We lost the Vietnam War, Reagan stepped forward, ran for President, and Establishment Republicans – who then ruled the GOP – beat him. Then Jimmy Carter beat them. Four years passed, Reagan ran again, whipped the Establishment Republicans, whipped Jimmy Carter, and we won the Cold War.
The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, a threat vanished. Politics began to change.
Years ago, living in London, ambassador to England, John Adams wrote Thomas Jefferson he was happy with the new Constitution; Jefferson wrote back he saw nothing in the Constitution that would stop a villain clever enough, and ruthless enough, to get his hands on a majority of the votes in Congress from pulling other people’s money out of the federal treasury to help himself. Jefferson called that problem ‘The Tyranny of the Majority.’
A few years passed, Senator Daniel Webster cut a deal with Senator Henry Clay to pass a tariff: The tariff protected Webster’s New England textile mills from English imports; Clay got to spend the money in the west, and most of the tariffs came out of the pockets of southerners.
During the Gilded Age Washington Politicians handed railroad tycoons huge land grants, handed subsidies to millionaires to build steamships. Evolving, the ‘Tyranny of the Majority’ rolled on: Washington Politicians handed subsidies to drug companies, airplane companies, Wall Street bankers, tech giants.
When the Cold War ended politicians sowing trade deals gave us the new ‘Global Economy.’ Wall Street and Silicon Valley boomed but in the heartland mills and factories shut down – when Hillary ran in 2016 blue collar workers stared at the epitome of a Washington Politician, stared at a Showman who was nobody’s idea of a politician. Elected Trump.
Strutting in the White House Trump bragged, boasted, bungled Covid, lied covering up, lost to Biden – Washington Politicians were back in power. And we landed in a muddle. Which was nothing new. It wasn’t the first time.
It didn’t take a genius to see Hitler, Tojo, and Joe Stalin, allied with each other in 1939, were a threat. But, in a muddle, Americans shrugged, We’re isolationists. None of that matters to us. Bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. Americans woke up.
Thirty years later, in another muddle, losing the Cold War, turning on TVs, Americans watched Russian tanks roll into Saigon, woke up again.
Time passed, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, threats vanished. Fear vanished. Thirty years rolled by. Putin, China, North Korea, Iran are not at our throat yet but they are unforgiving enemies. And we’re mired in another muddle, trapped between Washington Politicians and Showmen.
