I’m sure by now you’ve already seen the video evidence that President Trump was quoting the evil-doer Bane from the Batman universe. In Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises, the bad guy Bane makes a speech (actually referencing some key aspects of the French Revolution…I use the speech in my classes when I teach on the Revolution) in which he says “we give it [power, riches, control] back to you, the people.”
The “it” in the speech refers generally to giving power or riches or governing control to the people. Right—power to the people. If you think you’ve heard that before, you are right. It was central to President Obama’s 2008 campaign of “yes we can”…meaning, we, the people, can achieve a better world, or at least a government that isn’t controlled by….well, I guess by the evil powerful government people of President Bush.
Of course, the idea gained modern cache in the Sixties. John Lennon wrote a song called “Power to the People” in 1970 (the Black Eyed Peas did a remake in 2005). The Black Panthers were perhaps the first to emphasize the specific phrase calling for “All power to the people.”
One of my former students protested this connection between President Trump and Bane, feeling the attack unjustified. I guess I thought it was funny, as most attacks that do this kind of generalization and “click-bait” type focus. However, in my reply to my student, I wrote “However, this statement is an example of why I still don’t trust that his election makes everything necessarily better. This statement is so easy to say, and yet for 220ish years later, impossible to pull off. Or, perhaps I should say 200ish since even with Jackson’s promise to return power to the people swallowed up in his power grab as pseudo King, joined by an increasingly powerful Congress.”
What I mean in more detail is that you could say Jefferson’s 1800 election was the first of these type of demands. His accusation was that the Federalists and the George Washington/John Adams Presidencies (neither were of the Federalist Party) had stolen the power of living in a free society that the Revolution had promised. He was speaking in hyperbole, though he would not have agree with me. The government in 1799 was generally weak and most people rarely even interacted with the government. However, Jefferson’s Republicans would dominate politics for the next 28 years. How did they lose power? They lost when they were confronted with yet another person saying that those in government had taken too much power from the people.
Andrew Jackson’s victory in 1828 was seen as a one for the people. And yet…within 3 years, the easy accusation was that Jackson had merely shifted power from Congress to the Presidency, creating a pseudo-monarchial structure in which he wielded supreme power. His defense of his actions would come down his seeing his role as just that…the defender of the people. His great opponent, Henry Clay, would start a new political party (yes, one of the few successful “third parties”) the Whigs in order to fight for what he believed was the Founders’ overall vision, that the true defender of the people was Congress.
In other words, we’ve had this same fight now for over 200 years. What does it mean to give power to the people? And who is the defender? President Obama believed he was defending “the people.” A large percentage of the country agreed with him….of course, another large percentage DISAGREED with him and looked to Congress to defend them. Those people largely voted for Donald Trump and now we have yet again flipped roles.
Thus, 227 later, since 1790 when Alexander Hamilton first proposed the first national bank and Jefferson lost his mind at what he called a “prostitution of laws which constitute the pillars of our whole system of jurisprudence,” we have been engaged in this very debate. The citizens will usually be divided into two, perhaps three opinion groups. Finding any common ground then becomes the challenge.
But is it a fair quest or have we actually been on a Quixotic journey? Think about it…in any large scale organization demonstrates the challenge here. For instance, at Valencia, we have about 500 full time professors. Four years ago, we worked to complete new rules regarding how we choose textbooks and instructional material. As you won’t be shocked to find out, our completed rules, created after months of discussion, multiple moments for contribution from anyone, were quickly attacked as being unfair and taking power away from the professors (thus, the “people” had lost power against the evil “government”…the college administration).
I’ve had many people ask me about what we need to do to bring the country to a more settled and dare I say successful position. As 2017 dawns, I don’t know if we really can fairly suggest that “power to the people” is a fair goal. In fact, I don’t think I know anyone who really wants all the power back to the people. Few know what Rousseau really wrote (which, at its core, is what a “power to the people” mindset would look like), and there are none I know who would really want to try and live in his state of nature. I know that I would still want to pay taxes for fire and police protection. I want to have the roads and utilities managed.
And, as often as “power to the people” so often means “hate the rich”…almost everyone I know WANTS to be one of the rich. Certainly 95% of the students I see are people on a quest for a successful job that makes them a comfortable salary…and if they did well, and found themselves in a spot to make a six or seven figure salary, none of them would turn it down. So, if one was of the rich (as far more are in this country than they will admit), your proclamation of “power to the people” would mean something vastly different than what others mean.
In the end, I hope President Trump does return some power to the people. To get there, we’ve got to allow Congress to stop doing stuff…less war, less social services, less taxes and less power. I hope he gets there…though, I think if he got close, we’d soon start hearing another candidate arguing that he/she was running in order to give power back to the people…meaning, undoing whatever it was that the previous administration had done.