Who draws the line, indeed. There are essentially two ways to decide, sit down in a room with your fellow humans and hash it out, or reference some set of rules which tell you what to do. Ken Ham chooses the latter, in a logically consistent manner. At the Creation Museum, Georgia Purdom illuminates the danger of scrutiny of the Bible, that it leads to a skepticism which threatens faith and the faithful. Better to adhere to eternal verities than engage with one’s fellows about the matter.

Antonin Scalia is known as a proponent of originalism. As he described it:

“The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means today not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.”

In Scala’s world, while judges may have to site down in a room with their fellow judges and hash out what it means, in the end the text decides, not the judges. (With Scalia, though, there is deference to the democratic process, where citizens sit down with each other and by activism and suffrage, determine the course of their government.) If considering the Constitution a ‘living document’ means sitting around with one’s fellow judges to hash it out, Scalia’s view instead is one of adherence to a rule.

In Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Donald Luskin weighs in on how rules-based policy at the Federal Reserve will improve its management of the economy. He chastises Janet Yellen and her “make-it-up-as-you-go” approach as having been ineffective in dealing with the aftermath of the Great Recession and as having failed to achieve the central bank’s inflation target. Luskin cites 19th century Swedish economist Knut Wicksell and his imagined ‘natural interest rate’, an interest rate that the economy would settle at if there were no central banks setting it. Determining this rate requires nothing more than observing the rate of inflation. (Luskin notes that Yellen’s observations on the ‘neutral rate’ mirrors this thinking, but uses mechanisms to determine it which are too complex.)

Milton Friedman similarly argues for the Federal Reserve to manage itself more via rules than human decision making. He notes that the Great Depression was made far worse by the actions which members of the Fed took, and suggests that giving much power to individuals or institutions is dangerous. The rule he proposes to limit the ability of members of the Fed from causing too much damage is to make their decisions contingent on money supply. Friedman recognizes that humans make mistakes, and giving too much power to a small group of them generates great risks. He prefers creating institutions which force adherence to rules, instead.

Arthur Herman writes a fascinating account in The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization. In it he traces the ebbing and flowing of the influence of Plato, then Aristotle, throughout the history of western thought. If I can way over simplify, for Plato, behind the curtain lives the real world, and our job is to discover it and adhere to it. For Aristotle, the facts on the ground are all we have, and we need to engage with them. It seems that Ham and Purdom would have us cleave to the Bible behind the curtain, Scalia to the Constitution there, and Luskin and Friedman to the economic orthodoxy behind the curtain.

These have all been explored as reasons why Trump’s supporters back him. Matthew MacWilliams, in an article in Vox in February, insists that a “voter’s gender, education, age, ideology, party identification, income, and race simply had no statistical bearing on whether someone supported Trump. Neither, despite predictions to the contrary, did evangelicalism.” What did have a bearing was an inclination to authoritarian behavior. As MacWilliams describes them, “people who score high on the authoritarianism scale value conformity and order, protect social norms, and are wary of outsiders. And when authoritarians feel threatened, they support aggressive leaders and policies.” He mentions things which augment this sense of authoritarianism, including fear of terrorism, Trump’s strongman rhetoric regarding deporting illegal immigrants, anti-Muslim sentiments including banning them from entering the U.S., and tracking Muslim Americans. MacWilliams references other researchers, including Marc Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler, whose book Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics studies the phenomenon. They note, too, that those who are lower on the authoritarian scale can move higher if they feel under threat. The recently concluded Republican National Convention, and Trump’s speech heightening those fears, could increase this sense in voters and bring them over to Trump’s side.

Jordan Michael Smith augments while pushing back on the authoritarian angle by referencing Seymour Martin Lipset, writing in the late 1950’s. Lipset’s view was of “working class authoritarianism,” and that “authoritarian predispositions and ethnic prejudice flow more naturally from the situation of the lower classes than from that of middle and upper classes,” also quoted by Hetherington and Weiler. Are they Trump supporters because they have authoritarian traits, or are they supporters because Trump speaks to their declining fortunes as working class in America, who also happen to be authoritarian?

Cousin to authoritarianism and its interest in protecting social norms and wariness of outsiders is ethnocentrism, or more darkly, racism. Emily Flitter and Chris Kahn report that while significant numbers of both Republican and Democratic parties view blacks more negatively than whites, Trump supporters are even more likely to view blacks as “criminal, unintelligent, lazy, and violent.” They are also more likely to agree that “social policies, such as affirmative action, discriminate unfairly against white people.” Jeet Heer reinforces this, describing Trump’s comments about Mexican rapists and stirring up xenophobia towards Muslims, as a “racist pitch,” noting that such dog-whistle appeals to racism have been used heavily because the Republican party is overwhelmingly white. Matthew Yglesias believes “You can’t talk about Trump without talking about racism.” Echoing Nate Cohn, who notes that Trump’s supporters are “A Certain Kind of Democrat,” who populate “a broad swath of the country stretching from the Gulf Coast, up the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, to upstate New York,” Yglesias notes that his territory of support “ corresponds to the geography of white racial resentment in the United States.”

But are Trump’s supporters really the authoritarian working class? David W. Brady and Douglas Rivers show that early in the race, in September, Trump’s supporters were more likely to be older, less educated, and earn less than the average Republican. Janell Ross, writing in December, reinforces those traits, adding that Trump supporters are more likely to be male, as well. Rubio picked up the younger voters, Cruz and Carson evangelical voters, with Carson also scoring higher among the college-educated, and Bush doing better among moderates and women. But as Aaron Blake notes, to make Trump supporters, “Take Republicans, and make them more wary of outsiders.” Or as Corinne Purtill believes, it is a stereotype that the Trump supporter is white, working class, and uneducated; he or she is those things only in comparison to others in the Republican party. She references Nate Silver, who notes that Trump supporters are more well off than the average American, and more well off than either Sanders or Clinton supporters (whose primary voters are even more well off than the average American).

The media have made note of recent research indicating that, contrary to trends over many decades, white life expectancy has declined while black life expectancy has increased. However, white life expectancy remains higher than that of blacks. Regardless, it contributes to a sense that life is getting worse for whites. This is also the story of worsening economic pain. According to Benjy Sarlin, Trump’s support started out more strongly in counties which had experienced below average growth in the years 2004 to 2014, where white labor participation was lower, and where the population had less education. As much of the country exited from the Great Recession, some areas (the article calls out counties in Appalachia, part of the geography Nate Cohn calls out as being more favorable to Trump) did not benefit from the overall national economic improvement.

Emma Lindsay believes that this is just backdrop to what animates Trump supporters. She thinks that what Trump supporters have lost and most want, is, in a word, dignity. Part of being part of life is giving and sharing, but that the country is “depriving the white working classes of their means to give. As we export manufacturing jobs internationally and as we streamline labor with technology, we start moving people to the sidelines. It’s not just that they have less money, it’s that their identity as providers is being threatened. This is why they are often so against welfare. Even if it would fix their financial situation, it would not fix their identity problems. It would hurt their dignity. While the working class is undoubtedly worried about the economy, we already know many will not vote in their economic best interests. They vote for the candidate who promises a return to dignity, and it’s not because they’re dumb. It’s because they care about their dignity more than they care about their finances.”

Others put it less charitably. Jeet Heer thinks “Trump is appealing to the aggrieved privilege of well-to-do white Republicans who feel threatened by America’s changing demographics and challenges to the traditional racial hierarchy in the age of Obama.” Jamelle Bouie delineates many of the ideas expressed here, but asks why the Trump phenomenon now. He answers that the election of Barack Obama was a shock which made the cultural and political change unignorable. And Linda Wertheimer asks Robert P. Jones, author of “The End of White Christian America,” if it’s just that “Trump Supporters [Are] Nostalgic For A Fading White, Christian America?”

Either way, what’s driving Trump supporters is a sense of loss. Lindsay notes that her progressive friends think Republicans, particularly those who have become Trump supporters, must be ignorant having continued to vote against their own best interests. Many have noted that the Republican party, it of big business and small government favoring the well-off, has managed to keep the Tea Party element and the angry base inside its tent. But the base has come to recognize its feeling of powerlessness. Trump, however, has tapped into that feeling. As Derek Thompson notes, “But voters who agreed with the statement “people like me don’t have any say about what the government does” were 86.5 percent more likely to prefer Trump. This feeling of powerlessness and voicelessness was a much better predictor of Trump support than age, race, college attainment, income, attitudes towards Muslims, illegal immigrants, or Hispanic identity.”

When you have little say in your government, your government doesn’t reflect your interests. Benjy Sarlin talks about what Trump supporters say when asked at rallies. Money in politics leads to incompetent and corrupt government. But Trump “can’t be bought.” While the Republican leadership kept backing the loosening of campaign finance restrictions, those who ultimately would become Trump supporters recognized that this money was the source of government incompetence.

Aggrieved. Disrespected. Economically left behind. Having lost faith in government. Responding to a leader strong in proclaiming nationalism. Turning their backs on democracy?

During the Bush-Cheney administration, I remember telling my father-in-law that I suspected about 40% of Americans would approve of abolishing democracy in favor of a strong leader who promoted their interests. Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk have come to a similar conclusion. In articles at the New York Times in September and at Vox in December, they have delineated this dissatisfaction with Democracy. Trust in Congress has plummeted since 1980, from more than 40% to less than 10%. When asked if it would be a good thing to have Army rule, the percentage of Americans who agree has gone from 6% to 16% in the last 20 years. Increasingly, wealthy Americans see their fate less entwined with that of the middle class, and in increasing numbers support authoritarian rule (from 20% to 45% since 1995; for Americans in the bottom half of the income scale it has stayed roughly at 30%). And this turn away from democracy is seen in other countries across the globe, as well.

Is the Trump phenomenon one with this distancing from democracy? Trump supporters tend to be older, and older Americans are still more supportive of democracy than younger Americans, so maybe not. But the same distrust in government and loss of optimism about the future which drives anti-democracy views also animates Trump support. Congress doesn’t work; big money is corrupting the system. Maybe a strong leader is the solution.

Foa and Mounk would disagree. Reflecting the views of a different set of disaffected Americans, those feeling the Bern, Foa and Mounk argue that more democracy is the solution. They cite Lawrence Lessig’s presidential campaign focused on reforming the electoral process; curbing the power of the rich; limiting campaign finance contributions; stopping the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street; and redistributive polices which improve the standard of living of all citizens.

“I support Trump.” Now that the conventions are over and the campaign has started in earnest, it will be interesting to see how our politics realigns itself.

Kim Messick, noting that Saletan was merely documenting this notion that the Republican candidates are upset “with the idea that its assertions and proposals be tested against empirical evidence,” takes the argument one step further by documenting the “conflict over the meaning of conservatism in the modern world.” He argues that conservatism from the mid 1850’s to the 1960’s was anchored in a commitment to a market economy, and adapted as the economy changed from small producers and merchants to industrial capitalism. Messick argues that the ‘Southern Strategy’ which brought the South to Republicanism and the Republicans to electoral victory, required ever greater ideological rigidity as time went on. The modern vision of society grants more equality across race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, and today’s conservatism rejects this in favor of a vision they ascribe to eternal realities and the wishes of God. By withdrawing from history this way, conservatives reject empirical evidence in favor of ideology and are insulted when the debate moderators challenge the veracity of policy prescriptions which leak from this idealogy (see “tax, budget, and deportation math” above).

Plato wrote the allegory of the cave in the Republic. In it, the liberals are chained to the back of the cave watching shadows of things passing by on the wall in front of them. They give names to these shadows, and treat them as reality. A conservative manages to escape the cave and enter into the bright sunshine where he perceives reality. Were he to reenter the cave he would still likely not be able to convince the liberals in chains that they are prisoners to shadows.

Or so a Republican presidential candidate might see it. The notion that Messick is pointing to is that conservatives, and most of the Republican contenders, subscribe to a view that there is a truth that they perceive independent of the empirical evidence (and math) of the world around them, and that they consider it an insult that this view be challenged.

In Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us, Avi Tuschman enumerates the genetic, biological, evolutionary, social, historical underpinnings of what makes us conservative or progressive. What he explores is less the particular policies that conservatives or liberals might propound, and more these influences which give us a particular world view and lead us to particular policy positions. Patrick Allitt in The Conservative Tradition at Great Courses weighs in on a similar subject when he compares conservatives in Britain with those in the United States. In Britain, conservatives are not proposing expanding rights to bear arms as is the case with U.S. conservatives, nor or they proposing dismantling as socialist the National Health Service as conservatives in the U.S. are proposing dismantling Obamacare. What Tuschman is highlighting, often in concert with the insights of George Lakoff and Jonathan Haidt, are these biological and psychological tendencies which then express themselves in conservative or progressive policy prescriptions.

Aside from the tailoring of our genetic heritage by forming close-knit groups and staying in a circumscribed area where our genes were adapted to fighting off local disease, or alternately the genetic adaptations from developing an openness to new experience required of groups which had to migrate frequently, Tuschman to a large degree sees conservatism as the response to the coming of agricultural and the settling into societies tied to the land. He maintains that hunter-gatherer societies tended to be more egalitarian, including between the genders, because of a high level of mutual dependence and since it was easy to leave the group and set out on one’s own. With the settling into agricultural communities, wealth depended on inheriting land, limiting the ability to leave the group. A division of labor between the genders ensued, in part due to the fact that women could have more children, since they weren’t migrating and needing to carry children with them. Being able to generate a surplus for sale created wealth, and with it power. And families, and society, became controlled by men.

Jonathan Haidt posits six foundations of morality. Liberals emphasize care, fairness, and liberty. Conservatives are a mix of all six, but tend towards loyalty, authority, and sanctity. These latter three do a good job of encompassing what Tuschman’s describes as the consequences of humans taking up agriculture. In George Lakoff’s analysis, we tend to sort ourselves into one of two models, the strict father approach, and the nurturant parent one. The strict father approach also maps closely with what Tuschman sees in the adoption of agriculture and its consequences.

Tuschman describes conservatives as ethnocentric and as scoring high in conscientiousness; Haidt notes that sanctity plays a large role in the conservative view; Lakoff sees adherence to authority as critical to the conservative outlook. Haidt also notes a general belief among conservatives in ‘karma’, that if you do something good, good things will happen; and conversely for bad things. This also then reinforces that notion that those who are wealthier are so because they are deserving; those who are poorer have brought their poverty on themselves by their deeds. The ethnocentrism that Tuschman notes expands on this. The group that has more wealth and authority believes so because it is worthy of it. Its members will also defend it against all takers. Progressives, on the other hand, tend to believe in the innate, inner equality of all people, leading them to ascribe social inequality and injustice to the fact that some people are mired in poverty.

In medieval mystery novels, the hero is often the son who didn’t inherit. Not having a base for wealth, he is left to survive on his wits. Those who were smarter were able to do so, and they became the heroes of such novels. Those who didn’t were forgotten. As society has moved from its agricultural basis to modern industrialism, fewer individuals are subject to the constraints of an agricultural society. More are in a position to succeed on their own wits, as those in the medieval mystery novels. With the move of the population to the cities, individuals come into contact with others of different backgrounds and beliefs, and have to adapt (or perhaps, those who can adapt have a wider choice in mates and are more likely to reproduce). In developing countries, women have fewer children, and invest more time and money into each one. In part to pay the increasing expense of children who remain dependent longer, spending more years in school, women are more likely to enter the workforce, and gain a measure of independence, diminishing the inequality between the genders. Tuschman documents how ethnocentricity is often a result of a group strengthening its genome to protect against the diseases in its geographic area, and insulating itself from the diseases outsiders bring. Haidt reinforces this notion when he highlights conservative attraction to the notion of purity. But in an age of antibiotics and modern medicine, the rational fear of disease is lessened, and presumably with it the strength of adherence to ethnocentricity.

If, as Messick notes, Republicanism until the 1960’s was responsive to the changes in the economy as it moved toward industrial capitalism, since then the party has been dominated by the rural and the religious. While much of the rest of the country has adapted to new social realities, conservatives have stayed true to their values. All of which brings us to the liberal, Saleton/Messick critique of the Republicans candidates as unwilling to acknowledge evidence and math, while the candidates insist, on the one hand, on larger, eternal verities, and on the other, loyalty to just rewards, order, and ethnocentricity.

After the war, however, many succumbed to the stupor that accompanies a strong central government, preferring safety and comfort to the freedoms they had just fought a war to acquire. A group of brave, patriotic men met in Philadelphia, and with few disagreements and a unified voice, created a Constitution which weakened the central government by placing limitations on its authority. Even though the creators of the Constitution had few disagreements among themselves, it took a concerted effort to convince a population growing lazy that a weaker central government was in their interests. It took the valiant efforts of Jameson, Alexander, and Bird in the Federalist Papers to promote this new vision, and ultimately, it prevailed.

Well, of course, that’s not how (97% of?) historians see it. Gordon Woods puts it succinctly in his lecture at the Humanities Texas teacher institute, melding the two most common views of the  formation of the Constitution, that of John Fiske in 1888, and that of Charles Beard, from 1913. Fiske describes a society “falling into chaos and anarchy, with the country’s finances near ruin. The confederation government was collapsing, and the various state governments were beset by debt. . . . It was a desperate situation, retrieved only in the eleventh hour by this group of high-minded Founding Fathers who came in and saved the country from disaster.” Beard creates the Progressive interpretation, that the founding fathers got together to protect their own economic interests. Wood notes that society was not really falling into the chaos as Fiske describes, but does acknowledge that commercial and military interests required a stronger central government. Further, Wood describes a “democratic despotism” going on in the states. In his view, Madison reacts against “the multiplicity, the mutability, the changeability, and the injustice of state laws [that] was the most serious problem facing Americans.”

In all of these cases, Fiske, Beard, Wood, and Madison, it is clear that the founding fathers were replacing a weak central government confederation of sovereign states with a strong, central government connecting directly to the people and maintaining authority over the states.

So how can servative, writing at Saving Our Future, claim that “The Constitution, which began as a contract of federal constraint, is ‘evolving’ into an instrument of federal repression,” when ranting about illegal immigration and the 14th Amendment’s ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’ How can Richard Mack, former sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, say, “And I will tell you this, if we do not, if the counties and cities and states do not exercise their proper constitutional authority, known as state sovereignty and the 10th Amendment, if they do not enforce their own state sovereignty and secure their state sovereignty, then America will die. If we do not exercise the 10th Amendment and state sovereignty, we will lose liberty in America, and we will not get it back unless there’s bloodshed.” How can the Tea Party adherents have campaign planks emphasizing “state sovereignty”? How can conservatives promote state sovereignty as the law of the land when the very Constitution they worship was written to limit the rights the states had in the Articles of Confederation?

