John Adams warned us against oligarchs

OCTOBER 30 marked the 291st anniversary of the birth of John Adams in Braintree. This year we’ve been watching his fears come to life.

With Elon Musk dumping nearly $500 million into the midterms and nearly 100 billionaires contributing to Susan Collins’s US Senate campaign in Maine, Adams’s warnings about wealth in politics were on vivid display.

We may be tempted to call his warnings overblown after Musk’s millions, including $224 million spent backing Republicans in Texas alone, sank gurgling beneath the blue wave that saw huge Democratic gains, including the governor’s office and a US Senate seat in the Lone Star state.

These outcomes would leave Adams unmoved. He would be quick to say that if Americans now think that by winning midterm battles against Musk and his fellow oligarchs we’ve won the war, we’re deluded. Adams saw the struggle against oligarchy as a permanent— and permanently acute—condition.

Adams is often remembered as the most conservative of the Founders—as a borderline reactionary, morbidly anxious about the danger of too much democracy, and convinced that plebeian mobs could destroy the legal architecture of the new Republic. Adams is frequently contrasted with peers—Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison—who believed that by erasing hereditary titles and offices the United States had given birth to a stable new world of democratic rule by the people.

Adams never amassed great wealth, and he always identified with the New England middling farmer and artisan class into which he was born. But it is certainly true that he did not trust the mass of people to run the government. He expressed this view with his characteristic impolitic pungency. At the arrival of pure democracy, Adams said: “The idle, the vicious, and the intemperate, will rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery.”

The unwashed crowds could be stupid and unwieldy. But what of an elite, composed of the well-born, the beautiful, and (especially) the rich, that could dominate, exploit, and mobilize those crowds? That, Adams believed, constituted the permanent, aggressive, and existential threat to the Republic.

As Luke Mayville showed in his 2016 book, John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy, what really distinguished Adams from his comrades at the founding was not a weakness for pro-aristocratic policies and institutions; it was his conviction that abolishing formal titles of nobility and explicit hereditary ranks did not remove the threat from ravenous elites.

Adams saw that even in our new order the “goods of the mind” could not obliterate the “goods of fortune” —wealth, beauty, and family—that fuel metastasizing influence. John Adams saw Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel coming.

Adams thought that Madison, Jefferson, and the rest had naively substituted ideology for a cold-eyed examination of human nature, and in so doing had failed to account for the basic reality that “the power of privilege is so deeply rooted that it would persist even in modern democratic republics.”

Adams’s criticisms of the Jeffersonian program arose not from admiration of Old World aristocratic structures, but from his fear of their sources. In Adams’s view, with or without titles, there always exists “a class of men who will not suffer themselves to be governed,” who would “Employ the commonality to knock to pieces any plan and model that the most honest architects in legislation can invent to keep them within bounds.”

Adams saw all along that eventually these tycoons would say, as Peter Thiel put it, that they “no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Yes, Adams agreed, now we will have elections, but, he warned, “He who had the deepest purse, or the fewest scruples about using it will generally prevail.”

Adams would see the Democrats’ midterm wins as “the foam on the sea of history.” The fact that Musk was willing to squander $500 million and that others dumped $10 million into the Senate race in Maine shows us the eternal forces operating deep underneath.

And Adams understood that wealth is politically powerful in modern societies not merely because money buys influence, but also because citizens admire and even sympathize with the rich. He thought that wealth is powerful in the same way that beauty is powerful—it distinguishes its possessor, and prompts approval, even veneration. MAGA might vote with the rich not because they hope to be rich one day themselves, but because they esteem the rich and submit to their wishes.

John Adams would take sardonic pleasure from the fact that there is no John Adams Memorial or Monument in Washington, where we will soon see a Trump ballroom, and (perhaps) a Trump Arc of Triumph.

But then, Adams would get to work. Adams would argue that 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, we’re still in a fight for our lives. He would be very sure whom the fight was against. And he would know which side he is on.

Adams would welcome the midterms’ impressive frustration of oligarchy. Then, he would warn us to remain vigilant, for the oligarchs haven’t gone away, and that they never will.

James Doyle is a Boston defense lawyer and author. He is former head of the public defender division of the Committee for Public Counsel Services and director of the Center for Modern Forensic Practice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.