- The Adams Institute For the Preservation of the Democratic-Republican Model of Government

The republican model of government. The preservation of the Constitution. The prosperity and independence of ordinary households. The practice of innovative and responsible capitalism. The civic virtue required for authentic democracy. The annihilation of racial disparities. The cohesion of family values. The society worthy of universal patriotism. The common welfare and the domestic tranquility. The future liberty and happiness of our children.

All these are united upon the object of:

MIDDLE-CLASS PRIMACY.

This means we must save as many households from falling out of the middle class and raise as many people from below into the middle class as possible, until the middle owns half.* Today, the American middle class only owns 29% of America’s wealth,^† depriving ordinary Americans of about $30 trillion of their rightful share of national prosperity.^‡

Let us forever redeem what was best about America’s founding and finally repair what was worst, by scaling capitalism’s own device of the long-term incentive plan from the level of enterprise to nation. Let our national economic philosophy be: no gains for the middle, no gains for the top. And let us implement this plan through the legal form of the constitutional amendment which it is our mission to advance.

To the People of the United States of America:

The Constitution is exceptional, but the erosion of our founding egalitarianism reveals that it only ever guaranteed the LEGAL FORM of our democratic republic. It must now be empowered to guarantee its POLITICAL SUBSTANCE. That political substance resides only in an upright and independent middle class, continually refreshed by upward mobility. We can save our middle class, but not by means of political faction. Political salvation will not be found in any charismatic leader, in the alternating conquests of one political party over another, or in the absolute dominion of a benevolent custodian. Instead:

AMERICA’S MIDDLE CLASS SHALL BE RESTORED BY THE DUTIFUL ENFORCEMENT OF AN IMPARTIAL AND INCORRUPTIBLE MATHEMATICAL RATIO BENCHMARKED AGAINST THE NATIONAL MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD NET WORTH.

From our first essay No Gains for the Middle, No Gains for the Top.

Read all our essays here.

Dear Senator Romney:

In sounding the alarm of our accelerating transition from legitimate popular government to demagogic mob-rule, you join the ranks of a much older political anthropology reaching all the way back to Plato and Polybius. For it was Plato who first enunciated an order of political regimes, describing democracy’s inclination to drift toward authoritarianism and despotism. And it was Polybius who, watching the floodgates of political violence open in the late Roman republic, first synthesized those and other lessons into a complete sequence of political evolution. This sequence, which he calls anacyclosis (ἀνακύκλωσις), spans the entire story arc of political society from tribal chiefdom to imperial monarchy, mocking all our hubris with the guarantee that popular government is never more than a brief phase in the full course of human civilization.

From our first letter to Mitt Romney, November 2023.

Check out all our letters here.

More to come…

Notes

*That the middle class should own at least half the wealth, see Aristotle, Politics, 1295b, stating: “It is clear therefore also that the political community administered by the middle class is the best, and that it is possible for those states to be well governed that are of the kind in which the middle class is numerous, and preferably stronger than both the other two classes.” That ordinary Americans intuitively agree that the middle class should own half the wealth, see Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Association for Psychological Science, 2011.

† That the middle class owns about 29% of national wealth, see Federal Reserve data. When defining the “middle class” as middle three wealth quintiles by income percentile, the middle 60% owns $46.44 trillion of the $161.38 trillion total, or 28.8% (Q3 2023). When defining the “middle class” as the middle 40% of wealth by wealth percentile group (between the top 10% and bottom 50%), the middle class owns $43.89 of the $142.42 trillion, or 30.8% (Q3 2023).

‡ The ~$30 trillion damage model is achieved by averaging the delta between 50% and the actual middling share of the total aggregate national wealth numbers cited above.

Property monopolized, or in the Possession of a Few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality – this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches.

John Adams, 1765