First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Michael Hayden, January 2024

Abstract: On or about the Ides of every month, 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.

January 13, 2024

Dear General Hayden:

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.

As we all know, the period spanning the inauguration of the first and last-elected Presidents mentioned above has seen a severe deterioration of America’s internal social conditions. This civic degradation has been marked by an uptick in tribalism and political polarization, lies and vulgar rhetoric, the subordination of objective reality to emotion, cultism, grievances, and fear, the manifestation of a spirit of reprisal and revenge, the proliferation of populist and reactionary demagoguery, and a hard turn toward authoritarianism. In Madisonian and Hamiltonian terms, we today witness the effects of political faction, never more eloquently described than in George Washington’s Farewell Address:

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.

But what of the causes of political faction? In answering this question, you and Madison took separate roads but nevertheless arrived at the same place. The root cause of our intensifying social discord can be traced to one main economic circumstance: middle-class pessimism and insecurity. In Federalist No. 10, Madison declared “The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.”

Madison’s diagnosis fits quite well with the three-layer cake metaphor you’ve mentioned while discussing your book The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies. As you outlined, the three layers are from bottom to top: first, the American body politic; second, our government; and third, foreign agents – specifically the Russians. This metaphor holds that the most important determinant of electoral outcomes is the general condition and disposition of the body politic, for this dictates the political fault lines or the “seams” in our nation’s social fabric. Next is the words and deeds of candidates and politicians. Least important are various foreign espionage campaigns conceived to infiltrate these social rifts to aggravate domestic faction and influence our political outcomes (e.g., Project Lakhta).

In your September 13, 2018 visit to the University of Pennsylvania Law School you expressed your view that current social fractures derive from middling angst and insecurity. Responding to Claire Finkelstein’s question on what is driving the rising political faction, you referenced:

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.

Your June 15, 2018 discussion with Hoover Institution Fellow Jamil Jaffer made the same basic point, underscoring the encroachment of identity politics into America’s legacy middle class. “I said what does “America First” mean to you?” you said in recounting an informal gathering you had in a bar with a few dozen Trump supporters, “And the answer I got was “somebody’s paying attention to me.” … Blue collar, middle-class whites are described as the only unprotected species in the whole ecosystem.”

As Madison observed, men divide into factions over “the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions.” In his day, differences of opinion concerning religion and government may have loomed largest. In ours, arguments over traditional and permissive beliefs are probably the loudest, but that cacophony is rivaled by the shrill denunciation of every egalitarian thought as “socialism.” In any case, a common prosperity, when touching upon most households, sedates the latent causes of faction, whatever they are. When the economic sedative is removed, pessimism drives out optimism, every source of political antagonism is noticed and inflamed, and partisanship and ideology suffocate all thoughtful discourse. Demagogues and an unscrupulous press now hold sway only because the middle class does not, inclining men to “seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual” as Washington warned. This is our politics today. We know it. Our enemies know it. And they’ve already used it against us.

If this is a fair situation report, and if it’s true as you wrote in USA Today[1] that domestic threats are now graver risks than foreign aggression, then middling insecurity is America’s greatest national security threat. But middle-class insecurity represents something deeper and more insidious than just this. Middling decline jeopardizes our national identity, because it threatens the continuation of the democratic-republican model of government and thus the Constitution which ordains it. We do think this accurately describes our current affairs, and we heed your warnings. But we also celebrate the bright spot you noted to Mr. Jaffer, stating: “Fix the base layer, we’re fine.” In other words, if we fix our middle class, we’ll be ok.

We agree with you, and in our belief in the stabilizing influence of the middle class, we travel in the company of Aristotle and Alexis de Tocqueville.[2] In order to rebuild the middle class – and to widen avenues of upward mobility for all those below of every race and creed – we propose an amendment to the Constitution that would fix household wealth at a prescribed multiple of the national median household net worth such that, in order to enjoy any future gains, covered households must utilize their market power to raise the median as their outcomes would thereafter rise and fall lockstep in mathematical proportion thereto.

Unlike ordinary wealth taxes intended solely to generate revenues, our objective is to promote voluntary wealth de-concentration by market actors. The initial median-top wealth ratio would be 10,000:1 (subject to periodic adjustment until the optimal ratio is discovered), implying an initial wealth cap of ~$1.43 billion (based on last 3-year average reported national median), surpassed by about 660 American households having a total net worth of $4.2 trillion. At this 10,000:1 ratio, every $1 gain to the median raises the cap by $10,000; every $10,000 by $100 million, every $100,000 by $1 billion. The only limit this plan imposes on the wealth of elite households is the limit of their genius and efficiency in raising the median, a task over which they retain control. They are to be taxed only in proportion to their failure, and only until the middle class owns at least half the wealth, whereupon the tax would be suspended.[3]

The amendment would grandfather preexisting fortunes to the extent located within American territory and provided their owners are not convicted of certain crimes, adding repatriation and good behavior incentives to the underlying market incentive. To incentivize ratification, the amendment would distribute all revenues raised by ratio enforcement in equal shares to each State which timely ratifies it, bypassing any Congressional inaction via Article V convention. The States can use their respective shares to satisfy the partisan preferences of their local constituencies, strengthening our founding principle of federalism.

This proposal is neither radical nor socialist in form or substance. It’s 100% American. In his Second Inaugural Address, Thomas Jefferson proposed a similar amendment to divert luxury tax revenues to the States. He also wrote that “Legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property.” James Madison similarly advised that we take measures to prevent “an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches” and “reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort.” At the onset of the American Revolution, John Adams wrote that “Property monopolized, or in the Possession of a Few is a Curse to Mankind. We should … preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches.”

“The beauty of the American system is we don’t want strong men,” you told Michael Moynihan in August 2016. You’re right, but this assumes the middle class prevails. Few men have done as much as you have to protect America. We now write to ask your help in protecting it once more. Not from foreign armies, or from terrorist attacks, but from destroying itself.

Sincerely,

Tim Ferguson

[1] We fought to defend democracy. This new threat to America now keeps us awake at night, USA Today, June 22, 2022, Co-authored with Generals Stanley McChrystal, James Clapper, Douglas Lute, and Mark Hertling.

[2] See Aristotle, Politics, 1295b and Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book II (Influence of Democracy On Progress Of Opinion in the United States), Chapter XXI (Why Great Revolutions Will Become More Rare).

[3] The 50% middle-class target is taken from Aristotle, Politics, 1295b. A 2011 survey shows that over 5,000 ordinary Americans intuitively agree with the proposition that 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.