“Why Republicans want to destroy the hidden link between Middle Class wealth and democratic power” – Thom Hartmann; The Progressive Populist; August, 2025.
*** “The most perfect community is one in which the middle class is in control and outnumbers both of the other classes.” [ Aristotle ]
In this post, as well as in others, and in ANY TRUE account of where 1981-2025 America is NOT the 1947-80 America that WAS a middle class society – by design and policy. Look at the unspun TRUE numbers: wages, incomes, wealth, tax rates, home ownership….
Ask yourself: WHY have economists called the 1947-75 period “the great compression”?
Look at income ratios between CEOs and their employees, 1947-80, versus, 1981-2025.
Ask yourself WHY we’ve gone from [maybe] l billionaire in 1956 to over 900 in 2025?????
KNOW THIS: one big key to 1947-80 middle class prosperity was that American wealth was SHARED – average people made enough, to mostly, have one wage earner. That began to change in the 1970s
For those of YOU who did not live then – think in terms of. THEFT. What the rich have done to YOU is STEAL YOUR SHARE. of America’s wealth. [This has been numerically PROVEN.]
Do YOU have good health insurance? Do YOU have a DEFINED BENEFIT pension? WHY are people in Scandinavian countries annually “THE happiest people on earth’????? What do their countries do for their people that America no longer does for its people????? THE answers for American misery are found in the answers to the above questions. KNOW THIS – what has happened, 1980-2025, IS. NOT. AN. ACCIDENT. KNOW ALSO – the people and groups the FAR RIGHT blames ARE NOT the villains, as their BIG LIES claim.
*** “If you tell a big lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” [ Adolf Hitler ]
Following are excerpts from Thom Hartmann’s “Modernization Theory: The Key to Understanding the GOP’s Hatred of the Middle Class”; The Progressive Populist; August, 2025:
8] “On the other hand – and here is the GOP’s real goal – if you can do away with or diminish the wealth and political power of the middle class, you can more easily loot the government and act exclusively in the interest of the morbidly rich.” [Note: go to the numbers, 1981-2025. Just one example; WHO were the primary, and intended, beneficiaries of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts – the ones the GOP just made permanent???]
1] “A Pew poll published in late June finds that 59% of Americans say the GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that cuts taxes for billionaires and raises them for working-class people “would hurt lower-income people and 51% think it would hurt middle-income people.” [Suppose you took Republican voters out of the poll – THEN what would it say?]
2] They”re correct. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said “the bill will measurably reduce the income and spending power of low-and middle-income people whie giving a $4 trillion gift to the morbidly rich.”
3]. “So, why would Republicans want to further reduce the size and wealth of America’s middle class?….There are two good reasons that answer that question.
4] “the first and simplest is that ever since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court made it legal for billionaires and big corporations to bribe politicians, the GOP has done the bidding of the morbidly rich to the exclusion of everybody else…….with their Buckley and Bellotti decisions in the late 1970s, laying the foundation for..Ronald Reagan’s war against unions and working people..”
5] “..there’s a larger reason why Donald Trump and the GOP are working so hard to immiserate and impoverish working class Americans. That reason has to do with something called “modernization theory.”….Seymour Martin Lipset, famously wrote: “The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy.”
6] “As Barrington Moore noted in his book “Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy”: “No bourgeois [middle class], no democracy.” In 2003, researchers Carles Boix and Susan Stokes found strong evidence that wealthier countries are more likely to be democracies, and once established, democracies are far more stable in richer nations.”
7]. “Similarly, in their book “Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy,’ Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson prove that when economic growth empowers new classes [especially the middle class], those groups will demand political reforms.”
*** “There is class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
[ Warren Buffett ]
9] “…multiple cross-national studies using World Bank income data and Freedom House democracy scores show a strong correlation between per capita income and democratic governance; as people become wealthier they more vigorously demand a small-d democratic political system.”
10] “By 1981, the American middle class was at its peak because of a 74% top personal income tax bracket, a 50% top corporate income tax rate, a strong and healthy social safety net, cheap health care [because hospitals and insurance companies were required to be nonprofits in most states], and free or near-free college.” [ THIS – is what we mean when we say. YOU should look at 1981-2025 America. – and see what was been STOLEN FROM YOU.]
11] “Democracy was also arguably at its peak; for the previous 40 plus years Congress had passed, one after the other, bills that primarily benefitted average working people and the middle class. Voting was easy, women and minorities were empowered, and we led the world in education and innovation.” [ THIS is what has been STOLEN FROM YOU]
12]. “When Reagan came into office in 1981 about a third of American workers had good union jobs, meaning that about two-thirds of all American families lived good middle class lives on a single paycheck….. ˇhat was the year the GOP declared war on working-class people because, in the estimation of the Nixon-and Reagan-era Republicans, our democracy had gotten out of hand…….So, in 1981 the GOP set about dismantling the American middle class with their s0-called Reagan Revolution.”
13]. “Who did this to us?” Republicans and the FAR RIGHT, from Limbaugh, Fox “News”, an Trump blame immigrants, Black people, uppity women, college students, an union bosses !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! [ THE REALLY BIG LIE ]
*** “Of all the forms of tyranny the least attractive and most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, then tyranny of plutocracy.” [ Theodore Roosevelt ]
14] “The bottom line is ghat the GOP opposes democracy because it interferes with and complicates their very well-paid efforts to suck up to-and legislate on behalf of – the morbidly rich.”
*** “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” [ Plutarch ]
With Justice For All 