First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Erica Payne, Morris Pearl, and Bob Lord, April 2024
In Stephen Spielberg’s 1997 movie Amistad, John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) famously said “in court, whoever tells the best story wins.” If only this were so in the realm of tax policy. But as your 2021 chat with Town Hall Seattle seemed to suggest, when it comes to tax policy, whoever writes the biggest checks wins. The quid pro quo which governs our tax system arises from the natural symbiosis existing between wealthy donors wishing to minimize their tax liability and ambitious candidates wishing to maximize their campaign funds. And so long as that bargain persists, the donor-candidate bond shall prevail over every appeal to reason and fairness unless it is overcome by a stronger influence, exerting a more powerful wedging force upon the self-interest of the donors. That’s why we structured our own wealth tax proposal as an incentive plan, applied to households, and actuated by the self-interest of the latent but supreme authority in our constitutional system: any given thirty-eight States.
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Dolly Parton, April 2024
Although many folks are frustrated by the fact of your partisan neutrality, all should respect your reasons for it. And the greatest reason is, as far as we can tell, that your Christian faith prohibits you from casting aspersions and condemnations upon others. Your partisan neutrality does not, however, translate to political mootness. Touching on the themes of women’s dignity and equality, migrants and poverty, many of your songs convey an egalitarian, tolerant, and compassionate political disposition. But perhaps your most provocative political lyrics are found in your recent song World on Fire from your latest album, Rockstar. This song seems to express your apprehension about a concern that we also share: the future of our republic (emphasis ours):
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Marcus Brutus, March 2024
The wisest founder of our republic once wrote that the best-known period of history covered the death of yours. Writing to you a hundred generations later, I fear that if we do not soon grasp the basic parallels in the causes which brought down Rome’s commonwealth and now threaten ours, we may have little hope of avoiding a similar fate. Many patriots tried to preserve the Roman Republic according to their understanding of fealty. The names of Gracchus and Brutus loom largest in my mind. No tragedy more than their failure could better teach us the fact that all euphoria that can be gained by virtue of wealth, status, power, and office are fleeting, to be quickly stolen by competitors, successors, senility, obscurity, or death. And if the bloody end of mankind’s first great experiments in popular government teaches us anything, it’s that while the greatest men of the day rise to the height of the prevailing regime, the greatest men in history cast off bad regimes as you endeavored, or else improve existing ones for the benefit of the people.
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Darren Walker, February 2024
Roughly one-fifth of America’s population were slaves at the moment of Independence, entitling their descendants a primal claim to America’s founding lineage, equal to any whose ancestors disembarked the Mayflower. Yet even 159 years after Abolition, countless millions of these descendants feel more alienated from the American Dream than those whose forebears later arrived by choice, making it understandable if any should decline to boast that heritage. History tells us how this wound was made. Economics tells us that the wound remains open. Ignorance daily pours fresh salt into it. And yet you, Mr. Walker, have told us not only how it will be healed, but also how our democratic-republican model of government will be preserved: hope. Not guilt or blame, but a universal optimism nourishing the pursuit of happiness that is every American’s birthright.
