First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Stanley McChrystal, December 2023
Devotion and duty would seem to be the watchwords of your life, judging by your record of military service to our country. Few Americans today match your dedication in rising to John Adams’s call: “Our Obligations to our Country never cease but with our Lives. We ought to do all We can.” But your recent writings suggest a third maxim guiding your civilian life. One deployed not to defending America’s interests and assets from foreign aggression but that would instead preserve its republican form of government: egalitarianism. In Lincoln’s Call to Service – and Ours, you noted your concern over poverty. In At 63, I Threw Away My Prized Portrait of Robert E. Lee, you wrote how you now equate his image with racial inequality. And in We fought to defend democracy. This new threat to America now keeps us awake at night, you deplored our past “contradictions, prejudices, and systemic inequalities.”
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Mike Pence, December 2023
Although I’ve never voted against the Republican presidential nominee, I salute you for certifying Donald Trump’s defeat on January 6, 2021. In so doing, you placed the orderly transition of power ordained by the Constitution above partisan politics. You may even have single-handedly prevented a constitutional crisis for which, as your legal counsel put it, there would be “no neutral arbiter to break the impasse.” But though you protected our republican institutions from that crisis, the populist forces which precipitated it – the “disorders and miseries” that George Washington warned lead men to “seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual” – yet gather strength. There will be more crises. And those disorders and miseries which inflame them flow from one main source: middle-class decline. Noah Webster warns that the same middling insecurity which fueled Rome’s tournament of demagogues has inaugurated our own:
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Mitt Romney, November 2023
Reference is made to your statements of September 13, 2023 announcing your intention to relinquish your Senate seat upon the conclusion of the current term. In describing the reasons leading to this decision, you expressed your aversion to the reactionary populist demagoguery and disregard for the Constitution manifesting in a disaffected portion of the Republican Party. All who are familiar with George Washington’s nightmare vision of the fate stalking America’s experiment in self-government – which judging by the sad state of our national discourse is far fewer than it ought to be – should applaud your loyalty to the Constitution and the egalitarian principles for which the Republican Party was originally conceived. Regardless of to which party, candidate, or cause one’s political sympathies may now or then run, all Americans should always share your devotion to these.
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Warren Buffett, November 2023
During the 2012 campaign cycle, you deplored the fact that your tax rate was lower than that of your secretary, Debbie Bosanek. Refuting the justification given by then-Speaker John Boehner, you blamed Congress for the absurd state of affairs still persisting in America: Billionaires are taxed at lower rates than ordinary middle-class households. You not only reiterated your opinion in a 2019 interview, stating: “The wealthy are definitely undertaxed relative to the general population.” You also then asserted that wealth taxes, when they come, would be unlikely to trigger the apocalyptic capital exodus that their opponents routinely prognosticate. We agree on all the above, though it’s worth considering whether the self-identification and self-imposed exile of anyone who prizes their fortunes above their country, were that instigated by a well-designed wealth tax, wouldn’t be more a feature than a bug. At any rate, your principle on the matter echoes Theodore Roosevelt’s 1906 annual message to Congress: