How one 1971 letter changed everything for America — and gave us Trump

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 26, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

America seems to be failing, both at home and around the world. But why?

David French published a thoughtful op-ed in Monday’s New York Times titled The Fire of Stupidity Can’t Be Contained, identifying many of the symptoms of our national decline and wondering out loud why this is happening now.

His best guess is that we’re not remembering the horrors of both fascism and communism from the last century, which is why people — particularly young people — are embracing both. He notes:

“A disturbing number of young people on the right are fascinated with fascism. An extraordinary 34 percent of young people overall express a favorable view of communism, and young Americans are far more likely than their parents or grandparents to say that political violence is ‘sometimes OK.’”

Katy Tur opened an hour of her MSNOW show with French’s article; she similarly was wondering what happened that has so torn our country apart. Could it be that we’re just not as well educated about our history as we once were? Is it the economy? Demagogues like Trump in politics?

Millions of words have been rightly devoted to this sort of inquiry, but most miss the most obvious answer: it’s the billionaires, stupid. Follow along and I think you’ll get it.

When FDR took over America in March of 1933, we’d been a largely laissez-faire nation since our founding. There wasn’t much government help for anybody other than the rich and powerful.

Three preceding Republican presidents (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover) had dismantled what little regulation was left from the progressive Republicans (Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft) and dropped Wilson’s 91% top income tax rate down to 25%, kicking off the Republican Great Depression.

In 1933 a third of America was unemployed, hunger and homelessness were rampant, and only about 20 percent of us were in the middle class; the country had never gone above a third of us in that class. So, FDR, his wife Eleanor, and Labor Secretary Francis Perkins set out to reinvent America. They legalized unions, restored the 90% income tax rate on the morbidly rich, made government the employer of last resort, and instituted the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, Social Security, built schools and infrastructure nationwide, etc.

The result was dramatic. By 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, fully a third of us had good union jobs and they set the wage floor for another third of us; as a result, two-thirds of us were in the middle class, and could do it with a single paycheck. A single-family home, a car, an annual vacation, send the kids to college, and retire on a good pension.

But from 1933 forward, FDR’s New Deal had been under continuous attack from a handful of extremely wealthy oligarchs who resented capping their paychecks to avoid that top 91% tax rate and hated the regulations that made both consumer products and the workplace safer but cut into their profits.

That backlash movement found its voice with Lewis Powell’s infamous Memo in 1971, and Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court the following year.

The Memo called for the creation of rightwing think tanks that could influence public opinion, taking over schools and colleges, buying and running media operations, seizing control of the courts (particularly the Supreme Court), aggressive pushback against the Civil Rights movement, and the promotion of “free market” ideology. It was essential, Powell wrote, to “save” America from an incipient communist takeover.

The Memo electrified what we today call the Epstein/Billionaire Class of morbidly rich men. They endowed and built all of that infrastructure, spending literally billions in today’s dollars, putting a right-wing radio station in every city and town, right-wing TV networks, well-paid pundits, “alternative” colleges like Hillsdale, a billion-dollar effort to pack the courts, challenges to textbooks, and an embrace of hard-right Christianity.

Their main message was that the government had grown “too big,” a result of the New Deal that must be reversed, and the GOP they own has run with it ever since.

Although the federal government of the US was smaller as a percentage of either population or GDP compared to virtually every other developed country in the world, it was a meme that resonated with average people who were horrified that we’d been lied into the bloody Vietnam War, resented paying taxes, and felt they were being left behind as a result of the severe oil-shock inflation of the Nixon/Ford '70s.

Their plan worked. Trust in the American government went from nearly 80 percent in the early 1960s to a mere 17% last year. And, just like a marriage doesn’t work when the partners don’t trust each other, neither does a society or a government.

Reagan cemented this by declaring in his first inaugural speech that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” It was the perfect encapsulation of the billionaire hatred of taxation and regulation, but was sold so well that a majority of Americans bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Reagan and the billionaire-owned Republicans in Congress broke the back of the union movement, slashed taxes on the morbidly rich and corporations, stopped enforcing our anti-monopoly laws, sold off federal lands, increased subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, slashed federal spending on education and college, enabled stock manipulation through stock buy-backs, etc., etc.

Five corrupt Republicans who the Powell movement billionaires had helped install on the Supreme Court helped amplify the damage with their 5-4 Bellotti (written by Powell) and 5-4 Citizens United decisions, freeing both billionaires and corporations to buy elections by claiming that “corporations are persons” and “money is free speech.”

As a result, our elections now typically go to the highest bidder and billionaires are the biggest players in our political system. Just 100 billionaires put $2.6 billion into the 2024 election, about a fifth of all spending, and will probably beat that number this fall; in recent elections, roughly nine times out of 10 the better‑funded candidate wins, especially in House races.

Meanwhile, 45 years of Powell Memo-style Reaganomics have gutted the middle class. Only around 43 percent of us can now claim that status, and it takes two full-time paychecks today to live like one could in 1981.

Nobody has halted this slide from a highly functioning government and a vibrant, healthy middle class into the mess we have today, all as the result of nearly a half-century of Reaganomics.

The income tax rates are still stupidly low, incentivizing yachts for billionaires and massive bonuses for corporate executives. Bill Clinton declared “the era of big government is over” as was “welfare as we know it.” Obama turned our healthcare funding system over to a handful of massive insurance companies who are now turning the screws to extract as much wealth from us as they can.

So, people are — quite reasonably — p----- off. Our legislators are bought-and-sold, sometimes even by foreign-loyal entities like AIPAC, our judges are hand-picked by billionaires, and Trump has gutted our “big” government even further.

By the end of 2025, the federal civilian workforce had shrunk by roughly 300,000+ employees compared with its size at Trump’s inauguration, a drop of around 10% in a single year.

Education Department staff fell by 43% in 2025 alone, the U.S. Agency for International Development was effectively dissolved, the agency housing the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities lost more than half its staff; AmeriCorps shrank by 44%; the Small Business Administration by 33%; the agency overseeing Voice of America and other international broadcasters by roughly 33%; and the National Science Foundation by about 30%.

During the 2025 shutdown, the Trump administration used that crisis it created to carry out at least 4,200 immediate layoffs across seven agencies in a single day, rather than furloughing workers. Cuts hit Treasury (1,446 workers), Health and Human Services (around 1,100–1,200), Education (466 on that day, after earlier large cuts), Housing and Urban Development (442), Commerce (315), Energy (187) and Homeland Security (176), with additional reductions at EPA and the Patent Office.

Laying off over 7,000 people at Social Security has left seniors with frustrating day-long hold times and a lack of in-person appointments, while the feds under Dr. Oz are experimenting with partially privatizing and starting pre-clearances done by big insurance companies and inflicted on traditional Medicare recipients in six states, Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Washington.

As our government is gutted, our social services are crushed, our unions are enfeebled, wages are flattened, and our politicians and judges are wholly-owned properties of a handful of billionaire families and industries, Americans are justified in looking for alternatives.

Ironically — and perhaps alarmingly — billionaires are now looking for alternatives, too.

Peter Thiel, the guy who funded JD Vance’s political career who, through Palantir, has access to mind-boggling amounts of data on us and our future, just moved his entire family to Argentina. Mark Zuckerberg has a 5,000 square-foot doomsday bunker in Hawaii, and Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison are reported to have similar “bolt-holes” in case the public gets too restive or Trump starts a nuclear war.

The bunkers-for-billionaires business is among the fastest-growing in America, with Survival Condo, Oppidum Bunkers and Vivos advertising architect-designed what Oppidium calls “ultra-luxury fortified underground residences.”

Meanwhile, because of Reagan’s cuts to education and civics, two generations have grown up without a good understanding of how government works in a democracy; only 1 in 20 Americans can name the five freedoms protected by the First Amendment, and a third of Americans can’t name the three branches of government. No wonder they’re curious about fascism and communism.

So, the next time somebody asks you why America is in such a mess, why people no longer care or even despair about the future, let them know the simple and real answer: “It’s the billionaires, stupid.”

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