A conjunction of two recent books provides a compelling answer, David Sehat’s The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible, and Elvin Lim’s The Lover’s Quarrel: The Two Foundings and American Political Development. In The Jefferson Rule, Sehat argues that, throughout American history, whether liberal or conservative, in order to get your argument validated, you have had to establish that your views are those of the Founding Fathers. In the Lover’s Quarrel, Lim argues, our nation has had two foundings, one founding being that of the Declaration of Independence, the other that of the Constitution.

In The Jefferson Rule, Sehat maps a path through American history where political success required fealty, real or pretended, to the Founders. Jefferson described his victory over the Federalists as establishing his own view as the incontrovertible authority of what the Founders wanted. In the election of 1824, John Quincy Adams expressed regard for the “precious inheritance” of the Founders, but he realized that his administration needed to depart from the path set by this view of the Founders. Unable to communicate his views persuasively, his administration floundered. The views that Jefferson promulgated, now equated with the principles of the Founders, and policitian’s perceived need to adhere to them, laid down the circumstances for a series of crises which would lead over the next forty years to the Civil War.

With the failure of the Founders’ government to prevent the Civil War, expressions of fealty to their vision became less prominent. In 1908, Woodrow Wilson wrote Constitutional Government in the United States, which recognized the changes in society and the nation and noted the “anachronistic character of the Founder’s government.”

Since then, however, fealty to the Founders has gained in prominence. Here the argument of Elvin Lim’s The Lover’s Quarrel becomes salient. The nation began with a Declaration of Independence and a confederation of sovereign states. This was the first founding, with anger at England and a meddling government and the violence of the Revolutionary War. When the Articles of Confederation turned out to be insufficient, a group of men met in Philadelphia to create a Constitution which called for a stronger central government. This was the second founding, one of deliberation and compromise. But even as the Constitution was successfully ratified, the Anti-Federalists, those who opposed the Constitution as granting too much authority to the central government, were able to secure “a piece of the First Founding in the new Constitution, with the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791.” And so was launched “the fundamental bipolarity of the American identity in our conceptions of our union.”

As we need to ground our current principles and policies in adherence to the Founders, as Sehat proposes, we can ground them in the principles of the first founding, or those of the second founding, and the two are very different. The first founding is one of small central government, and sovereign states rights; the second founding in the recognition that a stronger central government is necessary to the well-being of the nation. In the first founding, the government is the enemy of liberty and must be restrained; in the second founding, the government is in many ways the guarantor of liberty.

President Harding in the 1920’s first coined the phrase “Founding Fathers” and “sought to renew the founding adoration for a new generation.” To Harding, the founding fathers would have supported big business and rejected the progressive policies of the era just coming to an end. When he spoke at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922, he turned aside the notion that Lincoln had overseen a new, effectively third, founding, and proclaimed, “He treasured the inheritance handed down by the founding fathers, the ark of the covenant wrought through their heroic sacrifices…In that way Lincoln proved ‘the wisdom of Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton and Franklin’ in preserving their system of constitutional government.”

Franklin Roosevelt, in response to the Great Depression, dramatically increased the scope of government. As Sehat notes, “even for a politician as skilled as Roosevelt, the American political tradition of invoking the Founders could not be so decisively rejected. The pattern of argumentation proved too useful, too alluring a weapon. As he began to ramp up his program, his critics, though few, would soon make effective use of the Founders to try to block his agenda. And when they did, Roosevelt would have to decide how to respond. In the process, he began the modern fight over the Founding Fathers.” When business turned against the New Deal, and the Liberty League wrapped itself in the mantel of the Founding Fathers, Roosevelt “fully shifted his rhetorical strategies. He now no longer spoke of reconstructing and transforming American government to meet the new realities of an industrial age. His goal, he said, was primarily restorative. The battle he fought began ‘in the Constitutional Convention of 1787.’ ‘From time to time since then,’ he elaborated, ‘the battle has been continued, under Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.’ Roosevelt stood in this tradition.”

When in the 1980’s the Reagan economic program was failing, when lower taxes and higher defense spending led not to a balanced budget but to the largest deficits ever, and support in his administration was eroding, he, too, took up the mantle of the founders. “His team had decided to renew the theme of national values that he had sounded in 1980, but this time he draped himself again and again in the robe of the Founding Fathers. Because his project was a recovery of the founding values, he claimed that his opponents were betrayers of the American character and purpose and therefore thoroughly un-American.”

Ours is the decade of the Tea Party and both Behat and Lim reference the movement. For Lim, obviously, the Tea Party harkens back to the first founding, one where their loyalties are to the states and localities, and where the federal government is the adversary. When he mentions the Tea Party wanting to ‘take back’ Washington, he notes that this “has insinuated that there is a higher source of legitimacy than the Constitution itself—namely, the people.” Consonant with his view that our allegiances to the first or second founding come more from predilection than analysis, he references the work of Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williams (The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism), “Despite their fondness for the Founding Fathers, Tea Party members we met did not make any reference to the intellectual battles and political compromises out of which the Constitution and its subsequent amendments were forged … nor did they realize the extent to which some of the positions Tea Partiers now espouse bear a close resemblance to those of the Anti-Federalists … The Tea Partiers we met did not show any awareness that they are echoing arguments made by the Nullifiers and Secessionists before and during the U.S. Civil War.”

Behat takes a similarly jaundiced view, noting that the Tea Party posture on the Constitution is one of literalism, “a literalism so strict that Lepore accused the Tea Party of ‘historical fundamentalism.’”

Behat summarizes, “Because the Founders do not offer a stable reference to make sense of the present, their presence in American political debate has long been problematic. They have become icons of divergent visions of national life, repositories for political ideals, favorable institutional arrangements, and visions of citizenship that vary depending on who is invoking them. Jefferson spoke of the Founders as supporters of an agrarian ideal of liberty. John C. Calhoun made them into promoters of states’ rights. Jackson used them to push political democracy. Others have gone in different directions, using the Founders for national economic development (Clay and Adams), slavery’s restriction (Lincoln), popular sovereignty (Douglas), business rights (the American Liberty League), economic equality (Roosevelt), black civil rights (King), tax cuts and antigovernment retrenchment (Reagan), political moderation (Obama), and the revolutionary power of the people (the Tea Party).”

