First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Donald Trump, November 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.

November 13, 2024

Mr. President:

Congratulations on your second election to the Presidency this month. Despite the recent hyper-polarization, and the apprehension some have about your return, we wish you a successful second term from the standpoint of, and for the sake of, our republic. After all, you’re right when you call us “a republic in decline.”

I write to introduce a plan to reverse that decline. You’ve not yet heard of this plan and it will be resisted by special interests arrayed against the American people. But it’s consistent with your own ideas.[i] Our Founding Fathers would endorse it.[ii] And it’s a plan that, were you credited with its implementation, would seal your reputation as the greatest republican statesman ever.

There’s no doubt that both America’s decline and your political fortunes derive mainly from the same source: the pessimism and insecurity of our dwindling middle class.[iii] To be fair, middle-class neglect alone doesn’t tell the whole story of your victory: Perceptions of government waste, an assault on traditional morals, and the typical charges of “socialism” always leveled against Democrats, contributed to the headwinds against your opponent. But, more than anything else, it was the effects of 50 years of capital appeasement – 50 years of an economy rigged against the middle class – that twice put you in the White House.[iv]

The story is universal: the rich get richer, everyone else gets poorer.[v] But the stage is unique, for there’s only ever been one other superpower republic: Rome. The circumstances of history thus constrain the role you may play, and predetermine your legacy, more than you might think. You may exact vengeance as some fear, but you’d never equal a Marius or a Sulla. If you grasped for imperium, you’d never surpass a Catiline, let alone a Ceasar or Augustus. America is independent and strong, so you can’t be an Adams or Washington. Its Constitution is ancient and venerated, precluding the role of a Madison or a Hamilton. There’s no real threat of secession or mass-mobilization civil war, so you’re not the next Lincoln. None seriously pursue dictatorship, so you can’t play a Cicero, a Cato, or a Brutus.

What character can you emulate that won’t relegate you to the status of second-class historical footnote? The projects of government efficiency and deportation, while ideologically gratifying to some, are laughably insignificant next to the problem of wealth concentration. And indeed the assault on a bloated bureaucracy or poor immigrants diverts our attention from our true and far more formidable adversary: an anti-American plutocracy.[vi] In that same vein you could attack monopoly, following Theodore Roosevelt’s footsteps. Or champion the interests of workers, following Franklin Roosevelt’s. But even there you’d likely still be a minor supporting actor.

There is, however, one major part that you could play. And it is in fact the greatest hero in the pantheon of republican heroes. It is the role of Gracchus.

What did Gracchus do? He implemented a law – the Lex Sempronia Agraria – to break up the plutocracy’s great estates.[vii] Why did he do it? Because wealth concentration was destroying Rome’s middle class and ultimately destroyed Rome’s republic.[viii] And what did our Founding Fathers, learned in Classical Antiquity, say of his law while they were establishing our republic? They called it “a genuine republican Measure.”[ix]

Our plan, the enclosed Operation Abigail, is the legitimate heir of the Lex Sempronia Agraria. It is a direct descendant of the same Classical republican constitutional anthropology which gave birth to the United States, adapted to the capitalist mode of economy. Its pedigree can be traced back to Lycurgus, who laid down Sparta’s constitution before Rome was even founded and whose image graces our Capitol and Supreme Court buildings.[x] Its objective is to rebuild America’s middle class – expanding it to all Americans – and thereby return our commonwealth to even greater glory and economic egalitarianism than it enjoyed in the 1950s. Its guiding belief is that, in order to have a commonwealth, the commons must have the wealth.[xi] Operation Abigail, in other words, is at once the most authentically patriotic, republican, conservative, egalitarian, and capitalist plan that you will ever see. It can be ridiculed and opposed by no force other than ignorance, fear, greed, sycophancy, and treachery.

As the enclosed summary of Operation Abigail speaks for itself, I close emphasizing only two points as to its form and function.

As to form: Operation Abigail is quite literally a scaled-up version of capitalism’s own device of the long-term incentive plan. No good capitalist would ever allow management to run amok without an incentive plan. The executive compensation tax rules passed under Republican administrations addressing golden parachute payments (Section 280G, Ronald Reagan) and stock options backdating (Section 409A, George W. Bush) show that an unbridled management would happily crash any enterprise into the ground as long as it can siphon value from it. This is precisely what our plutocracy has been doing to our country for the past 50 years. Operation Abigail uses the techniques of capitalism to fix the excesses of capitalism, and therefore protect capitalism, by imposing an incentive plan on the economic actors who most need it.

