Day 89.
Look, I’m a nerd. I like history, and tax policy. I believe in reversing the racist legacy of this country I love so much, because my liberation is bound up with that of my fellow human beings. These are a very specific set of interests. So when I come across a piece of writing that hits all those nails on the head it’s kind of astonishing. This is maybe the second time in my life that it’s happened to me like this.
The first is the time when, just before finals during the first semester of law school, someone from Simon & Schuster mailed me a copy of The Partly Cloudy Patriot. I never found out who sent it. (If you’re reading this and you want to cop to it, please.) It was so right for me. It was such a treat to read after I finished those exams. I too had opinions about what kind of nerd Al Gore was, and about what kind of nerd Willow Rosenberg was. And I too longed for the coming-together of Lincoln’s second inaugural, but was frustrated by the circumstances of the end of the 2000 Presidential Election. What a gift that was.
A series of clicks today brought me to the second time. It was a book and an article by Robin L. Einhorn, on the intersection of slavery and tax policy since before the founding of the republic. The essay crystalized the issue as the answer to this question: why do middle-class Americans instinctively resent progressive taxation – higher rates for the wealthy – so much?
The answer isn’t simple, and I’d do Einhorn a disservice to claim to be able to summarize it. In “Tax Aversion and the Legacy of Slavery,” she argues that the question cannot be answered without a reckoning of the relationship slavery and taxation had. Noting that slaveholders were never a majority, she writes that this minority elite held up the very establishment of the government unless it preserved their interests. And that in turn made the horror of slavery impossible to ignore.
The slaveholding minority did this through several strategies, one of which was ultimately critical to their success: to convince the white, non-slaveholding majority that its interests were aligned with those of the slaveholding elites. Those interests: weak central government and constrained taxing authority. In turn, these resentments of centralized authority and taxing power have led to weak and cash-strapped state governments where constituents have been pushing against attempts to shore up revenue for decades. Revenue they lost, in fact, when the progressive tax on slave-ownership was left behind after slavery was abolished.
I haven’t read Einhorn’s book, American Taxation, American Slavery yet (obviously I’m going to have to). But I’m seeing this going to another common narrative: the unlimited (economic) opportunity of the American Dream myth.
I’m constantly reminded that that dream, that this country, depended on the horror of the exploitation of others.
Vine & Figtree 