Lim’s ideas are much more nuanced than I have presented, and well worth reading. His thesis offers an understanding of the differences which power political disputes today and renders shallow most of political commentary today. The differences between first and second founders throughout history, and in today’s political skirmishes, flow from deep and deeply-conflicting roots. On gun rights he notes, “Defenders of gun rights believe that citizens should enjoy the presumption of virtue, not governments.” This is why, “conservatives do not seek a more perfect Union, but a more virtuous republic. In contrast, “If virtue in citizens and representatives was enough, the state governments and the Articles of Confederation would not have failed so miserably, or so some Federalists thought.” To summarize his understanding, he notes, “The Constitution did not create a compound republic in which the partly federal and partly national elements were stably and constantly integrated. Ours is a colloidal republic in which the powers of its component parts were never conclusively fixed because from the beginning, as Madison put it in Federalist 37, ‘no language is so copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea.’ The new federalism was quintessentially such an object.” But Lim’s depth and subtlety is well beyond the scope of this article.

Behat and Lim give the reader a perspective from which to analyze our political discussion. The tale of Kim Davis illuminates these fissures. Kim Davis has the right to her religious freedom (first founding, and it’s in the Constitution!); no, she has a constitutional duty to perform her job (second founding, clearly what the Second Founders intended!). The Supreme Court ruled unconstitutionally (there is a higher power than the government, it is ‘the People’, if not God himself); no, it was a violation of their constitutional rights that some individuals were forbidden from marrying. Getting perspective from Behat’s and Kim’s theses, we are better able to analyze the arguments, recognize their provenance, evaluate their legitimacy and utility, and better understand the complexity of our political process. We also echo, with Sehat, that requiring that we continually clothe our arguments in the mantle of the Founders is often truly damaging to effective political discourse.

In an excerpt on Salon from his book The Lovers’ Quarrel: The Two Foundings and American Political Development, Elvin Lim makes the point that the Anti-Federalist/Federalist debate over ratifying the Constitution continues in today’s political disputes. He frames it as the nation having had two Foundings. The first Founding was the Revolution and the Declaration of Independence; the second Founding was the Constitution and the formation of the nation from it. The first Founding was one of anger and revolt, and the tone of the Declaration of Independence reflects this; the second was pragmatic and compromising, reflected in the Constitution. The first founders pursued war to get their way; the second founders compromised to create a pragmatic government capable of keeping the nation together.

Lim sees the continuation of the Anti-Federalists, who promoted the rights of individual states against the federalized government the Constitution was creating, in today’s Tea Party. He begins the section excerpted with the opening words in the Tea Party Patriot founders Mark Meckler and Jenny Martin’s book, “We the People. With these three words, our nation began.” They then take a tone more reminiscent of the Revolution, “We, the people of the United States of America, felt threatened. We felt angry. We felt helpless.” The entitle their book, Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution. Lim sees this as an example of how the descendants of the Anti-Federalists confuse the two foundings, using the words of the Constitution to launch a revolution against the nation which embodies it. He references Herman Cain quoting, “the Constitution, [where] there’s a section in there about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” which are actually from the Declaration. He quotes Rand Paul saying the “The entire purpose of the Constitution was to limit the power the federal government had over the states,” exactly the opposite of what the Constitution in fact did, which was to assure a strong enough central government so that the nation would not disintegrate into chaos. Lim points to the Republic Party Platform of 2012 lauding the Constitution in the language of the Declaration. Lim notes similar Anti-Federalist sentiments and the confounding the two foundings throughout American history, referencing Jefferson, Calhoun, and Van Buren, among others.

I doubt very much that those who gathered in local tea party groups to participate in the movement started their first session by considering whether they stood with the first founders or the second founders, and having decided on the first, moved on to grasp what that meant for the views they should take on immigration, taxes, social issues, and the politics of the day. If Anti-Federalism has been such a prevalent strain throughout American history, it must have some genesis in the American psyche and social order. Understanding where it comes from, psychologically, as well as socially and historically, is a study unto itself.

I come down on the side of the second Founders. When we talk about our nation, we need to see it in terms of the document which established it and is its legal guiding principle. If the citizens of the nation under the Articles of Confederation were “We the People of our respective states,” citizens since the Constitution are citizens “of the United States” as a single nation. So important was this idea of what America really stood for, that our founding fathers met in Philadelphia to ensure the nation’s survival, even if it meant changing their views on state sovereignty. So important was this idea, that we fought a Civil War, “testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, could long endure.” Constitutional amendments following the war further strengthened the ability of the central government to hold the nation together. It is those four words, “of the United States”, which have changed the course of a nation, and with it the course of history.

Similarly, there was an episode in The Rifleman where a fellow comes to town who seems like a nice fellow, befriends the rifleman’s son and his friends, and when there was trouble we kids couldn’t imagine this nice guy being the culprit. But our parents saw what we didn’t, either because they knew the character, or they knew how TV shows played out.

In both cases we kids jumped on the direct path; our parents were more circumspect. Joshua Greene explores something similar in Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, where he discusses what he has come to call the modular myopia hypothesis. He calls it “the most complicated single idea that I will present in this book,” meaning that I don’t fully grasp it, and my retelling will be even more incomplete. Nonetheless, I see something in our political discussions which reflects this hypothesis, and often seems linked with the law of unintended consequences.

Greene’s hypothesis starts with findings he calls the dual-process theory of moral judgement. Based on results from subjects in a variety of experiments revolving around the footbridge case (would you throw the fat man off the footbridge onto the trolley tracks below to stop the trolley if you knew it would save the lives of five others who are on the tracks and would otherwise be run over), and the switch case (would you switch to trolley to a different track where it would run over the fat man on the tracks rather than continue on the current track and run over the five people there). Most of us recoil at physically throwing the fat man off the bridge, but generally agree to pulling the track switch. Greene ties this dual-process theory to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, which posits two tracks of thinking, a more automatic response, the fast path, and a more deliberative response, the slow path. Greene posits that we have a fast path which causes us to recoil at physically throwing the fat man from the bridge to his death, even though it would save five; but that when this fast path doesn’t provide a visceral response, as in the case of pulling the switch, we think more deliberatively and weigh the lives of five against the lives of one and respond accordingly. This deliberative thinking allows us to respond in a more utilitarian fashion, regarding five lives as more important than one.