As to function: We are from the standpoint of political economy at a watershed moment in the history of our republic. The choices we make over the next generation will either lift the American people their former status as an independent middle class, or let them sink into the status of a dependent lower class from which they will never thereafter escape.[xii] Because your political career is predicated upon middle-class distress, your legacy will be judged mainly according to which direction your actions nudge our people.

If that legacy is something you care about, as opposed to a few fleeting years of a little brief authority in the line of mostly-forgotten Presidents, then you must attend to your own destiny and not to the insatiable avarice of a Crassus or two.[xiii] Operation Abigail, a plan to rebuild America’s middle class, could earn you the most affectionate immortality in the future memory of our republic, if only you are wise and benevolent enough to adopt it.

Sincerely,

Tim Ferguson

A copy of Operation Abigail was enclosed behind this letter in the physical mailing to this recipient. Here is a link to the current version of Operation Abigail, which may have superseded the version that was submitted with this letter. Refer to the PDF scan of this letter for the version which was sent to this recipient.

[i] In 1999 you advocated massive taxes on the wealthy, demonstrating your understanding that wealth concentration has reached unsustainable levels.

[ii] 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, 1785: “Legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property,” James Madison, Parties, 1792, advising to “reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort,” Noah Webster, Miscellaneous Remarks, 1790: “The basis of a democratic and a republican form of government, is, a fundamental law, favoring … a general distribution of property,” and Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, 1797: “All accumulation, … of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.”

[iii] See James Madison, Federalist No. 10: “The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.”

[iv] See Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards, Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020, calculating the gains that would have but did not accrue to ordinary Americans since 1975 relative to post-World War II run rates. The abstract: “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.”

[v] 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.

[vi] See Aristotle, Pol. 1297a: “The encroachments of the rich ruin the constitution more than those of the people.” That America was born middle class, and that excessive fortunes are anti-American, see, e.g. 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,” Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751: “6. Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry; for if they even look far enough forward to consider how their Children when grown up are to be provided for, they see that more Land is to be had at Rates equally easy, all Circumstances considered. 7. Hence Marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe,” Richard Price, Observations on Civil Liberty, 1776: “The Colonies consist only of a body of Yeomanry supported by agriculture, and all independent, and nearly upon a level; in consequence of which, joined to a boundless extent of country, the means of subsistence are procured without difficulty,” Thomas Pownall, A memorial address to the sovereigns of America, 1783: America was characterized by “a general equality, not only in the Persons, but in the power of the landed Property of the Inhabitants” and that America stands on a “natural equal level Basis,” Charles Pinckney, speech of 25 June 1787: “The people of the U. S. are perhaps the most singular of any we are acquainted with.—Among them there are fewer distinctions of fortune & less of rank; than among the inhabitants of any other nation.—Every freeman has a right to the same protection & security and a very moderate share of property entitles them to the possession of all the honors & privileges the public can bestow.—Hence arises a greater equality, than is to be found among the people of any other country, and an equality which is more likely to continue. … there will be few poor & few dependent,” George Washington to Richard Henderson, 1788: “America … will be the most favorable Country of any in the world for persons … possessed of a moderate capital, to inhabit. … it will not be less advantageous to the happiness of the lowest class of people because of … the facility of procuring the means of subsistence.” For confirmation by contemporaneous observers, see Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835: “Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions.” For modern confirmation, see Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, American Incomes 1774-1860, NBER Working Paper 18396, 2012, showing that in 1774, New England and the Middle Colonies were the most egalitarian place in the measurable world.

[vii] Land agitation is as old as the Republic, itself founded in 509 BC: Agitations are reported by Livy and Dionysius in the years 486, 484, 483, 482, 480, 477, 474, 472, 468, 454, 453, 440, 434, 422, 419, 418, 412, 411, 409, 407, 397, 384, 383, and 379. In 367 BC, the Lex Licinia-Sextia imposed a 500-iugera cap on household use of public lands, which was not vigorously enforced. The 133 BC Lex Sempronia Agraria of Tiberius Gracchus revised and revised the Lex Licinia-Sextia adding, among other things, robust enforcement mechanisms and restraints on alienation of granted parcels. Appian (The Civil Wars, 1.4.27) reports that a law removed the Gracchan encumbrances on alienation, allowing the wealthy to swiftly reacquire lands; that a 118 BC Lex Thoria cancelled distributions under the Gracchan plan; and that a 111 BC Lex Agraria quieted title for many private holders. Despite the uncertainty, and attempts by Saturninus in 103, Drusus in 91 and Rullus in 59 BC, the issue was decided in plutocracy’s favor.

