In the 1780s the so-called Founding Fathers created a Constitution rooted in the principles of federalism. In theory, a federalist system features (1) a unified national government with limited powers, (2) a strong system of checks and balances to reign in abuses of executive, legislative, and judicial power, and (3) autonomous states with a great deal of freedom to run their affairs as they see fit. Looks great on paper, right?
The authors of the Federalist Papers (James Madison, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton) insisted that a strong national government was needed to protect democracy and individual freedoms. The Anti-Federalists (most notably Patrick Henry and George Mason) argued that a national government would inevitably suppress states' rights and individual freedoms. They also worried that presidents would over time become tyrannical monarchs as bad as King George III. Madison, Jay, Hamilton and others successfully persuaded enough states to accept the Constitution and its vision of federalism, but the Anti-Federalists succeeded in getting the Bill of Rights attached to it.
You would have to be willfully obtuse to argue that the powers of the federal government have ever been "limited" in a meaningful sense. In 1787, when Revolutionary War Veteran Daniel Shays led a western Massachusetts rebellion sparked by high rates of poverty, farm foreclosures, and unfair taxes, Madison and other former rebels concluded that a strong national government was needed to put down such unrest. The debate over federal power has never been about whether or not the feds should wield power, but about how that power should be wielded and on whose behalf.
As a Rhetorician, one of my main academic interests is the language used to justify the exertion of federal power. A major principle of modern Rhetoric as a field of study is that the behavior of individuals and institutions is correlated with the narratives (i.e. stories) that they construct, accept as true, and preach.
So if it is true that the federal government exerts extraordinary powers reaching into every part of our lives, it behooves us to understand what stories the representatives of that institution are governed (no pun intended) by. My argument is that at its best, the federal government is guided by a "for the people" narrative that challenges and often forces states to make the privileges of American citizenship available to everyone. When the federal government is at its worst--which is unfortunately a period we are living through right now--it is guided by an authoritarian narrative that widens divisions between people while privileging the desires of the few over the needs of the many. This latter narrative of federal power is essentially what is meant by "oligarchy."
Allow me to provide two examples from our history when the federal government, as represented by leaders empowered to make transformative policy changes, was guided by the for the people narrative. They are the Civil War period and the New Deal era of the 1930s.
The Federal Narrative In the Civil War Period: From March 4, 1789 (when the Constitution went into effect) until 1860, federal power in relation to slavery was exerted in a mostly shameful manner. Powerful members of Congress, federal judges, and most presidents of the period--even those who thought slavery would and should eventually come to an end--could not accept the abolitionist movement's narrative of the slave as a human being whose oppression required a second American revolution to right a monstrous wrong. The majority of feds in Washington spent decades appeasing, enabling, and compromising with slavery interests.
Even Abraham Lincoln, who campaigned in 1860 on a platform of keeping the union together--and who justified the Civil War strictly on those grounds for most of 1861and1862--only slowly came around to articulating federal power as a force for emancipation. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 represented a transformative moment for American federalism, and contributed to empowering the "Radical Republican" Congress to successfully pass the Reconstruction Amendments (13th, 14th, 15th) that were rooted in a narrative of granting American citizenship--and the rights and privileges that come with it--to African Americans.
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| The Emancipation Proclamation transformed the idea of federal power in America upon its official release in January of 1863. For the first time, the federal government would take the side of an oppressed group. President Lincoln released a preliminary version in September of 1862. |
Sadly, the radical Republican reforms faced a wicked backlash, and the United States entered a long period of Jim Crow laws and Robber Baron takeover of government that put federal power once again at the service of racists and plutocrats. The most noble leaders of the post-Civil War progressive movement, such as Wisconsin's Fighting Bob LaFollette, spent most of their careers expressing dissent against a federal government aggressively enabling segregation, child labor, oppression of women, and imperialist adventures abroad. It was not until the 1930s, in reaction to a brutal economic depression, that the federal government acted according to the precepts of a more humane narrative.
The Federal Narrative in the New Deal Era:
Most Americans believe the United States has experienced one "Great Depression," the one that started in 1929 and lasted officially until the United States entered World War II in 1941. But there were actually two great depressions that preceded it: The Panic of 1837 (which lasted well into the 1840s), and the Panic of 1893 (which lasted for most of the remainder of the decade.). In those earlier depressions, the federal government response was limited and ineffective, largely because the feds were controlled by a narrative that conceived of direct assistance to the unemployed and poor as anti-American.