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Abigail Disney, February 2024
By the time you earned your philosophy doctorate, you must have encountered Socrates’s saying: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And your own examination seems to have brought you some pain: wearing old clothes to conceal your wealth. Exiting the taxi a few blocks before your destination to be seen on foot. The warnings never to say anything about the family business. Your mother’s voice admonishing you to sit up straight when you do, as you prepared to call upon Congress to raise your own taxes. Witnessing the harm that extreme wealth concentration inflicts on our republic – the pessimism, insecurity, narrowing upward mobility, polarization, demagoguery, and authoritarianism – many may wonder if anyone else with a conscience lives in your neighborhood. On the one hand we have you, with a net worth below 1,000x the national median, struggling to pull the plutocracy back to Earth. On the other we have the plutocrats, some of which seem to be governed by souls with holes so cavernous they can’t be filled with 10,000, 100,000, even 1,000,000 American Dreams, with half the country in want of just one. Indeed, one may wonder where conscience dwells at all in the twilight of a superpower republic, considering how nearly Sallust’s eulogy for Rome’s mirrors the present decline of our own:
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Michael Hayden, January 2024
Given your distinguished military record and tenure as chief of both the NSA and the CIA, it’s hard to identify any person more qualified to opine on America’s national security than you. And given your intellect and partisan neutrality, it’s hard to imagine any such opinion that should be accorded greater weight. That you were appointed to lead the NSA by Bill Clinton and the CIA by George W. Bush; that the later nomination was confirmed by then-Senator Joe Biden yet opposed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton; and that you oppose Donald Trump and the MAGA strain of the Republican Party demonstrate your partisan independence. Your erudition is meanwhile made clear by your writing and speaking, in which you’ve cited the ideas of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton while warning of America’s drift away from Enlightenment principles and toward a post-truth world.
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Steven Spielberg, January 2024
History furnishes many examples of democratic and popular governments, but of only two attaining uncontested sovereignty over their respective worlds: the Roman republic and the United States. These two superpower republics have in turn produced an equally short list of egalitarian reformers whose resistance to the plutocracy marked the onset of civil war and who were slain for their devotion to the republican cause. The greatest story that Hollywood has never told is of the earlier –Tiberius Gracchus – the young noble tutored in Greek philosophy, who went on to become the first Roman to scale the ramparts at Carthage, was twice elected plebian tribune, and was finally murdered by the Senators in his desperation to save Rome’s middle class by his Lex Sempronia Agraria, a law which John Adams pronounced “a genuine republican Measure.” The greatest story that you have ever told is of the later: Abraham Lincoln and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, permanently emancipating four million people from slavery.
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Stanley McChrystal, December 2023
Devotion and duty would seem to be the watchwords of your life, judging by your record of military service to our country. Few Americans today match your dedication in rising to John Adams’s call: “Our Obligations to our Country never cease but with our Lives. We ought to do all We can.” But your recent writings suggest a third maxim guiding your civilian life. One deployed not to defending America’s interests and assets from foreign aggression but that would instead preserve its republican form of government: egalitarianism. In Lincoln’s Call to Service – and Ours, you noted your concern over poverty. In At 63, I Threw Away My Prized Portrait of Robert E. Lee, you wrote how you now equate his image with racial inequality. And in We fought to defend democracy. This new threat to America now keeps us awake at night, you deplored our past “contradictions, prejudices, and systemic inequalities.”
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Mike Pence, December 2023
Although I’ve never voted against the Republican presidential nominee, I salute you for certifying Donald Trump’s defeat on January 6, 2021. In so doing, you placed the orderly transition of power ordained by the Constitution above partisan politics. You may even have single-handedly prevented a constitutional crisis for which, as your legal counsel put it, there would be “no neutral arbiter to break the impasse.” But though you protected our republican institutions from that crisis, the populist forces which precipitated it – the “disorders and miseries” that George Washington warned lead men to “seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual” – yet gather strength. There will be more crises. And those disorders and miseries which inflame them flow from one main source: middle-class decline. Noah Webster warns that the same middling insecurity which fueled Rome’s tournament of demagogues has inaugurated our own:
First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Mitt Romney, November 2023
Reference is made to your statements of September 13, 2023 announcing your intention to relinquish your Senate seat upon the conclusion of the current term. In describing the reasons leading to this decision, you expressed your aversion to the reactionary populist demagoguery and disregard for the Constitution manifesting in a disaffected portion of the Republican Party. All who are familiar with George Washington’s nightmare vision of the fate stalking America’s experiment in self-government – which judging by the sad state of our national discourse is far fewer than it ought to be – should applaud your loyalty to the Constitution and the egalitarian principles for which the Republican Party was originally conceived. Regardless of to which party, candidate, or cause one’s political sympathies may now or then run, all Americans should always share your devotion to these.