The Great Turning

by David C Korten

  Tax Revolt

  The end of the Seven Years’ War among the great European powers in 1763 left the British treasury deep in debt. Many in Britain felt that the colonies had been the primary beneficiaries of the war, which had strengthened Britain’s position in North America, and that it was only right and proper for the colonies to pay a share. To this end, the British parliament imposed a stamp tax in 1765 on all colonial commercial and legal papers, newspapers, pamphlets, and almanacs.

  The colonists felt differently. Under the banner of Sons of Neptune, maritime workers organized a widespread tax revolt that featured demonstrations, a refusal to use the stamps, and attacks on the property of British officials. Some wealthy merchants supported the protests behind the scenes but became increasingly nervous when the anger began to spill over to a general resentment of the rich. The British parliament caved in and repealed the Stamp Act in March 1766, only to replace it with the Revenue Act of 1767, which imposed tariffs on a number of imported goods, including lead, glass, paper, and tea.

  The Revenue Act taxes were rescinded in 1770, with the sole exception of the tax on tea. Later, Parliament passed the Tea Act of 1773 to benefit the financially troubled British East India Company, in which the king and prominent members of Parliament held shares. The act gave the company a special exemption from the tea tax and refunded the taxes it had already paid on the large quantities of tea it was holding unsold in inventory, thus allowing it to undercut the prices of its smaller competitors, put them out of business, and establish a tea monopoly.

  Outrage over the Tea Act gradually grew and on December 16, 1774, a group of Boston rebels organized the Boston Tea Party. Dressed as Indians, they boarded three British ships anchored in the harbor, broke up chests of tea, and threw them into the sea. Similar tea parties were held in other ports. In Annapolis a tea ship was burned. Some students of the American Revolution consider this a tax revolt. More than that, however, it was a protest against the legally sanctioned abuse of corporate monopoly power.3

  The British responded to these acts of rebellion by closing Boston Harbor and demanding compensation for the tea, dissolving the Bay 176Colony government, prohibiting public meetings without explicit permission of the British governor, building up British military fortifications and troop presence, and ordering colonists to quarter British troops in their homes. This further fanned the flames of rebellion. Colonists throughout Massachusetts responded by forming local militias, stockpiling weapons, and holding town meetings in defiance of British orders.

  Participatory Democracy

  Opponents of the Crown’s effort to tighten colonial administration and tax collection formed local resistance groups, with names such as Sons of Liberty, Regulators, Associators, and Liberty Boys, to engage in acts of noncooperation such as refusing to purchase and use the Crown’s tax stamps, boycotting British goods, and subjecting merchants who failed to honor the boycott to public humiliation. Artisans and laborers refused to participate in building military fortifications for the British. When the British Crown decided to assert its authority over the Massachusetts Supreme Court by paying its judges directly from the royal treasury, the people responded by refusing to serve as jurors under the judges.

  The colonists also undertook initiatives aimed at getting control of economic life through local production. Women played a particularly crucial role by organizing Daughters of Liberty committees to produce substitutes for imported products.

  Others formed Committees of Correspondence, groups of citizens engaged in sharing ideas and information through regularized exchanges of letters carried by ship and horseback. These committees linked elements of diverse citizen movements in common cause—carrying out a function similar to that of the Internet in our own day. The first such committee was formed in Boston in 1764. A similar committee formed the next year in New York and took the lead in convening representatives of nine colonies as the Stamp Act Congress in New York in October 1765 to formulate a unified response to Stamp Act provisions. By 1774, all the colonial legislatures had responded to a proposal of the Virginia legislature that they each appoint a standing committee to engage in intercolonial correspondence, which led to their convening the First Colonial Congress in Philadelphia in September 1774.

  The Congress was composed of white male property-owning aristocrats who were educated in the ideas of the Enlightenment and desirous 177of winning recognition as equals of the English aristocracy and obtaining greater freedom to govern their own affairs and those of the colonies. Thoughts of creating an independent nation were still far from the minds of the delegates who gathered in Philadelphia. Their concern was with securing a guarantee of their rights under a distant British king and a parliament in which they had no representation.

  To this end, the Colonial Congress adopted a Declaration of Colonial Rights on October 14, 1774, that claimed for the people of the English colonies the rights to life, liberty, property, assembly, and trial by jury. It denounced taxation without representation and the maintenance of British troops in the American colonies without local consent. It called for a boycott of all British goods and an embargo on the export of American products to Britain in the event that the king failed to accept their demands.4 These events awakened a new political consciousness throughout the colonies.