The myopic module that Greene suggests is an automatic response which has been developed over evolutionary time to counter our tendency to violence, so that we can live together in society without killing each other. Pushing the fat man off the bridge triggers this repulsion to violence, and keeps us from accepting it as a reasonable reaction, even if it saves five at the expense of one. The module is myopic because it is heuristic, triggering on cues that stand-in for real violence. It is myopic because it can be triggered when it really shouldn’t be, for instance when subjecting people to simulated violence even when they know it isn’t real. Greene conducted a series of experiments to show just this result, giving credence to his hypothesis and use of the term ‘myopic’.

Greene calls on work by John Mikhail, who extends proposals from Alvin Goldman and Michael Bratman. In these theories, every action has a primary chain, or trunk, and zero or more secondary chains, or side effects. As he explains, “The primary chain consists of the sequence of events that are causally necessary for the achievement of the goal.” In the footbridge case, the action is pushing the fat man onto the tracks which stops the trolley and achieves the goal of saving the five. That action is on the primary chain, and triggers our modular myopic response. In the switch case, the switching is the action which diverts the train and saves the five; the killing of the fat man is a side effect, on a secondary chain, and doesn’t trigger the modular myopic reaction, which is why most people are comfortable with it. As Greene further explains, we recoil at pushing the fat man off the bridge because he becomes the means; in the switch case killing him is ‘merely’ a side effect. Devising ever more targeted experiments, Greene came upon one he calls the loop case which seems to fit the pattern of the footbridge where the fat man is used as the means to stop the trolley (he is on a loop, if he weren’t there the train would continue back to the main track and kill the five), but subjects don’t recoil at the action. Greene sees this as evidence of the applicability of Mikhail’s theories to moral judgement. What he posits is that the loop case involves more multiple causal chains, and our automatic judgement is too ‘myopic’ to be up to the task, and so doesn’t kick in with revulsion at the idea of using the fat man as the means to save the five.

When we children were watching The Fugitive and The Rifleman, the immaturity of our brains and the paucity of our life experiences forced us to deal only with the primary path response, unable to take in secondary and more nuanced paths. This seems analogous to what Greene considers in the context of moral psychology. Moreover, it seems related to political decisions we make. If I raise taxes, revenue will increase (ignoring the secondary path where the economy suffers from individuals having less money to spend); if I have a gun, I can better protect my family from intruders (ignoring the secondary path of the dangers of accidental deaths from firearms around the house). In Anti-Obamacare ads backfire: How right-wing TV attacks may have helped ACA, Simon Maloy sees evidence that all of the anti-Obamacare attacks not only increased awareness of the act and may have led more people to enroll, but by convincing people that Obamacare was doomed, may have encouraged people to buy now before the benefit goes away. The creators of the ads only saw the primary path, not the multitude of secondary paths and how they might influence people’s actions.  Elias Isquith thinks the religious right’s enthusiasm for the Hobby Lobby precedent and their hope to use it to extend discrimination against the LGBT community will boomerang on them. Having failed at getting laws passed in legislatures in Kansas, Idaho, Mississippi, and Arizona, they see hope in implementing them by judicial fiat. As they might say, “I see before me the direct path by which I will enable our society to discriminate against LGBT people in the name of religious freedom, and I’m going to pursue it.” But Isquith thinks the alternate chains they aren’t seeing will cause many Americans to think of “religious liberty” as mere dog whistle for discrimination, and turn against the notion of religious liberty itself. Perhaps I’m taking Greene’s work (and that of Mikhail and those who preceded him) as too much of a metaphor, but it seems to me there’s more to explore here.

Much has been made of how little rational we truly are. Dan Ariely has written Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, Daniel Kahneman has shown how subject we are to fast thinking, and George Lakoff relates how we don’t respond to reason when considering political choices. This can lead to a rather pessimistic view of humans and our potential. However, there are several counter trends. Joshua Greene shows that we can turn our deliberative thinking on, apply it to moral choices, and create a more utilitarian society, where more benefits flow to more people. Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature details the decline of violence over time, and associates at least some of it with education and our ability to think at a higher level of abstraction and apply reason to our lives, much like recognizing the secondary chains in our potential actions. And the whole American Experiment is based on a nation born of ideas and of reason, unlike any that preceded it, as historian Gordon Wood delineates in his numerous books. And so far it has turned out pretty well.

Unlike in Gil Cunningham’s sphere, in the 15th and 16th centuries, inspired by an expose of witches called Malleus Maleficarum written by two monks, French and German witch hunters killed between 60,000 and 100,000 accused witches, according to Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker cites two pressures which contributed to the waning of superstitious killing, one “an increased valuation of human life and happiness”; the other a recognition that some things happen due to “impersonal physical forces and raw chance,” or as Pinker more succinctly puts, a recognition that “shit happens.”

In Gil Cunningham’s 15th century Scotland, someone needed to be found guilty of the man-in-the-peat’s death, and found soon regardless of true guilt, in order to appease the forces that be and restore order. These views are not far distant from a past where human sacrifice was formally engaged in, in order to appease the gods and maintain the order of the universe. It was also convenient that the “guilty witch” in the story was part of a different community, a different tribe if you will, so that the guilt and punishment could be made to fall on others. Since those days, there has been a dramatic decrease in violence, as Pinker details, consonant with changing views and social structures. As society has moved forward, extended commerce has made partners out of potential enemies, and literacy and the application of reason have extended our understanding and allowed us better to take the perspectives of people unlike ourselves.

Still, it is often hard to break free from the notion that there is a cause for everything. Nicholas Wade, in his book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History argues that Europeans developed more open nation-states starting around A.D. 1000, that this caused selection for genes in the population which promoted more trust and social openness, which reinforced the ability to build more trusting and hard-working cultures and nations. This genetic-social development did not take place in Asia and Africa, leaving Europeans with genes better suited to a successful modern society. In his review, David Dobbs takes issue. The sentence which most caught my attention was, “While warning us to avoid filtering science through politics, he draws heavily from conservative historians who minimize the roles played by political power, geographic advantage, momentum, disease and dumb luck.” “Dumb luck.” “The impersonal forces of nature.” Not everything that happens is pre-ordained. Wade, the reviewer might say, is stuck on causation. “The result,” the reviewer asserts, “is a deeply flawed, deceptive, and dangerous book.”

