The Straight Line to Corporate Control of America: A proposition

Looking back to the origins of American Democracy, we find a straight line from Hobbes through Locke to Jefferson. Here the idea that authority comes from "the people" leads to government "of the people." But what compels this idea in history to begin with? Neibuhr puts his finger on it: the rise of a class of wealthy individuals from outside the gentry. Money seeks power. In fact, despite, the ostensible structure, this pivot in history had nothing to do with empowering the people, nor does it in fact do so. That was never the goal. Some scraps of power were ceded to the people temporarily to keep up appearances. But "the people" were invented as a justification to seize power from the old rich and pass it on to the new rich. The compelling force was incipient capitalism, for which philosophy created a scaffold. Its logical end game is being played out here and now. The people have always been a nuisance to wealth. Both Republicans and Democrats (though the former more egregiously than the latter) have become primarily the tools of the super rich, government has increasingly become the regulating body of, by, and for the super rich. And, as evidenced by the passage of the 2017 tax bill, they can now (helped by the political tricks of gerrymandering, repressive voter i.d. laws, the ending of the Voting Rights Act, and the "Citizens United" decision) afford to circumvent the interests of "the people" with impunity. This, and not Marx's utopianism, is the final stage of capitalism. While the (presumably) billionaire president and his cronies mouth concern for those left behind (which somehow for them translates exclusively to the white working class) in fact everything they do is intended to leave everyone behind, puppets of the logical of late capitalism who are at the same time the sole beneficiaries of that logic.