The situation became so desperate in the 1890s that Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey led the first ever march on Washington, demanding federal intervention in the economy including direct assistance to the unemployed. "Coxey's Army" was the best known of many popular uprisings designed to push the federal government to DO SOMETHING to alleviate the suffering across the land. In 1894 after Coxey's Army had marched 400 miles and reached Washington, Jacob Coxey was arrested for walking on Capitol grass and thus could not deliver his speech. Fifty years later Coxey delivered that speech on the steps of the US Congress. It challenged the federal government to help the oppressed:
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| In 1894 Coxey's Army marched 400 miles to Washington, D.C. to petition the government for unemployment relief. Such a demand was radical at the time, in part because the dominant narrative of the federal government was that it could not be "limited" if it actually intervened in the economy to help suffering people. Coxey's activism was vital in challenging the dominant narrative around government action, and helped create an environment that would make the New Deal possible decades later. |
We are here to petition for legislation which will furnish employment for every man willing and able to work; for legislation which will bring universal prosperity and emancipate our beloved country from from financial bondage to the descendants of King George . . . We have come here through toil and weary marches, through storms and tempests, over mountains, and amid the trials of poverty and distress, to lay our grievances at the doors of our National legislature and ask them in the name of Him whose banners we bear, in the name of Him who plead for the poor and the oppressed, that they should heed the voice of despair and distress that is now coming up from every section of our country, that they should consider the conditions of the starving unemployed of our land, and enact such laws as will given them employment, bring happier conditions to the people, and the smile of contentment to our citizens.
The narrative of a federal government "for the people" favored by Coxey, labor activists, and other social justice advocates finally took partial hold of the federal government in the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal not only ushered in new social welfare policies (Social Security, unemployment insurance, the right to unionize, child labor restrictions, etc.), but just as important, a new story about government. On October 13, 1932 in a campaign address delivered less than a month before his election to the presidency, FDR laid out a vision of federal government responsibility that represented a break from the past:
In broad terms, I assert that modern society, acting through its government, owes the definite obligation to prevent the starvation or the dire want of any of its fellowmen and women who try to maintain themselves but cannot. To these unfortunate citizens aid must be extended by the government, not as a matter of charity but as a matter of social duty . . . In the words of our Democratic national platform, the federal government has 'a continuous responsibility for human welfare, especially for the protection of children.' That duty and responsibility the federal government should carry out promptly, fearlessly, and generously."
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| Democrats wondering how to counter the reactionary policies of Presidents Musk and Trump would do well to remember FDR's warning: "We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests." |
It's hard to exaggerate how radical it was for a mainstream politician to express that vision of a federal government. When FDR took office, he acted on his campaign platform with mixed success as the federal courts--still wedded to a narrative that saw direct participation of the federal government in the economy as unconstitutional--struck down a number of initiatives. Ultimately the courts relented, and we entered a sixty-year period which featured many policy disagreements about the federal role in our lives (especially during the Reagan years of the 1980s), but general acceptance of the narrative that says the federal government does have some responsibility to help meet the needs of all citizens. That narrative begins to break down, in my view, when President Bill Clinton in his January of 1996 State of the Union speech--clearly concerned about his reelection chances later that year--declared "the era of big government is over."
Clinton won reelection, but since the mid-1990s we have seen the narrative of a federal government that exists to protect and uplift all citizens reduced to a talking point in Democratic Party fundraising pitches. The Republican Party, never enamored with the expansive federal government narrative to begin with, now openly embraces a return to a pre-New Deal vision of federal power. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are in many ways the inevitable result of years of anti-government propaganda that naturally appeals to the millions of people who struggle to make ends meet, and Trump/Musk also benefit from the failure of social justice advocates to make an effective case FOR government. In the New York Times, M. Gessen expresses the situation clearly:
It is not enough to say that Trump and his crony Elon Musk are staging a coup, though they are. Many of the people who voted for Trump want to see him smash what he has successfully framed as a useless, wasteful government. It is not enough to say that Trump is destroying American democracy. Many of the people who voted for him did so because they have long felt that the system as it is constituted doesn’t represent their interests — and both Trump and Musk have argued that they are wresting democracy back from unelected bureaucrats. It is not enough to say that Trump’s actions have caused a constitutional crisis or that his executive orders may violate laws passed by Congress. Many of the people who voted for Trump longed to see their frustrations addressed by decisive, spectacular action, which he is delivering.Not that defending institutions, norms and laws is wrong. It is essential. Contrary to popular opinion, it is institutions, norms and laws — not elections — that constitute a functioning democracy. The mechanisms Trump is destroying are certainly imperfect, but they are also inspired, sometimes brilliantly devised and almost always beautiful in concept, for they are the mechanisms of self-government, the products of deliberation and collective action, the embodiment of our obligations to one another.
It is hard to imagine an American politician saying something like that today. If one did, he would sound like a lunatic, or a pious academic whom Trump would Marx-bait. The idea that government is fundamentally suspect has been around for so long, has become so widely held — and has had such a dumbing-down effect on public conversation — that a full-throated defense of the ideals and institutions of American government seems cringe-worthy.
In short, Presidents Trump and Musk have won the narrative war--at least for now. Our federal government has been taken over, quite literally, by forces that have contempt for the idea that government exists to empower the people at-large while reigning in the oligarchs. It's not surprising that Trump expresses admiration for the William McKinley era, an era that saw Robber Barons plunder the federal treasury while preaching "self-reliance" to the unruly masses. An era in which government mocked and marginalized Jacob Coxey instead of meeting its duty to respond to the cries of the masses that he represented. The opponents of Trump and Musk can hope that the courts find a way to constrain them, or that public pressure on the Congress might push the Republicans to restore some checks and balances to our federal system. Those and other measures to counter Trumpism and Muskism are surely necessary.