So how does big data fit into this picture? Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier repeatedly make the point in Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, that applying big data to problems allows us to come up with meaningful and actionable correlations independent of any concern for causation. This takes us a further step away from the idea that there is some supernatural reason for everything. Not only are there “impersonal physical forces” responsible for some of the things which happen in life, but even when there is a cause, it’s often not worth our while to seek it, since we can accomplish so much merely by applying data and discovering correlations.

Pinker often picks up on the theme, in one case when he investigates and finds that wars break out randomly and follow a power-law distribution. Power law distributions are interesting because they look the same over a vast range of values rather than heaping around a particular set of values as with a bell curve. Examining war in such a statistical fashion could allow us to discover things we might not have otherwise if we merely examined them in a historical/political context. Some of the items that Pinker notes are that the same dynamics which apply to smaller engagements, threats, backing down, bluffing, engaging, escalating, fighting on, or surrendering, apply to larger engagements. Also, since power law distributions have long tails, meaning in this case that larger wars are less frequent but not astronomically unlikely, and that a conflagration much larger than two world wars we have experienced is not out of the question.

Unlike the examples in Big Data, where the goal is merely to find correlations that are actionable, Pinker does wish to understand the dynamics, from psychology, politics, and technology, which would cause wars to break out on the power law distribution, notes work in other fields on similar investigations, but admits that there is not enough data on wars to come to an answer.

The Big Data authors are not unaware of the dangers of big data. If we can predict, we can take measures to minimize or maximize the outcomes we are predicting. Much as in Minority Report, we could predict who will commit crimes in advance and incarcerate them preventatively. That this counters the notion of free will is certainly a concern. It also feels spookily like knowing who’s a witch and responsible for the dead body in the peat. Acting on our predictions is much like assuming causation and returning us to a situation where shit doesn’t happen, but all is determinable.

The world has gotten less violent, in part because, recognizing that the impersonal forces of the universe are responsible for much of what happens, we don’t feel as much need to seek retribution when bad things happen. This signals an increase in the level of abstraction through which we view the world, and signals a turn away from emphasizing causation, and toward one on correlation. This is the foundation for the big data revolution which Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier describe, and is part of the foundation of Pinker’s approach to analyzing war and peace.

Human beings believe things for which they have insufficient evidence, or which are simply untrue. While we believe, particularly in Western cultures, in an Enlightenment view of reason, that objectivity is crucial, and that we can exercise reason and objectivity, we find this very difficult to do and tend instead to decide matters more on the basis of our biases. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman posits two thought pathways which he calls fast and slow. Many others, independently or following Kahneman, have described similar dual pathways in our thinking. In Moral Tribes, Joshua Greene, in analogous fashion, describes a dual process theory of moral judgement. The one pathway, like Kahnemann’s “fast”, is emotional and intuitive; the other rational and calculated. It takes effort to step back into the rational mode when making moral choices (in fact, sometimes our intuitive choices are the best; knowing when to switch to rational mode is key to making the best choices). Reinforcing this dual-path understanding, J. David Smith of the University of Buffalo has found the strongest evidence yet that humans have distinct cognitive systems by which they conceptualize the world, one implicit, one explicit.

We tend to be more heavily influenced by the implicit, emotional, fast pathway. This reinforces our biases, and leads to being heavily influenced by the irrational, as proposed by Dan Ariely. George Lakoff believes that we live our lives and process the information we receive in terms of central metaphors, most notably the “strict father” and “nurturant parent” modes. He derides Democrats, for example, for refusing to acknowledge that political discourse is more heavily processed by these metaphors than by our reasoning faculties. Drew Westen similarly schools Democrats to tell stories which touch people’s emotions, this being a more effective tool for communication than resorting to reason and logical argumentation.

These are all part and parcel of the “How politics makes us stupid” syndrome. We are subject to what is variously called motivated reasoning and identity-protective cognition, where challenging one’s opinions with logic and facts leads to the backfire effect, where we dig in our heels and become even more sure of our views when presented with contradictory information. So is there anything we can do to keep the discussion open? As Maria Konnikova describes it, Brendan Nyhan, professor of political science at Dartmouth, performed some experiments to see what elements of a pro-vaccination campaign would most effectively overcome opposition. None of the ways of presenting information, including stories designed to touch emotions, changed any anti-vaccine outlooks. Once we have a belief, even a false one, it is difficult to dislodge it. As Dan Kahan has found with identity-protective cognition, challenging our beliefs is challenging our self-worth. So Nyhan used a technique pioneered by Claude Steele to have individuals perform exercises in self-affirmation, and discovered that individuals were then less resistant to the challenging information. Having a better sense of self gives us confidence to grapple with opposing information. Taking a different approach, Yale University’s Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil, over a decade ago, came at the matter with what is called “the illusion of explanatory depth.” Humans, it seems, are very confident in their understanding of how things work…until asked to explain. Philip Fernback of the University of Colorado found that when individuals who had strong opinions on matters of political importance, Iran sanctions, healthcare, and climate change, were asked to give reasons for their opinions, their opinions hardened. But when asked to explain in a detailed way how a policy works or how the consequences of a policy would play out, in step-by-step detail, the individuals were stymied, and as a consequence their opinions moderated.

If people having a debate on issues can start by affirming the self-value of their adversaries, and ask for explanations of how their views actually work, they can set up the parameters for a more reasonable discussion.

Which is where Wittgenstein comes in. If rather than presenting a hard-fast view of human experience as he had set out in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus one sees philosophy as more of a communication in which individuals of potentially differing opinions seek mutual understanding,  a true conversation can take place. Levi Asher imagines that this mindset can apply to the more political issues of our day as well. Of course, if we wish to foster an openness to differing opinions in those with whom we engage, we must also be open to other opinions not currently our own. The end result might be a rapprochement of our differing opinions; at least we might have a more modest view of the rightness of our views, as might those we are debating with, and a reduction in antagonism.

Katerina once told me that democracy is a deception that the powerful offer to trick people into believing they have a voice in their government. She was a left-wing student of mine when I was teaching high school in Greece almost 40 years ago, and I have always remembered not only her words, but the matter-of-fact way she expressed them.

