for extremism. When the economic sedative is removed and pessimism drives out optimism, all the latent animosities and petty differences are noticed and inflamed until the public discourse succumbs to ideology and partisanship and a thirst for vengeance.

It is therefore not the erosion of conservative morals which continually relaxing social customs must perpetually irritate, but the loss of middling confidence and prospects, that sets men in search of a Sulla or a Caesar. That is our politics today. Any explanation failing to so account for political economy is incomplete. And Noah Webster warns that the same middling insecurity which fueled Rome’s tournament of demagogues has inaugurated our own:

The causes which destroyed the ancient republics were numerous; but in Rome, [N.B., history’s only other superpower popular republic] one principal cause was the vast inequality of fortunes … . Rome, with the name of a republic, was several ages losing the spirit and principle. The Gracchi endeavored to check the growing evil by an agrarian law but were not successful. In Caesar’s time, the Romans were ripened for a change of government; the spirit of a commonwealth was lost, and Caesar was but an instrument of altering the form when it could no longer exist. Caesar is execrated as the tyrant of his country; and Brutus, who stabbed him, is applauded as a Roman. But such was the state of things in Rome, that Caesar was a better ruler than Brutus would have been; for when the spirit of a government is lost, the form must change.[5]

The Constitution thus only established the legal form of a republic. Its political substance – its spirit – arises from the moderate disposition incidental to middling status. And the principal fact of America’s founding is that despite slavery, it was born middle class.[6] The Founders knew it was this fact above all that enabled them to establish America as a democratic republic in an age of aristocracy.[7] Democratic and popular governments have mainly appeared in two great historical waves, in both cases preceded by the entrenchment of broad middle classes.[8] Our Founding Fathers well-understood that it is the diffusion and reconcentration of wealth that dictates the diffusion and reconcentration of political power.[9] That’s why they advocated for government intervention as necessary to keep it that way.[10]

Middle class resurgence was the principal feature of our post-war life until the Bicentennial, after which most gains accrued to the top.[11] Whereas the middle class today owns below a third of our nation’s wealth, and falling, the common intuition of mankind has held steady over the past twenty-four centuries that the middle class should own at least half.[12] If we allow the fleecing to continue much longer – if we allow our middle class to be hollowed out as Rome did, and as all other history suggests is inevitable[13] – we will lose our republic, period.

In 1776, John Adams wrote to Abigail Adams praising Rome’s greatest agrarian law, the Lex Sempronia Agraria, as a “genuine republican Measure.” This law among other things revived ancient caps on the amount of public land that Roman households could occupy, while making modest distributions to poor Romans in an effort to reconstitute the middle class. In the first drafts of his 1776 Virginia state constitution, which James Madison reviewed, Thomas Jefferson emulated the Gracchan plan by providing for 50-acre grants to certain eligible citizens. In our next letter to you, we’ll show how the Founders would adapt these principles to rebuild our own middle class. In so adhering to our founding principles, we would be undertaking not only a genuine republican measure, but a genuine conservative measure as well, in an act of true patriotism that would bring us all back to the Constitution that we both cherish.

Sincerely,

Tim Ferguson

[1] On the Hebrews, see the story of Solomon, searching for the wisdom that would make the sad happy, and the happy sad: “gam zeh ya’avor (this too shall pass).” On the Greeks, see Anacyclosis (ἀνακύκλωσις), the idea that the natural and probable sequence of political evolution is tribal chiefdom, monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy or mob-rule) (For the anthropology see, e.g., Pindar, 2^nd Pythian Ode, Herodotus (III. 80), Thucydides (VIII. 97), Plato (Rep. VIII) (Laws, III. 676 A), Aristotle (Nic. Eth. 8.10; Pol. 1286b), Polybius (Hist. Bk. VI), and possibly Panaetius, Dicaercus, Isocrates, Protagoras, and Hecateus). See also Dionysius, (Rom. Ant. VII, 54-56)).

[2] The Soft Hum of Corruption, June 6, 2024 with Jane Meyer and Noah Bookbinder.

