It Could Backfire and the People Could Wake Up—and History Shows Why
Trump wants to make politics all about power. He wants international relations to be about it as with Venezuela and the threats against Greenland. Also politics around the country as with sending troops to cities he doesn’t like and withholding money for programs for states he doesn’t like. He wants politics in DC about it too, as in defying Congress in all sorts of ways then scaring Republican members into submitting by threatening to campaign against their re-election.
Times it’s been better
Power is what so very much has always been about, even in this nation’s best times of leaning a little closer toward higher principles. Even at times of the environment being relatively better tended to. Times of some advancement of the status of people of color and the legalization of gay marriage. Times when money did not get things quite as much its way, as in monopolies being broken up or prevented from forming, or with the reining in of dangerous banking investment practices after 2008. But even in those times it was the sway of the rich and influential that made those accomplishments so difficult, and which constantly limited them and often pushed them back, as is happening now. Certainly not everyone who is rich wants all that is happening now, but the ones who are leading these destructive changes are rich and are either in power or are influential.
Times it’s been worse
Relative power is why there is such wealth and income disparity. It’s why the difference in pay between a CEO and an average worker has sky rocketed (in 1965 a CEO made 21 times what the typical worker made. In 2024 it was 281 times). It’s why the way the pie is sliced, the big pie of total national income, and how much of that actually ends up in the hands of the people doing the work, what BLS calls Labor Share, has shrunk since the 1970s, and still shrinking fast.
Where does that power come from? The rich pull strings and apply pressure and badger employees and consumers and citizens into acquiescing. Some are very blatant about it. Some have no intention of doing that and are just trying to conduct business, but the result is the same. It works because people acquiesce.
Why do they acquiesce? Because they’re waiting for, hoping for, some laws or regulation of things, or some market forces, or some occasional true champion in leadership, or some reasonable behavior to lead to their getting what they should get. That is, the environment they live in not so abused, the poisonous side effects of industry reasonably controlled, the economy not completely under the thumb of the richest people and companies, their pay being reasonably close to what their work is worth given what the companies makes. They acquiesce because they can only assume that some of that is already true and that what they’re making probably is close to what they should be making. Surely it is, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
Why does it take people acquiescing? Because, though people are rarely aware of it, people have most of the power. The rich, the powerful, the political bullies can only get it by getting the people to be unaware and to unconsciously yield it to them.
But what happens when those most in charge make it explicit and blatant that they want everything to be about power and they are going to make it that way, and they are going to grab every bit of it they can? What happens when you are watching them take more and more of the things you used to feel you had at least some control over? Watching as they make your life smaller and smaller? Watching while you either just accept this, or it occurs to you that you have to play the same game. You have to exert whatever power you can to stop the encroachment. You start to look around to figure out what power you have. People, having been backed into a corner of looking at things in terms of power, and trying to find any power they have, might stumble on the fact that they’ve had all the power all along anyway.
Times we’ve used our power
The people had the power in the early 1900s when they had been being paid pennies to work endless hours in dangerous jobs and they said, “Enough!” and got big improvements in workplace safety and limits on child labor hours. They had it when enough people said enough about “legal” bias and brought and end to Jim Crow laws and pushed through the Civil Rights Act. When in the 1930s they elected and supported leadership that would bring about a New Deal that shifted the whole economy much more to the benefit of those doing the work, which then continued for decades. We had the power when our original colonies told the British crown, “We don’t submit to this anymore.”
The people had the power when they overthrew Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, when they ended communist rule in Poland and forced elections and chose freedom-champion Lech Walesa, when they ended apartheid in South Africa and let the country be run by the votes of all people regardless of color. We don’t need an overthrow. An about-face within our own systems and ways of doing things is what is needed. One that would shift the whole focus of the country much more toward the benefit of the people, similar to what was done in the 1930s.
But you push people into that corner, you make life at the moment all about power, you make them either look to find power or else just watch so much being taken, and who knows? You might just push them into stumbling on the fact that’s been right under their nose all along. That they could force change from a system warped to the top. Push them and corner them and they might discover that they’ve had the power all along to say, “We don’t submit to this anymore.”
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