In truth, the people seem to have little influence in the policies of their government. Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University have recently published a paper in which they summarize, “Our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts…Policy making is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans…America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”

To many conservatives, the US Constitution and free enterprise are inextricably intertwined. An example of a succinct description of this came in response to a question on Yahoo Answers, What kind of economic system does the United States Constitution establish for the United States? One answer:

None. 

However, it does protect our individual liberties, which is the basis of Capitalism. 

So, although the Constitution does not say the word “capitalism”, it clearly protects individual liberty and restricts government powers, which is pretty much the definition of Capitalism.

A more involved answer, again at Yahoo! Answers, came in response to the question How does constitution protect the free enterprise? The response:

The Tenth (sic Fifth) Amendment requires that property may only be taken by the government after due process and with just compensation. The Supreme Court ruled long ago that “property” in this clause means both real and personal property, plus the rights to receive such for any legal reason. 

 It follows that the right of a businessman to receive the profits of his endeavor, if the business is legal, are protected by the Constitution and that he and he alone has the right to sell, modify, or dispose of his enterprise. 

 Thus, capitalism is indirectly protected in the Constitution. 

 In his book, Prophets, Principles and National Survival, Jerreld L. Newquist writes, “How many of the Latter-day Saints truly believe in the Constitution of the United States? That Constitution stands for free initiative. That is free agency. In a business sense we have spoken of it as free private enterprise.”

The National Center for Constitutional Studies puts it this way,

America’s Constitution did not mention freedom of enterprise per se, but it did set up a system of laws to secure individual liberty and freedom of choice in keeping with Creator-endowed natural rights. Out of these, free enterprise flourished naturally. Even though the words “free enterprise’ are not in the Constitution, the concept was uppermost in the minds of the Founders, typified by the remarks of Jefferson and Madison as quoted above. Already, in 1787, Americans were enjoying the rewards of individual enterprise and free markets. Their dedication was to securing that freedom for posterity.

In his book, How to Read the Federalist Papers, Anthony A. Peacock makes much of the notion expressed in the Federalist Papers that it is only as a commercial republic that a republic as large as the original thirteen colonies could survive as a republic, since all other examples of republics were of limited territory, mostly city-states.

Listening to conservative talk radio, we hear adherence to the Constitution, and promoting free enterprise, as part and parcel of what has made this country great (until, of course, the current administration came into power).

In From Commercial Republic to Plutocracy at The Christendom Review, Paul Cella makes both the case for free enterprise at the heart of the nation that the Constitution created, but also since the recent economic troubles, as a scourge which threatens the republic. “The unique place reserved for free enterprise in America, in other words, acquires constitutional significance in The Federalist; and it cannot be doubted that this work, above all others, provides the interpretative key for our constitutional order.” But in the wake of the recent recession, he continues,

In a word, the answer to the hard questions may be that we have had the misfortune to witness the degradation of Hamilton’s noble work, his painstaking formation of a commercial republic characterized by liberty, into a much baser form of political arrangement: plutocracy, an aristocracy of alienated wealth, characterized by insolent speculative gain. Instead of patriotic statesmanship grounding prosperity in the security of property, we shall have idle elitism, grounding narrow interest in sophistication and the abstraction of property. I leave it to the reader to judge whether such an environment is conducive to liberty.

Cue Piketty. I’ll summarize Robert M. Solow’s summary of his work. Piketty traces total private and public wealth over time and geograpy. He calculates a wealth-income ratio so that he can compare nations in different times and places. A high ratio indicates wealth inequality, and stood at 7 in Europe in the 1700’s and 1800’s (using France and England as examples). It fell to around 2.5 and 3 in those countries after World War II, but is now back up to 5 and 6. (In the U.S. the trajectory is different, starting low at about 3 in 1770, rising to 5.5 around 1930, down to 4 after the war and back up to 4.5 now. That inequality was low during the time that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were promulgated should head off any suggestions that the Founding Fathers lived in a time of inequality and were comfortable with it). Piketty predicts this wealth-income ratio will rise to 6.5 by the end of this century, putting us back at the levels last seen over a hundred years ago, effectively wiping out modern trends toward a large and prosperous middle class.

If an economy grows at a certain rate, and invests its capital at a proportional rate, the wealth-income, or capital-income ratio will stay stable. But Piketty sees growth as slowing in the rest of the century, while investment stays steady at current rates. This leads to capital becoming a larger part of overall wealth, and raises this capital-income ratio, to 6.5 in Piketty’s prediction.

But capital also produces income by having a rate of return, which has been rather steady at 3-6% over time and geography. Growth in the economy is dependent on growth in productivity, and wages have not kept up with this growth in productivity, meaning that wages are a smaller part of the national income, with returns on capital taking a greater proportion. More capital, growing faster than wages and taking a greater proportion of income, means that those with capital take an increasingly large share of national income and those who get wages a smaller share. If most capital is owned by few people, wealth becomes ever more concentrated in fewer hands. In the U.S. more than continental Europe, this inequality is exacerbated by a recent trend of rising wage income of top earners and stagnant income of the rest of wage earners. Not only do the wealthy get a larger share of the national income because their income comes from increasing accumulations of capital rather than from wages, but a small proportion of individuals are getting super salaries and taking an increasing proportion of the wage income as well.

Solow sums up the worst case:

So Piketty’s foreboding vision of the twenty-first century remains to be dealt with: slower growth of population and productivity, a rate of return on capital distinctly higher than the growth rate, the wealth-income ratio rising back to nineteenth-century heights, probably a somewhat higher capital share in national income, an increasing dominance of inherited wealth over earned wealth, and a still wider gap between the top incomes and all the others.

Piketty sees rising inequality between the wealthy and the wage earners. In the U.S., Citizen’s United opened the doors for more corporate money to flow into and influence elections; McCutcheon v. FEC increased the amounts that donors can give to individual candidates. And even before this money started flowing into election campaigns, Gilens and Page observed that policy follows money, that policies favored by wealthy people (favoring wealthy people) are more likely to get passed than those favored by majorities of the common people.

Many, particularly conservatives, see American democracy and capitalism as inextricably intertwined and at the foundation of our nation. But the story that Piketty’s data tells shows that capitalism leads to oligarchy, unless our political choices redirect it toward more equality. But as Gilens and Page note and Supreme Court decisions reinforce, the wealthy are now more in charge of our political choices than the majority is.

Democracy is truly endangered.