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 He saw our promiscuous flag-waving as one way of taking democracy for granted. “You take a monarchy for granted, or a fascist state. You have to.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=17}} Compulsive flag-waving is no better than “compulsive adoration of our leaders,” which adoration Mailer calls “poison” for democracies.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=85}} Likewise, if you love your country indiscriminately, “critical distinctions begin to go. And democracy depends on those distinctions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=108}} You can be patriotic, you can love your country, you can put your life at risk defending it, and you can still be critical of it. It is precisely because democracy is “beautiful” and “noble” that it is always endangered, always “perishable.” “I think the natural government for most people, given the uglier depths of human nature, is fascism. . . . Democracy is a state of grace attained only by those countries that have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|pp=70–71}} One of the greatest threats to our democracy is the “mega-corporation,” ever doing its “best to appropriate our thwarted dreams with their elephantiastical conceits.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=75}} This threat is a reference to what Mailer has been identifying since the mid-sixties as “corporate totalitarianism.”
+The fragility theme is also central to Mailer’s dialogues with his son John in ''The Big Empty''. Again, fascism is a palpable danger, but if it does come to America it will not be comparable to what happened in Germany during the 1930s, as much to Mailer’s annoyance people keep suggesting. It will, instead, approach slowly, won’t be called fascism, won’t have party men in uniform. And we will allow it to develop here ourselves, whether we are Left or Right, if we keep acting stupidly.{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|pp=100–101}} We seem too ready not to investigate the difficult questions but search for quick answers, and patriotism “gobbled up, sentimentalized, and thereby abased is one of the most powerful single forces to proliferate stupidity.”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=98}} We have already made the shift from a country in love with “freedom and creativity (in constant altercation with those other Americans who want rule and order) into a country that’s now much more interested in power.”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=123}} He sees ominous signs in the collaborations of church (fundamentalism), state, and corporation. Capitalism per se is not the problem. Small businesses can be creative, useful, and don’t seek vast power. It is the marriage of the state with corporate capitalism or finance capitalism that poses the threat.{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|pp=211–212}} And corporations and their greed in turn are handmaidens to empire.
+It was John Adams, perhaps America’s first “left-conservative,” (followed by Thoreau and, closer to Mailer’s generation, Edward Abbey and Christopher Hitchens, for example) who was most attuned among the Founders, as Joseph Ellis points out, to the fragility of the democracy they were struggling to create. “In every society known to man,” Adams wrote in ''A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States'' in 1787, “an aristocracy has risen up in the course of time, consisting of a few rich and honorable families who have united with each other against both the people and the first magistrate.” As he would write that same year to Thomas Jefferson, who had a sunnier, European Enlightenment view of human nature, “You are afraid of the one, I, of the few.”{{sfn|Ellis|2018|p=87}} It was not a monarchy citizens of the new republic should fear most; it was oligarchy.
+Ellis points out that Adams questioned certain beliefs of the French Enlightenment—belief in the preternatural wisdom of the people; the assumption that human beings are inherently rational creatures, the assumption that America was immune to class distinctions so common in Europe. No less a patriot than Jefferson, Adams nonetheless wanted as much as possible a healthy skepticism built into the constitution that would spark the vigilance of future generations as they adapted to maintain the best ideals of a living document. No threats were greater than the ruthless amassing of fortunes and the human passion for adulation or fame. In his 2018 book ''Rush'', Stephen Fried juxtaposes correspondence among John and Abigail Adams and Benjamin Rush between 1790 and 1801 that demonstrates their sense that a “system of influence bordering on corruption,” as Rush put it, was already creeping into their new republic.{{sfn|Fried|2018|pp=327, 411}}
+Adams seems to have retained a residual fondness for the Platonic/Socratic Guardians of the state, whose philosophically ''disinterested'' leadership is only for the good of the state and its citizenry. But upon reflection, Adams must have come to suspect that such higher polity was nowhere, never was, and never would be. For without attainable recourse to Platonic Aristos (with their “better and more complete education” and “minds that are awake” and who would never seek political office), Adams’ default became republican democracy. Democracy with protections against the excesses of the citizenry itself as well as their political leaders: three branches of government, a bi-cameral and representational Congress, a free press, etc. On the other hand, Adams’ fears better reflect Plato’s more realistic fears, as expressed in his Socratic dialogues: the treacheries of either tyranny (authoritarian rule above or in defiance of the law by one man’s brutal self-interest) or oligarchy (see American democracy, circa 2020).