  We see in these actions two ultimately competing strands of activity that continue to play out in U.S. politics to this day. One was a self-organizing populist uprising that created the social and institutional infrastructure of a coherent, nonviolent, and radically democratic bottom-up resistance movement similar in its underlying dynamic to the global peace and justice movement of our own time. The other involved a top-down alliance of the ruling elites of previously insular colonies to strengthen their position vis-à-vis the king, regularize the competition among themselves, and protect their privilege from the threat of what they viewed as mob rule. These two strands created a new reality and provided experience in two quite different forms of democratic practice —one radically populist and the other fundamentally elitist—that remain in dynamic opposition to this day.

  Creating a New Reality

  John Adams, one of the defining figures of the founding, set forth in his correspondence near the end of his life the thesis that the history of the founding of the United States should not be confused with the Revolutionary War. By Adams’s account, the war was not a war to gain the independence of the thirteen colonies, but rather the military defense of an existing system of independent government already in place against an attempt by a foreign power to force what was effectively an independent nation back into the fold of imperial rule.5 In this same spirit, 178historian Roger Wilkins suggests that the decade preceding the Declaration of Independence may have been the most important in U.S. history.

  The stunning achievements of the 1765–1775 period were not only instances of resistance to specific obnoxious acts of the British government but also key stages in the development of a continental revolutionary consciousness and impulse toward self-government, as well as the creation of the rudimentary instruments to carry out those purposes.…

  All of the practices and arts of politics were deployed in that fruitful decade. The colonists paid careful attention to public affairs. They spent time alone exploring and honing their opinions on important issues by reading history and philosophy as well as the latest correspondence, dispatches, and political tracts. They thought hard about what was occurring and consulted with others in order to inform and sharpen their views. They became involved in local and colonial politics by standing for office and putting forward proposals for action. When necessary—when, for example, colonial legislatures were disbanded, or when new instruments for protest and self-governance were required—they crafted appropriate new mechanisms. But most of all they thought, talked, debated, listened to one another, wrote, and created in ever-widening circles. All the while, their activities were fraught with great personal, political, and financial risk.6
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  A diverse, and in many respects deeply divided, people preoccupied with matters of their own daily survival had found the time to create a new political reality through acts of participatory democracy: engaging in dialogue, forging new alliances, and creating institutions of democratic communities. Once the people had expressed their will through their actions, the British had only Empire’s final option, the use of troops to force submission on pain of death.

  ELITE TAKEOVER

  The colonial resistance had on occasion involved violence against property, but avoided violence against persons. The British changed the rules of engagement by initiating the use of deadly military force and thereby confronted the rebels with Empire’s classic fight-or-die logic. 179British troops landed in Boston Harbor and armed conflict broke out on April 19, 1775, when they attempted to destroy the military stores of American rebels at Concord. It escalated from there.

  Not even the patriots who organized the resistance had fully come to terms with the new reality they had already created. Even as the armed engagement began, scarcely anyone was thinking of total independence. It is especially significant that the armed conflict between local militias and British troops was already under way when the Continental Congress decided in mid-June 1775 to bring order to the rebellion by appointing an army and commissioning George Washington to head it. The colonial elites who controlled the Continental Congress were responding to the leadership exercised by thousands of ordinary people engaged in a living democratic expression. If the delegates to the Congress had not acted to bring the rebellion under their control, they would have been reduced to an irrelevant debating society with no political base or authority and would likely have been swept away by the victor, whether the British or the rebels.

  Within a year popular sentiment shifted and talk of independence filled the air. The Continental Congress responded by signing a formal Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, giving expression to what had by then become a widespread public sentiment. It was a revolutionary document written by men of property and privilege to stir the passions of the masses to fight for liberty from a king who refused them the respect and rights they felt they were due. The people led and the leaders followed, which is how real democracy is supposed to work.

  In the end, General Washington and his army expelled the British with the help of France, Spain, and the Netherlands. The war ended with the Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783. A rebellious people inspired by a vision of liberty gave birth to new nation. It was a remarkable contribution to humanity’s long journey beyond monarchy and theocracy, but it was only a beginning on the road to real democracy.

  The diversity of circumstances, interests, races, values, religious beliefs, and national origins of the people who made up the new nation speaks to the magnitude of the ambition of joining together the thirteen colonies into a new nation with a democratic vision.

  180 Overall, precious little beyond their shared antipathy to British taxes and corporate monopolies bound the people of the new nation together. Accustomed to being the subjects of arbitrary rule by those in positions of power, many had no experience beyond the frame of the Imperial Consciousness that equates personal liberty with a license to abuse others, and they had no particular reason to consider the law as anything other than a means by which the few exploit the many.

  Aristotle would not be alone in considering these conditions an inauspicious beginning for the formation of a democratic nation. Yet for all their diversity and lack of experience with organized self-rule, the grassroots rebels who initiated and led the revolution in its earliest manifestations demonstrated a remarkable capacity to express the popular will through self-organizing groups and networks—long one of democracy’s most meaningful and effective forms of expression.

