First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Jon Stewart, June 2024
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.
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Carter Price and Kathryn Edwards, May 2024
We commend your 2020 Working Paper Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018, and we credit Civic Ventures’ interview of Dr. Price for raising it to our attention. The astonishing magnitude of the problem they reveal – and the headwinds younger generations now face – may perhaps be most effectively communicated to ordinary Americans with a little vignette explaining how, over the past 50 years, they’ve been deprived of an amount of income so massive that it exceeds the entire wealth of every other nation on Earth except China: In the Second World War, America and her allies defeated the Axis powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy. During the next two decades (the “Baby-Boomer Years”), the income gains of ordinary American workers kept pace with national economic growth. But that all changed in 1975. Since then, the total value of income that has been diverted to the top 10% – relative to the trends of the Baby-Boomer Years – exceeds the entire national wealth of Germany, Japan, and Italy combined.
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Liz Cheney, May 2024
In giving your account of January 6, you cited George Washington’s voluntary relinquishment of power as “one of the highest moral lessons ever given to the world.” But though you quoted John Trumbull’s words, you omitted the story behind them. Trumbull said them to President James Madison. Congress had just commissioned Trumbull to execute four paintings in the national Capitol celebrating the foundation of our republic. The choice of subjects was left to Madison, who summoned Trumbull to the White House to discuss the matter. Upon briefly considering Trumbull’s words above, Madison, Father of the Constitution and a devout student of history, replied: “I believe you are right; it was a glorious action,” and approved Trumbull to commemorate it in the painting that now graces the Capitol Rotunda. We can be sure that in his moment of pause, the contrast between Washington and a short list of others who once commanded the destiny of republics flashed before Madison’s eyes: Sulla. Napoleon. Cromwell. Caesar. And from his writings – displaying a vast knowledge of the life and death of popular states – we can be equally confident that while Washington’s emulation of Cincinnatus was indeed glorious, Madison would tell us today: the greatest moral lessons of history are found not in the beginnings of republics, but in their end.
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Erica Payne, Morris Pearl, and Bob Lord, April 2024
In Stephen Spielberg’s 1997 movie Amistad, John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) famously said “in court, whoever tells the best story wins.” If only this were so in the realm of tax policy. But as your 2021 chat with Town Hall Seattle seemed to suggest, when it comes to tax policy, whoever writes the biggest checks wins. The quid pro quo which governs our tax system arises from the natural symbiosis existing between wealthy donors wishing to minimize their tax liability and ambitious candidates wishing to maximize their campaign funds. And so long as that bargain persists, the donor-candidate bond shall prevail over every appeal to reason and fairness unless it is overcome by a stronger influence, exerting a more powerful wedging force upon the self-interest of the donors. That’s why we structured our own wealth tax proposal as an incentive plan, applied to households, and actuated by the self-interest of the latent but supreme authority in our constitutional system: any given thirty-eight States.
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Dolly Parton, April 2024
Although many folks are frustrated by the fact of your partisan neutrality, all should respect your reasons for it. And the greatest reason is, as far as we can tell, that your Christian faith prohibits you from casting aspersions and condemnations upon others. Your partisan neutrality does not, however, translate to political mootness. Touching on the themes of women’s dignity and equality, migrants and poverty, many of your songs convey an egalitarian, tolerant, and compassionate political disposition. But perhaps your most provocative political lyrics are found in your recent song World on Fire from your latest album, Rockstar. This song seems to express your apprehension about a concern that we also share: the future of our republic (emphasis ours):
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Marcus Brutus, March 2024
The wisest founder of our republic once wrote that the best-known period of history covered the death of yours. Writing to you a hundred generations later, I fear that if we do not soon grasp the basic parallels in the causes which brought down Rome’s commonwealth and now threaten ours, we may have little hope of avoiding a similar fate. Many patriots tried to preserve the Roman Republic according to their understanding of fealty. The names of Gracchus and Brutus loom largest in my mind. No tragedy more than their failure could better teach us the fact that all euphoria that can be gained by virtue of wealth, status, power, and office are fleeting, to be quickly stolen by competitors, successors, senility, obscurity, or death. And if the bloody end of mankind’s first great experiments in popular government teaches us anything, it’s that while the greatest men of the day rise to the height of the prevailing regime, the greatest men in history cast off bad regimes as you endeavored, or else improve existing ones for the benefit of the people.
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Darren Walker, February 2024
Roughly one-fifth of America’s population were slaves at the moment of Independence, entitling their descendants a primal claim to America’s founding lineage, equal to any whose ancestors disembarked the Mayflower. Yet even 159 years after Abolition, countless millions of these descendants feel more alienated from the American Dream than those whose forebears later arrived by choice, making it understandable if any should decline to boast that heritage. History tells us how this wound was made. Economics tells us that the wound remains open. Ignorance daily pours fresh salt into it. And yet you, Mr. Walker, have told us not only how it will be healed, but also how our democratic-republican model of government will be preserved: hope. Not guilt or blame, but a universal optimism nourishing the pursuit of happiness that is every American’s birthright.
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Abigail Disney, February 2024
By the time you earned your philosophy doctorate, you must have encountered Socrates’s saying: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And your own examination seems to have brought you some pain: wearing old clothes to conceal your wealth. Exiting the taxi a few blocks before your destination to be seen on foot. The warnings never to say anything about the family business. Your mother’s voice admonishing you to sit up straight when you do, as you prepared to call upon Congress to raise your own taxes. Witnessing the harm that extreme wealth concentration inflicts on our republic – the pessimism, insecurity, narrowing upward mobility, polarization, demagoguery, and authoritarianism – many may wonder if anyone else with a conscience lives in your neighborhood. On the one hand we have you, with a net worth below 1,000x the national median, struggling to pull the plutocracy back to Earth. On the other we have the plutocrats, some of which seem to be governed by souls with holes so cavernous they can’t be filled with 10,000, 100,000, even 1,000,000 American Dreams, with half the country in want of just one. Indeed, one may wonder where conscience dwells at all in the twilight of a superpower republic, considering how nearly Sallust’s eulogy for Rome’s mirrors the present decline of our own:
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Michael Hayden, January 2024
Given your distinguished military record and tenure as chief of both the NSA and the CIA, it’s hard to identify any person more qualified to opine on America’s national security than you. And given your intellect and partisan neutrality, it’s hard to imagine any such opinion that should be accorded greater weight. That you were appointed to lead the NSA by Bill Clinton and the CIA by George W. Bush; that the later nomination was confirmed by then-Senator Joe Biden yet opposed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton; and that you oppose Donald Trump and the MAGA strain of the Republican Party demonstrate your partisan independence. Your erudition is meanwhile made clear by your writing and speaking, in which you’ve cited the ideas of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton while warning of America’s drift away from Enlightenment principles and toward a post-truth world.
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Steven Spielberg, January 2024
History furnishes many examples of democratic and popular governments, but of only two attaining uncontested sovereignty over their respective worlds: the Roman republic and the United States. These two superpower republics have in turn produced an equally short list of egalitarian reformers whose resistance to the plutocracy marked the onset of civil war and who were slain for their devotion to the republican cause. The greatest story that Hollywood has never told is of the earlier –Tiberius Gracchus – the young noble tutored in Greek philosophy, who went on to become the first Roman to scale the ramparts at Carthage, was twice elected plebian tribune, and was finally murdered by the Senators in his desperation to save Rome’s middle class by his Lex Sempronia Agraria, a law which John Adams pronounced “a genuine republican Measure.” The greatest story that you have ever told is of the later: Abraham Lincoln and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, permanently emancipating four million people from slavery.