[viii] That extreme wealth concentration destroyed the Roman Republic, see Appian, The Civil Wars, I.1, Sallust, Conspiracy of Catiline, 10, 33. I; 37.3, 38, 53, The Jugurthine War, 4, Livy, History of Rome, Preface, Tacitus, Annals, 3.27, Florus, Epitome, I, XLVII, Lucan, Pharsalia, 1.63. Marcus Philippus said in 104BC that out of perhaps 400,000 citizens, only around 2,000 held any significant wealth.

[ix] See John Adams to Abigail Adams, 25 August 1776, on Gracchus reviving “the old Project of an equal Division of the conquered Lands, (a genuine republican Measure, tho it had been too long neglected to be then practicable).” Adams was influenced by James Harrington’s writings during the English Interregnum; see Commonwealth of Oceana, Part I (the Preliminarys), advocating an agrarian law that would balance the nobility 50/50 with the commons, capping landholdings at £2,000 annual revenues. See also John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776, admonishing “to make the Acquisition of Land easy to every Member of Society: to make a Division of the Land into Small Quantities, So that the Multitude may be possessed of landed Estates.” See also Noah Webster’s favorable account of Gracchus (Id., 1790): “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.” On two specific attempts to implement a Gracchan-style land grant, see drafts of Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 Virginia constitution establishing a 50-acre viritim, and General Sherman’s Field Order No. 15, approved by Abraham Lincoln, making 40-acre land grants to freedmen from lands along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts; despite efforts of Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens to codify as federal statute, this order was later revoked by Andrew Johnson. In that tradition, we may justly assert caps on private fortunes whose size exceeds some rational demarcation, acquired with the benefits of public infrastructure, government subsidies, or legal rights of market exclusivity, such vast fortunes being subject to a valid public claim.

[x] The United States Constitution, and Operation Abigail, are both derived from the idea of Anacyclosis (ἀνακύκλωσις). See Polybius (Hist. Bk. VI), describing the default sequence of political evolution as 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), and possibly Panaetius, Dicaercus, Isocrates, Protagoras, and Hecateus. See also Dionysius, (Rom. Ant. VII, 54-56) Cicero, De Re Publica, I, XXIX, II, XXV), Sextus Pomponius, Justinian’s Digest, I Bk. I, Tit. 2., 2. 1-11), Machiavelli Discourses on Livy, Ch. I. Bk. II. See also John Adams, An Essay on Man’s Lust for Power, All Men would be Tyrants if they could, with the Author’s Comment in 1807 (describing Polybius’ sequence as “the Creed of my whole Life.”) See also Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 9, alluding to Anacyclosis. On the Greek anthropology related specifically to the middle class, see, e.g., Euripides, Suppliants, Line 238 et seq., Plato, Laws 679b, Aristotle, Pol., 1291b, 1295b.

[xi] The common intuition of mankind is that the middle class should own at least half; therefore, this is the target for which legislation should backsolve. See Aristotle, Pol., 1295b, and James Harrington, Id. That the intuition of ordinary Americans agrees, 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. Federal Reserve data shows that achieving this target requires the movement of around $30-$35 trillion worth of wealth into the middle class when defined as the middle three quintiles by income percentage or the middle 40% (between the top 10% and bottom 50%).

[xii] In this regard, rentiers, and those lacking adequate grounding in the theories of middle-class agency, will advocate unconditional or universal basic income (UBI). UBI would reward idleness, enrich rentiers, exacerbate racial inequalities, and result in the ultimate ruin of the middle class. If the campaign to advance this project hasn’t started with lawmakers, perhaps under pretext of an efficient replacement for the social safety net, it will soon.

[xiii] All references to historical characters are meant solely for metaphorical and rhetorical purposes to illustrate a particular character archetype.

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