There's a widespread myth which says that if only we can get rid of the Republicans, get rid of the Tories, get rid of these right-wing forces, we can relax back into normality. And that normality is a democratic progressive state. The democratic progressive state is about as far from political normality as you can get.
The default state of centralised societies like ours is oligarchy. An oligarch is someone who turns... their inordinate economic power into inordinate political power. It's very rich people becoming very politically powerful.
This is why billionaires love Trump. This is why billionaires and multi-millionaires love Nigel Farage. It's why they love Marine Le Pen.
It's why they love so many of the hard right and far right movements that are rising around the world because they deliver for them. They accelerate. the transformation of democracies into oligarchies. That is where we are heading unless we produce massive counter-movements.
And we can't rely on bland, white-bred, centrist politicians to prevent the rise of oligarchy. People like Keir Starmer, people like Joe Biden, they can't do it. They don't have that sort of power to mobilise people.
They are trying to play both sides at the same time. They're trying to appease the oligarchs to get them off their backs and they're trying to appeal to the people at the same time. You cannot ride both horses. One of those horses is going to fall away and what falls away is popular support. Because if your programme is not meeting people's needs, people will look elsewhere.
And so you find yourself riding the oligarch's horse, not the people's horse. And what we're seeing now... is the return, big time, of oligarchic power.
And this is a phenomenon we see throughout history. And every so often, that oligarchic power is rolled back, but then it gradually begins to gather again and starts to return, unless you are struggling sufficiently against it. There's a very brilliant and very depressing book called The Great Leveller by Walter Scheidel, a very impressive historian. who says that there are only four forces which have ever destroyed rampant inequality, in other words, oligarchy, in human history.
One of them is total war. One of them is total and violent revolution. One of them is state collapse.
And one of them is massive plague. And what he's shown is that in the wake of those things, which can often destroy the power of wealthy people, you can build much more easily a more egalitarian and democratic society. We can see that so much of what we have benefited from has been the result of the two world wars in the 20th century, that to a large extent they destroyed the wealth and power of the uber-rich class, of the oligarchic class, partly because they needed to mobilize resources on a massive scale in order for countries to fight those wars and create a sort of warfare state. which requisitioned goods from very rich people, which raised taxes massively.
Taxes in the US rose to 94% on the top rate of income tax, in the UK to 98%, and it stayed at that level till well after the war. In the UK there was a luxury goods tax as well of 100%, and these taxes were seen as necessary to fund the war effort. And there were a whole load of other forces, like the physical destruction of capital, which took place on a large scale, the loss of colonies in which a lot of capital had been invested, the rationing systems, which made it impossible for very rich people to maintain their undemocratic positions. And their power was broken. And following the war, amongst many of the major combatants, the warfare state, became a welfare state.
And the measures which were used to fund the military economy were then used to fund a civil public service economy. Japan was occupied by the US occupation government under General Douglas MacArthur. They realised that Japan's fascist imperialism, which had led it into the Second World War and caused such horrendous atrocities in places that it had occupied. was driven by oligarchy. It was driven by a profoundly undemocratic settlement within Japan itself.
And the occupation government realised that if it was to prevent a resurgence of that fascist imperialism, it had to destroy oligarchic power. It destroyed these huge Japanese conglomerates. It distributed the land which had been captured by these big estates. and instituted the most effective land reform program in history, redistributing that land to peasants. It introduced trade unions.
It insisted that trade unions must be allowed to operate and created a very powerful trade union movement which persists to this day. It introduced far greater rights for workers, a minimum wage, all sorts of things that we didn't have in our own countries, which were implemented by the US occupation government. And it brought about a system of democracy the like of which Japan had never seen before. And it was on these massive changes that a completely different society in Japan was built.
A democratic, egalitarian and highly successful society. It's extremely ironic that it was the US occupation government which actually did all these things. Before a few years later it woke up and said, oh, hang on a moment, this looks a bit like socialism.
and started trying to row back at it, by which time it was too late. In the UK and in the US, the warfare state became a welfare state. And we enjoyed, as a result, the most democratic, progressive, redistributive era we have ever had.
And what we're seeing now is the fading of that force and the return, big time, of oligarchic power. It's been pouring billions of dollars. into a new politics whose aim effectively is to crush the gains that we've achieved since the Second World War and to crush democracy.
So it's desperately important that we revive a powerful, progressive, democratic politics based on egalitarian principles and at the same time produce far more effective strategies for overthrowing oligarchic... power by peaceful means, through organising on a massive scale, through using a new science of social tipping to show how you can just transform the way that society behaves if you can generate enough momentum behind new ideas. But it can't be done passively, it can't be done accidentally, it can't be done half-heartedly, it has to be a massive programme. of mobilisation.
We have to get millions and millions of people behind the new ideas, behind a progressive settlement, to take on the oligarchs and overthrow their undemocratic power. Because otherwise we end up with systems of extreme oppression and repression which have characterised the great majority of history in centralised states. I don't want to wait until there's another total war. I don't want to see a massive violent revolution in which millions of people die. I don't want to see state collapse.
I don't want to see a vast plague wiping out a third of the population. These are the forces that in the past have destroyed oligarchic power. We have to be clever enough to find the means of doing it without them.
We can't rely on the mainstream media to fight oligarchy because most of it is owned by oligarchs. Far from speaking truth to power, it shores up power against the truth. But at Double Down News, we confront oligarchic power, and we do the job that so much of the media fails to do.
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