First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Steven Spielberg, 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 Mr. Spielberg:

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.

We commend you for contributing the film Lincoln to our nation’s imagination and discourse. Lincoln beautifully communicates the ideals that were best in America’s founding and the cost of what was worst. Any historical quibbles over its plot are utterly irrelevant to its underlying theme of the triumph of justice. And the more blithely Americans speak of a second civil war, the more polarized our society grows, the deeper we wade into premonitions of authoritarianism and violence, the more essential Abraham Lincoln’s example of unity, temperance, and the mercy that would stay the hand of vengeance becomes. Though there’s much to praise in all the actors’ and actresses’ performances and in Mr. Kushner’s screenplay, perhaps the most salient words connecting this movie to our circumstances were not captured on the set at all. They were the remarks you delivered at Gettysburg National Cemetery ten days after its release at the 149th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address:

Nothing matters more than memory. Without memory we learn nothing. Without memory there’s no coherence. There’s no progress. … Because I think justice and memory are inseparable. Without remembering what has happened, what went wrong, what went right, the blessings that justice brings – dignity, real prosperity, individual and social health, peace – these blessings will not and cannot arrive. History lights the path toward injustice so without history there’s no hope.

Coming from the man who also gave us Schindler’s List and Amistad, this means something, and we agree. History’s highest purpose is to protect the future from the mistakes of the past.

That’s why our organization exists. And on the larger story of America’s democratic-republican experiment, our Civil War occurred only a few chapters ago. The prologue is found in Polybius’s account of Rome’s constitution, which distilled more than six centuries of Greek experience and theory into two simple ideas which now comprise the nucleus of our own.

The first is anacyclosis, or the wheel: the idea that every unchecked regime is corrupted, and every corrupted regime is replaced. This trend ultimately resolves into a cycle for wealthy states whose destiny is not controlled by another. Polybius gives the probable order as chiefdom, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and mob-rule, returning to chiefdom.[1]

The second is the tripartite mixed constitution, or the brake: the idea that since all unchecked regimes are corrupted – thereby cycling through the rule of one, few, and many – the optimal constitution checks and balances the best traits of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Sparta’s mixture of kings, Gerousia, and the people; Rome’s mixture of consuls, Senate, and popular assemblies; and Britain’s mixture of Crown, Lords, and Commons are famous examples of this tripartite brake. Enlightenment thinkers further developed this idea into the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers writ across Articles I, II, and III of our Constitution.

The Constitution was designed to restrain the undue concentration of power based on these ideas. But our authoritarian trajectory shows that the brake doesn’t actually stop the wheel any more than it turns it. The motor that rotates the wheel is the diffusion and reconcentration of wealth, for this drives the diffusion and reconcentration of power. [2] History confirms: Democracy has visited mankind in two great waves – one ancient and one modern – both preceded by the diffusion of wealth in broad and independent middle classes. And sure enough, the principal fact of America’s founding is that despite slavery, it was born middle class.[3]

If the diffusion of wealth dictates the diffusion of power, you don’t have to be a Socrates to know what follows upon its reconcentration. Nor need you be a Madison to know that the Constitution can’t really restrain the concentration of power if it can’t prevent the reconcentration of wealth. When Rome’s middle class was fleeced by its own elites in a tragedy the historians have so eloquently described,[4] Tiberius Gracchus resolved to save it. The death of the Gracchi – a sacrifice made in vain barely a decade later by the Lex Thoria – initiated a bloody tournament of demagogues that blazed a violent path to Sulla and Caesar, ending mankind’s experiment in popular government for nearly two thousand years.

History teaches that middle class primacy is as necessary to democratic and popular government as the guarantees of individual liberty and due process. To prevent our own contest of demagogues, depolarize society, sedate faction, restore optimism, neutralize the narratives of an unscrupulous media, and preserve the democratic-republican model of government, we must safeguard the middling share of national prosperity.

On the question of what that share should be, the common sense of ordinary Americans agrees with the genius of Aristotle: The middle should own half.[5] But today, the middling share is less than a third of America’s wealth, shortchanging the middle class of around $30 trillion.[6]

To reestablish our middle class and widen avenues of upward mobility for those below, we therefore propose a constitutional amendment that would set 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 wealth taxes that are intended solely to generate revenues, our purpose is to promote voluntary wealth de-concentration via market actors. The initial median-top wealth ratio would be 10,000:1 (subject to periodic adjustment) implying an initial wealth cap of $1.43 billion (averaging 2019-2021 Census Bureau data), a limit today surpassed by around 660 American households whose aggregate wealth exceeds that cap by about $4.2 trillion. At a 10,000:1 ratio, every $1 gain to the median increases the cap by $10,000; every $10,000 by $100 million, every $100,000 by $1 billion. Like a true executive incentive plan, which every real capitalist requires for management, the only limit this plan imposes upon the wealth of elite households is the limit of their genius and skill in raising the median.

Note too that the further any group clusters below the median, the greater the incentive to raise it. Since the Black median is only around one-tenth that of Whites, the amendment would make the annihilation of these historic racial disparities an urgent market imperative.

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 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 according to the various preferences of their local constituencies, strengthening the principle of federalism.

If this seems radical at first, know that we aren’t the first to suggest a constitutional amendment that would divert luxury tax revenues to the States: Thomas Jefferson proposed a similar idea in his Second Inaugural Address.

John Adams wrote “Power always follows Property. This I believe to be as infallible a Maxim, in Politicks, as, that Action and Re-action are equal, is in Mechanicks.” The configuration of the social classes exerts a gravitational pull around which political society orbits and from which it never escapes. To stay within the democratic zone, we must make ordinary households a counterweight to the intractable elites that would otherwise rule them, by linking their destinies together. We ask not that you give money but that you lend your influence to this cause.

Sincerely,

Tim Ferguson

[1] See David A. Teegarden, Death to Tyrants!: Ancient Greek Democracy and the Struggle against Tyranny, Princeton University Press, 2013. Figure A1 shows that some form of monarchy was the most frequent regime from the first half of the 7th century BC until the first half of the 5th; oligarchy until the first half of the 4th, then democracy. Roman expansion scaled this sequence to the level of nation-state in the republic’s final century.

[2] See Noah Webster, An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, 1789: “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.”

[3] Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson concluded that “New England and the Middle Colonies appear to have been more egalitarian than anywhere else in the measureable world.” See American Incomes 1774-1860, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 18396, 2012.

[4] See V. Duruy, Histoire des Romains, II, 46-47, 1879 (as quoted by A. Stephenson, Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic, 1891) “After having pillaged the world as praetors or consuls during time of war, the nobles again pillaged their subjects as governors in time of peace; and upon their return to Rome with immense riches they employed them in changing the modest heritage of their fathers into domains vast as provinces.” 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.”

[5] 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. Compare to Aristotle, Politics, 1295b.

[6] Q2 2023 Federal Reserve data shows that total U.S. household wealth is ~$155 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%.