[3] In his 2018 visit to the University of Pennsylvania Law School, General Hayden attributed America’s rising political faction to: “A basic cultural drift inside of our society, probably created by the uneven effects of globalization. … I get it, globalization has been a wonderful blessing for me, it has been a wind at my back for fifty years. But when I go back to Pittsburgh and drive down the Ohio River Valley, and see the graveyards of steel plants, I know those same things that have made my life so much better – that has been a wind in the face of most of the folks in the Ohio River Valley.”

[4] See Aristotle, Pol., 1291b, 1295b, and Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. See also Euripides, Suppliants, Line 238 et seq.: “There are three ranks of citizens; the rich, a useless set, that ever crave for more; the poor and destitute, fearful folk, that cherish envy more than is right, and shoot out grievous stings against the men who have anything, beguiled as they are by the eloquence of vicious leaders; while the class that is midmost of the three preserves cities, observing such order as the state ordains,” and Plato, Laws 679b.

[5] Miscellaneous Remarks (1790). Edited for modern spelling. See also A. W. Lintott, Violence in Republican Rome, Oxford 1968: “Roman writers after the collapse of the Republic were … united in believing that the operative factor throughout was a moral failure arising from the increase of wealth: this had led the governing class to seek riches and power without scruple, while at the same time economic inequality had made the lower classes desperate and ready for any crime against the state.”

[6] See remarks from British Colonel Lord Adam Gordon in 1764: “The levelling principle here, everywhere operates strongly and takes the lead, and everybody has property here, and everybody knows it.” See also Tocqueville, Id. And Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, American Incomes 1774-1860, NBER 18396, 2012, showing that in 1774, New England and the Middle Colonies were the most egalitarian place in the measurable world.

[7] See a letter from George Washington to Richard Henderson, 19 June 1788, celebrating: “…the equal distribution of property the great plenty of unoccupied lands, and the facility of procuring the means of subsistence.” See also Mercy Otis Warren, History of … the American Revolution, 1805 Vol. I. Ch. I.: “Democratic principles are the result of Equality of condition.”

[8] First in the 6th century BC, spawning over 300 democracies, the second producing over 100 popular governments since our Revolutionary War.

[9] See James Harrington, Commonwealth of Oceana, Part I, John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776 and Defence of the Constitutions, Vol. III, Letter III (Padoua), Noah Webster, Miscellaneous Remarks on the Division of Property (1790) and especially An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution (1787): “On reviewing the English history, we observe a progress similar to that in Rome–an incessant struggle for liberty from the date of Magna Charta, in John’s reign, to the revolution. The struggle has been successful, by abridging the enormous power of the nobility. But we observe that the power of the people has increased in an exact proportion to their acquisitions of property.”

[10] See John Adams, Dissertation, 1765: “Property monopolized, or in the Possession of a Few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality – this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches,” Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 28 October 1785: “Legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property,” James Madison, Parties, 1792, advocating measures to “reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort” and Noah Webster, Id., 1790: “The basis of a democratic and a republican form of government, is, a fundamental law, favoring … a general distribution of property.”

[11] See Price, Carter C. and Kathryn A. Edwards, Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020. The abstract states: “From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion.”

[12] At least of wealth, if not income. See Aristotle, Pol., 1295b, and James Harrington, Id. That the intuition of ordinary Americans believes the middle should own half, see Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Association for Psychological Science, 2011. Q2 2023 Federal Reserve data shows that total U.S. household wealth is ~$150 trillion and the middling share is: (a) 28.1%, when defined as middle three asset quintiles by income; and (b) 28.6% when defined as the “middle 40%” (between the top 10% and bottom 50%), averaging 28.35%. This shows that the middling share is at least $30 trillion less than it would be if the middling share were at least 50%.

[13] See Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, Princeton 2018. Shows that structural inequality has only been reduced by the shocks of plague, revolution, mass-mobilization warfare, or state collapse.

Property monopolized, or in the Possession of a Few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality – this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches.

John Adams, 1765