American Bastille Day

Lessons from the French Revolution that the GOP & the moneyed class refuse to learn.

For much of the 18th century, France and England were at war, vying for global supremacy. Colonial America was only one of the fields of battle between the two superpowers—and not nearly the most important. What we think of as the American Revolution can also be understood as a proxy war between George III and Louis XVI.

While successful for France, these military adventures were paid for on credit. Eventually, the bill came due. And it cut deep. By 1788, more than half of the royal finances went to debt service. (An Old Regime Rand Paul would have lost his mind.) This burden was not sustainable. Something had to give. As the late French historian Georges Lefebvre explains in 1939’s Quatre-vingt-neuf (boldface mine):

There remained only one resource, though a considerable one. Not all Frenchmen paid taxes on the same basis. For one thing the regions that had retained their Provincial Estates, notably Brittany and Languedoc, bore a lighter burden. Many bourgeois did not pay the taille and the road service fell only on peasants. Most favored of all were the clergy and nobility. The tax exemptions from which they benefited were the more important since rural rents had risen more than prices—98 per cent compared with 65 per cent. At the same time the value of income received in kind, as from the tithe and some feudal dues, had risen in direction proportion to prices. In short, under the Old Regime, the richer a man was, the less he paid. Technically the crisis was easy to meet: all that was necessary was to make everybody pay.

But the king did not make everybody pay (although, to be fair, he did try). The nobles and the clergy—as greedy as they were short-sighted and out of touch with popular sentiment—refused to submit to further taxation. The debt went into default. The economy collapsed. The Bastille was stormed. And we all know what happened after that. (Cut to guillotine blades swooping down on rich, fat necks).

Twenty-three decades later, Republicans in U.S. Congress, ignorant of the chaos that befell the country that helped fund our country’s birth as a nation, are hellbent on making the same error committed by the French Parlement. As we just watched, Kevin McCarthy & Co. were perfectly willing to let the debt ceiling expire—to let the United States default on its obligations, with all the permanent and unthinkable consequences such a catastrophic own-goal would cause—to deliver yet more undeserved and unneeded financial gain to their grotesque benefactors.

Not content with the radical tax cuts bequeathed to the ultra-rich by Bush II and Trump, or the subsequent further transfer of wealth upward that happened during the pandemic, the GOP is now coming after our entitlements: Social Security and Medicare. The Republicans want to cut those services, and they are apparently willing to risk le Quatorze juillet to get what they want.

This naked greed isn’t peculiar to Washington. Hollywood is also at an impasse. After Bob Iger, the well-heeled CEO of Disney and one of the more visible antagonists of the SAG-AFTRA strike, took time away from his “Billionaire’s Camp” in Sun Valley to denounce the “level of expectation” of the actors guild as “just not realistic” and the strike as “very disruptive” and “very, very damaging” to the industry in a TV interview, Fran Drescher, the president of the union, compared the “tone deaf” mogul and his ultra-rich cohorts to “land barons of a medieval time.”

Seventeen-eighty-nine is not technically a medieval time, but her point stands.

It’s important to note that it was the burgeoning upper middle class—the merchant class; successful non-nobles; the Fran Dreschers of 18th-century France, basically—that drove the French Revolution. The poorest citizens, the peasantry, loved their king. “For monarchies and aristocracies, and indeed for all who rested on top of the social period, [religion] provided social stability,” Eric Hobsbawm explains in The Age of Revolution. “[T]he Church was the strongest prop of the throne. Pious and illiterate peoples like the South Italians, the Spaniards, the Tyrolese and the Russians had leaped to arms to defend their church and ruler against foreigners, infidels, and revolutionaries, blessed and in some cases led by their priests. Pious and illiterate peoples would live content in the poverty to which God had called them under the rulers which Providence had given them, simple, moral, orderly and immune from the subversive effects of reason.” (If you need further proof of this counterintuitive concept, look at which houses tend to fly the FUCK BIDEN flags.)

Income inequality isn’t entropic. It has its limits. Historically, there is a line that, once crossed, ignites revolution. The economist Max Lorenz wrote about this 125 years ago. We’re not quite there—not yet. But we will be, if the Republicans have their way.

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What does it say about the United States in the 21st century that our richest humans tend to be the most sociopathic, the least concerned with the common good, the worst exacerbators of global warming? And what does this current crop of bloated plutocrats actually do for society? What does a venture capitalist contribute? A hedge fund manager? A crypto exchange provider? A Hollywood accountant who, through bookkeeping legerdemain, makes sure a blockbuster never turns a profit on paper, to fuck over the screenwriters and actors who have points?

Elon Musk is often called, inaccurately, the richest man in the world. There is, still, a cult of people who think he’s some genius. But what has he done except invest his old man’s emerald mine fortune, use his exploding car company to game the federal government’s energy credit system, invest in shooting rockets toward a dead planet, promote Nazis and fluff dictators while ruining a perfectly good social media platform, and get women pregnant? He would be right at home in Ancien Régime France. He’s like a character in Les Mis. Rockefeller he is not.

There are humans who worship these titans of industry. I bring you the Bain Capital man Edward Conard, author of Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong and The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class, who rose to public prominence during Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. I recall an interview with him years ago—I believe this was after he was revealed as the $1 million mystery donor—in which he argued, seemingly without irony, that smart people who don’t contribute to the economy like good capitalist sociopaths are pretty much useless. If all of us smarties behaved like, say, Peter Thiel, life would be a dream sweetheart (hello, hello again, sh-boom, sh-boom).