+Madison, the first author of the constitution as the founders were moving away from a Confederacy toward a Nation, also saw that only a federal government might have the strength and courage to restrain economic elites, as well as inadequately informed but passionate majorities, from controlling power for their own purposes. George Washington agreed, sovereignty needed to shift from state to federal level. Jefferson acknowledged that only federal sovereignty might suffice, but he insisted that the Bill of Rights and the framing of the constitution assured what government could not do by way of restricting basic freedoms. In fact, history would demonstrate that the final documents have led to a dialectical exchange on many fronts between the two levels of government, but as Ellis points out, the Founders believed they were creating a living Constitution, adaptable (with difficulty) over time, not an inflexible, dead document.{{sfn|Ellis|2018|pp=141–142, 154–159}}{{efn|Ellis’s chapter on “Immaculate Misconceptions” is a masterpiece of historical reasoning that demonstrates the corruptions that have impinged on the Supreme Court by special interests who use the mis-named “originalist” justices for their own purposes and against ideas embodied in the Framers’ founding documents and dialogues, see 151–170. See also Noah Feldman’s ''The Three Lives of James Madison'' (2017) for another look at Madison’s view, through a process of philosophical struggles of his own and with his peers, of a “living constitution” balancing federal sovereignty with certain rights of the states.}}
+{{* * *}}
+Economic inequality, then, the Founders saw as one of the chief dangers to our democracy. Both Mailer and Ellis develop this theme at considerable length. Mailer in ''Why Are We at War?'' focuses on the conflict between our egalitarian ideals and the corporate takeover of America.
+{{Cquote|Nobody ever said . . . that a democracy should be a place where the richest people . . . earn a thousand times more than the poorest. . . . The people who feel this lack of balance probably make up two thirds of the country, but they don’t want to think about it. They can’t do a damn thing about it. We don’t run our country. Corporate power is running this country now. . . . If we have a depression or fall into desperate economic times, I don’t know what’s going to hold the country together. There’s too much anger here, too much ruptured vanity, too much shock, too much identity crisis. And worst of all too much patriotism.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|pp=104–105}}}}
+If Mailer were right, we dodged an asteroid when we climbed out of the 2008–9 Wall Street meltdown, but he foresaw some of the angry forces behind the 2016 election.