  It is also significant that the American Revolution did not start as an armed rebellion. This was an auspicious sign of a greater maturity of thought than might have been expected under the circumstances. It is axiomatic: democracy cannot be achieved at the point of a gun. The gun itself affirms the imperial principle of domination by superior force, which affirms the relationships of Empire. Violence against life, by its nature, is antithetical to the relationships of Earth Community.

  When the British changed the rules of engagement from nonviolence to violence, the rebels felt compelled to respond in kind. As the violence escalated, it created a situation that both allowed and compelled the elites of the Continental Congress to assert their authority by raising an army that assumed control of the rebellion and restored imperial order under a new command. The colonial elites who had long aspired to equal status with their European counterparts went on to form a new nation ruled by a wealthy aristocracy with its own agenda of imperial expansion. The British lost the war, but Empire remained robust, reasserting its dominion in North America as plutocracy cloaked in the guise of democracy.

  We are left with a troubling and perhaps unanswerable question: Did the American Revolution, as widely believed, bring democracy to North America and to the modern era? Or, by consolidating the power of America’s own ruling aristocracy and giving birth to an imperial nation destined to become far more powerful than any empire that preceded it, did that revolution set back the advance to universal suffrage and democratic citizen rule by many generations?

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  CHAPTER 11

  Empire’s Victory

  This is an impressive crowd. The haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base.1

  George W. Bush

  We can either have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.

  Louis Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court Justice (1861–1939)

  Extreme inequalityis the surest indicator of a society organized by the dominator relationships of Empire. It is no coincidence that the United States has the most unequal wealth distribution of any major industrial nation and is the most imperial of modern nations.

  In 1998, the top 1 percent of U.S. households owned 47 percent of all household financial assets, more than the entire bottom 95 percent— and the gap is growing. In the decade between 1989 and 1999, the number of U.S. billionaires increased from 66 to 268. The number of people living below the pitifully inadequate official poverty line (about $13,000 for a family of three in 1999) increased from 31.5 to 34.5 million. The ratio of CEO pay to the pay of an average worker rose from 141 to 1 in 1995 to 301 to 1 in 2003. The legacy of slavery’s destruction of families and its denial of opportunities for intergenerational wealth accumulation by black Americans is revealed in the fact that the total wealth of the average European American household is 5.5 times that of the average African American household.2

  For more than thirty years, political science professor Thomas Dye has been documenting in a series of studies titled Who’s Running America? just how small the U.S. ruling class is. In the 2001 edition, which documented elite rule under the then newly established administration of George W. Bush (Bush II), Dye identified 7,314 individuals, out of a U.S. population of 288 million, who by their positions of power and authority controlled

  182 almost three-quarters of the nation’s industrial (nonfinancial) assets, almost two-thirds of all banking assets, and more than three-quarters of all insurance assets, and… directed the nation’s largest investment firms. They commanded over half of all assets of private foundations and universities and controlled the television networks, the national press, and the major newspaper chains. They dominated the nation’s top law firms and the most prestigious civic and cultural associations, and they occupied key federal government posts in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches and the top military commands.3

  These are truly America’s Cloud Minders, members of a privileged elite that rule from a separate world of luxury and privilege far above the mundane. Traveling in private jets and chauffeured limousines, attending elite schools, living in gated communities and p
rivate estates, socializing in exclusive clubs, and getting their news from elite publications and news services that cater to an exclusive audience, these are the have-mores who live in world far removed from the mere haves, let alone the have-nots.

  The 2004 U.S. presidential race between George W. Bush and John Kerry, two white males from wealthy families who had each graduated from Yale University and belonged to the Skull and Bones society, underscored the narrowness of the path to the highest positions of political power. Indeed, the two presidents prior to Bush II, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, also held degrees from Yale University, and Bush I had also been a member of Skull and Bones.

  As history and a close reading of the original U.S. Constitution make clear, the intention of the architects of what we look to as American democracy was not to create a democracy; it was to create a plutocracy, a nation ruled by a wealthy elite—and they were very successful. Their efforts are worth a brief review, not only to remind ourselves of the realities of our history, but also to comprehend how past misdeeds and slanderous political rhetoric formed a template for our own time.

  WHO WILL RULE? A NATION BY, FOR, AND OF WHITE MEN OF PROPERTY

  The members of the Continental Congress who had issued the Declaration of Colonial Rights in 1774 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776 were all white male property owners named as representatives to 183the Congress by colonial legislative bodies, which themselves comprised white male property owners. Many, including Jefferson, included slaves in their property. It was the same for the Constitutional Convention. The free male laborers, who enjoyed minimal rights, and the women, slaves, bonded workers, and Native Americans, who had no legal rights, made up more than 90 percent of the population of the new nation, but had no representative in either body.