In that interview, Conard seemed particularly incensed about English majors, whom he derided as a drug on the market. He displayed a contempt for coffeehouses and the people who frequented such establishments. In a 2013 column for the Washington Post (“We Don’t Need More Humanities majors”), Conard wrote that “it is hard to believe humanities degree programs are the best way to train America’s most talented students.” So strongly did he feel about this, so passionately did he loathe us weak-sauce Art History types, that he [checks notes] married a comedy writer with a B.A. and an MFA in creative writing. The lesson: Economics is never as neat as Milton Friedman liked to think. The heart wants what it wants.

Say what you will about John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan, but at least they invested in the cities where they lived and did business. Robber barons, after all, require a baronetcy. This new crop of plutocrats has no such terrestrial allegiances. Forget about offshores; Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are in a race to leave the planet entirely. As for the others, when the apocalypse comes, they will be safely holed up in their New Zealand bunkers, well stocked with all the canned goods and pharmaceuticals they need. They will inherit the earth—the billionaires, along with the rats and the cockroaches. There is some poetry to that, even if everyone who can appreciate the poetry will be dead.

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These are the villains of the story. Not the one percent; the point-oh-one percent. The rest of us stand in opposition to them, and they thwart our attempts to organize. We are the screenwriters, the actors, the UPS workers; the laid-off journalists and tech workers; the screwed-over nurses and teachers; the poor, yes, but also the middle class that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are dutifully working to restore. We are the heroes. We have to stop squabbling with each other and unite in common cause. The future of democracy—a political system that, historically speaking, tends not to have a long shelf life—depends on it.

Biden has accomplished amazing things, especially given the environment when he took office. He’s been Herculean. But the president can only do so much. Inflation has settled down, but prices remain high. There is full employment, but wages are as flat as idiots think the earth is. Interest rates have doubled, making refinancing a mortgage prohibitive. Cat food costs twice what it did in 2019. Remember the weird increase in the price of eggs? That’s corporate greed, nothing more. It’s a tiny cluster of CEOs, choosing short-term profits over anything else, all to please “shareholders,” whoever they are. Meanwhile, the dark money flooding our politics is almost all coming from the Dark Side (or, in the case of Leonard Leo, the dark Seid).

And as in the Old Regime in France, the sickeningly wealthy refuse to pay more in taxes. That’s what it all boils down to. They spend hundreds of millions to ensure that outcome. The tax cuts under Bush II and Trump represent the largest transfer of wealth since…I’m not even sure. The sacking of the Mughal Empire, maybe? We’ve already given these parasites an arm and a leg; they want a hand, a foot, an ear, and an eyeball as well. And they have the politicians by the balls.

The top marginal tax rate is the percentage over a certain income level that the mega-rich have to fork over—or are supposed to fork over—in taxes. Anyone who earns more than $578,125 has to pay that percentage in tax for every dollar over that threshold. FDR raised the top marginal tax rate from 25 to 63 percent in 1932, to stem the Great Depression. It was in the 80s in the early 1940s, and peaked at 94 percent in 1944-45. For the entire decade of the 1950s—the most prosperous decade for the middle class in U.S. history—the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent; this was when Eisenhower, a Republican, was president. The rate came down to 70 percent in 1965 and remained there until Ronald Reagan, who cut it to half. Read my lips: Poppy Bush had it at 28 percent. It’s now at 37. Raise it back up! This isn’t rocket science. Put in an ultra-top threshold over, say, five million a year, and tax at 90 percent after that.

Technically the crisis was easy to meet: all that was necessary was to make everybody pay.

The solution here is what it was in France all those years ago. Tax the rich. Tax the elite. Tax the churches. Make them pay their fair share. Thanks to Trump’s signature legislative accomplishment, billionaires pay less in taxes as a percentage than you or me. It’s like five people go to dinner, all have the same thing, the bill comes to $100, but the rich guy only has to cough up two bucks; what sense does that make? How is that fair?

Make them pay. Tax them all. Tax the Musks and the Bezoses and the Zuckerbergs more—much more. Tax the churches that operate like, and effectively are, corporations. Tax the dark money groups. Track down the offshore cash. Seize the wealth. And then, use the windfall to finance universal healthcare, and renewable energy, and student loan forgiveness, and universal pre-K, and the education system. Build back better.

We can do this. And we must.

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If we continue on our current path, the revolution will come, one way or another, whether we like it or not. That, history tells us, is where extreme income inequality inevitably leads. It behooves nobody—neither the mega-rich nor the rest of us—to be anywhere near that point. For a country armed to the teeth, we have been very fortunate that political violence has been so limited, January 6 notwithstanding. For the love of all things holy, let’s please keep it that way.

History suggests that if we don’t tax the greedy plutocrats appropriately, we’re going to have an American Bastille Day. Heads will roll, figuratively if not literally. How did Ron Perlman put it? “There’s a lot of ways to lose your house.” And to be clear: this is not a threat but a prediction, based on centuries of historical precedent. We must do everything we can to avoid a bloody outcome. We need to learn from history; Republicans, meanwhile, don’t even want to teach it properly.

Outside of a few terms under FDR, there isn’t much precedent for equitable wealth-sharing in the United States. This ain’t Denmark. For all their grandiloquence on democracy—on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—the Founders were really just the first wave of American oligarchs, many of them slaveholders, whose primary gripe was that they were being taxed too heavily by the Crown. In that sense, they had more in common with the French nobility than the French revolutionaries.

Two and a half centuries later, the bill is finally due.

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Photo credit: Révolution française: L'exécution de Louis XVI, place de la Révolution, actuelle place de la Concorde, actuel 8ème arrondissement, le 21 janvier 1793.