+''The Big Empty'' takes this theme further. Mailer sounds the note early in this book, reminding us that democracy is the greatest of all experiments, and as such must improve or get worse. Capitalism may be stronger than socialism due to capitalism’s creativity, but the “foreseeable price” is that “greed becomes paramount.” For all its potential creativity, capitalism also tends to dumb down the populace, making us less civilized, less cultivated.{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|pp=10–11}} Mailer echoes here a theme in a lifetime of work by historians Charles and Mary Beard: the history of America is the history of the struggle between capitalism and democracy. Mailer describes this struggle as a war between liberals and conservatives. And the left is losing because they are only beginning to figure out that “they can’t beat the right with intelligent argument. They need punch phrases that get to the heart of the average American.” The right would like nothing more than to see protests and anarchy in the streets as self-justification for the right to advance its causes.{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|pp=7, 16–17}}
+Mailer argues that true conservatives, as opposed to “Flag Conservatives,” feel in accord with the left concerning the corporate stifling of our lives economically, aesthetically, culturally, and spiritually. Corporations are ''The Big Empty'', but they have “massive complacency about their own corporate virtues,” and our politicians have become their handmaidens and bodyguards.{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|pp=53–54}} The struggle against the corporation is profound, and it would take at least fifty years to prevail in such a revolution, Mailer says. We will first have to release ourselves from the economic, political, and spiritual brainwashing that is far superior and more subtle than that of the crude old Soviets. He then quotes Hermann Goering on the ease with which leaders can manipulate a population toward any policy—all you have to do is convince the people they are under attack, that the pacifists and naysayers are unpatriotic, and the people will follow, in Goering’s words, “whether it is a democracy, or a fascist government, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=60}}
+The capitalism of small businesses, however, may be a resource in the battle against corporate power, Mailer suggests. The men and women running small businesses are always taking their chances, leading an existential life, gambling with their wit, energy, and ideas for what will work in the marketplace. The small business owner “may be a sonofabitch, but at least he is out there in the middle of life.”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|pp=55–57}} Small business owners are not corporate executives ensconced in a political protection racket, coddled in their shimmering Xanadus. At one point in the dialogue, Mailer’s son John asks whether corporate CEOs and their peers can really be untouched by the economic and environmental crises they enable. After all, they too have children and grandchildren. Mailer responds, “You’re not old enough yet to know how various and creative are the self-exculpations in the mentality of the prosperous. They find more ways of forgiving what they’re doing than you can take account of.”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=109}} During those last four years of his life Mailer did of course go beyond ''Why Are We at War?'' and ''The Big Empty'' to further express his concerns publicly. One example, a sort of companion piece, is a long essay appearing in ''Playboy'' magazine’s 50th anniversary issue, where Mailer presented a series of “Immodest Proposals” expanding the ideas presented in his two final political books, a sort of definitive statement on economic inequity.
+{{cquote|Perhaps the time has come for Americans to stop worrying about the welfare of the rich. For the last two decades, the assumption has grown more powerful each year that unless the very well-to-do are encouraged to become wealthier, our economy will falter. Well, we have allowed them to get wealthier and wealthier and then even wealthier, and the economy is faltering. Apparently, the economic lust of the 1990s has unbalanced the springs. Might it not be unnatural, even a little peculiar, to concern ourselves so much about the needs of the rich. . . .They know how to make money. They do not need incentives. Making money is not only their gift but their vital need. That is their vision of spiritual reward. Not only is their measure of self attached directly to the volume of their gains, but the majority of them know how to stay rich. They are highly qualified to take care of themselves in any society, be it socialist, fascist, banana republic, or chaotic. Whether they live in a corporate economy relatively free of government or with a larger government presence, they will prosper. They can withstand an American safety net. And they may even sleep better.{{sfn|Mailer|2004|pp=90–94, 198, 266, 268, 270, 272}}}}
+Ellis takes up the topic of enormous economic inequality chiefly in his “then” chapter on John Adams and the subsequent “now” chapter entitled “Our Gilded Age.” Adams was one Founder who saw inequality as embedded in American society. Unlike Jefferson who thought an agrarian, decentralized polity was America’s future, Adams was both more prescient and more skeptical about human nature. (If Jefferson provided our democratic ideals; Adams tempered our ideals by pushing our noses closer to harsh historical realities). Adams agreed with Locke that political power derives from the people, but he was less reverential than Jefferson about popular sovereignty—despotism could arise from many sources, popular, oligarchic, or monarchial. Our passions control us more than our reason; they insinuate themselves into our conscience and our understanding.{{sfn|Ellis|2018|pp=71, 75–79}} Adams, so to speak, takes Mailer’s formulation a step further: we are all capable of dangerous self-exculpations. But to Adams, essentially, it was the “relentless pressure toward oligarchy,” as Ellis puts it, that “needed constant attention from all branches of government.” That, to Adams, was “the central problem of political science.”{{sfn|Ellis|2018|pp=85, 88}}
+===Notes===
+{{Notelist}}
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+{{Reflist|20em}}
 ===Works Cited===