This transcript has been edited for clarity.

David D. Stewart: Welcome to the podcast. I'm David Stewart, editor in chief of Tax Notes Today International. This week: Saving democracy with tax?

The Boston Tea Party is often held up as the foundational proof that Americans are generally antitax, but how does this truism hold up under the examination of history?

In her book, The Price of Democracy, Vanessa Williamson challenges the idea that Americans are inherently hostile to taxation. Instead, she argues that the country's battles over fiscal fairness indicate a direct relationship between the power to tax and the preservation — or erosion — of democracy.

Joining me now to talk more about this is Tax Notes historian Joe Thorndike. Joe, welcome back to the podcast.

Joseph J. Thorndike: Thanks, Dave.

David D. Stewart: Now, I understand you recently spoke with Vanessa Williamson. Could you tell us a bit about her?

Joseph J. Thorndike: She's a political scientist at the Brookings Institution and Tax Policy Center, and we talked a lot about her work. She's written a lot in the past about what Americans think about taxes, how they feel about taxes.

David D. Stewart: What did you discuss?

Joseph J. Thorndike: In the interview, we really were talking about her new book, The Price of Democracy. It's a history of American taxation [that] starts in the colonial period with the Stamp Act crisis, runs all the way up to the current day, and she's really just trying to say, "How do Americans argue about taxes, and why?"

David D. Stewart: All right, let's go to that interview.

Joseph J. Thorndike: Welcome to the Tax Notes Talk podcast, Vanessa. It's really great to have you here.

Vanessa Williamson: Oh, I'm so glad to be here.

Joseph J. Thorndike: We're going to talk a little bit about your brand new book, The Price of Democracy, but I don't want to take anything for granted with our listeners here, so for those who don't know your earlier work — you've written a lot about why Americans are willing, or even proud, to pay taxes, and about the Tea Party movement.

If someone read your earlier books and your new one, back to back, what would they notice? Any sort of through line?

Vanessa Williamson: Yeah, I think there really is a through line because I've been grappling for many years with this question of why taxation plays such a crucial role in our politics. It, I think, actually first occurred to me at a Tea Party rally.

So my first book was about the Tea Party, the conservative movement in the Obama administration. I remember being at a Tea Party rally and hearing a woman who was a gold star mother — that is to say, she had lost her son, I believe in Iraq — and she was talking about the sacrifices she had made and how angry she was about those sacrifices. Then it suddenly became clear she was talking about her taxes, and I remember being so struck by those comments because, I mean, now I'm a mother of boys myself, but just, I knew that there had to be something really deep and meaningful about taxation that anyone would put it in the same category with such an extraordinary sacrifice to the country.

I think ever since then, I've been trying to sort of grapple with taxation in America. My next book was about sort of tax attitudes and how people talk about taxation now, and then it eventually occurred to me, I think, that I had to go back to the beginning, so the new book starts with the Stamp Act and goes all the way to today.

Joseph J. Thorndike: I mean, it's true, right? So for people like you — or me, for that matter — whose lives are all about tax, we can take it for granted that tax is important, but it is actually kind of amazing. I don't think it's distinctively American, exactly, but there's something about the intensity of the interest in tax that doesn't seem to cross borders as freely. The Americans do seem more interested in tax.

You and I, I think, both want to problematize the idea that Americans are inherently antitax, and we're going to talk a lot more about that, but it does seem like Americans are inherently super interested in tax, in a way that is maybe different than a lot of other countries. Does that strike you as true?

Vanessa Williamson: I mean, it's certainly a question that I have. I mean, some part of me thinks that maybe my next book is about taxation internationally, and I can answer it more comprehensively, but I do think there's a really extraordinary amount of just taxation showing up at the key moments in our history.

It's not for nothing that part of what made our revolution, our fight for independence, a moral fight was that it was talked about in terms of the taxes that people were paying and their right to representation. I think, really from the very beginning, taxation has had this, not just important role in our economy, right? It's had an important role in the symbolism of our country, and maybe that is unique.

Joseph J. Thorndike: All right, let's move on to the very first part of the book, which is what everyone's going to see first: the title. Right? You call it The Price of Democracy, which is obviously a nod to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and his sort of classic description of taxes as the price of civilization. Why the wording change? Is it meaningful?

Vanessa Williamson: Yeah, absolutely. I think that Holmes is, of course, completely right to talk about taxation as the price of civilization. It's how we pay for roads and all the parts of society that hold a modern society together, but what I argue in the book is that taxation is really even more essentially about the development of democracy. It's more essentially the price we pay to have a democracy, for two reasons. Because when taxes are imposed on people, it encourages them to seek representation. Right?

Since Magna Carta, [there's] a long history of those who are taxed demanding that they therefore should have some say in the government, right, that they should be allowed to consent to the taxes that they pay through a system of representation, and that connection is international, it's historical, but it's also contemporary, right? People describe themselves as taxpayers when they make demands upon the government.

But taxes are also the price of democracy in the sense that they are what give the government the power to act. Right? We could have elections and have our legislature be, basically, a debating club. If they don't have the power to spend money, and if they don't have enough money to spend, their decisions aren't really very meaningful, right? So taxation is both this trigger that provokes representation, and at the same time, it's the fuel that actually makes the democracy go.

Joseph J. Thorndike: Right, and it seems like the Holmes thing kind of gets at the second half of that, but not at the first, right? The "democracy" part of it, which is obviously why you chose that word for the title.

Vanessa Williamson: Yeah, and I think there's a misapprehension, I think commonly, partly because of the sort of antitax rhetoric that's been so much a part of our politics in recent decades, but people sometimes misunderstand the connection between taxation and representation, in that there's a lot of rhetoric about taxation being tyranny. Right?

As it turns out, from a cross-national perspective and historically as well, tyrants are really bad at raising taxes. It's elected officials that are good at it, right, and so it's not uncommon for people who want to be autocrats to seek nontax forms of revenue, because it frees them from feeling obligated to or dependent upon the people. To me, funding your government with taxation is part of what makes a democracy strong, both because it gives them the money to do things, and because it creates that incentive for the people in power to think about what the people who they are financially reliant on, what those people want.

Joseph J. Thorndike: All right, so let's talk a little bit about what you actually say in the book. It makes a lot of sense chronologically. You start with the Boston Tea Party. It is so iconic that it makes a lot of sense to start there.

So most Americans, I think, they grow up thinking about the Tea Party as the original tax revolt, right, the original antitax revolt. It's the first in that long line and proceeds through the early years of independence when there's Shays's Rebellion, and then some people would put the tariff confrontations of the 19th century in the category of a tax rebellion. The property tax revolts of the 1930s, long forgotten by almost everyone, and then right up to Proposition 13 and beyond. There's a whole historiography, of course, right, of tax revolts. Some of it's quite conservative, some of it more balanced, but you start with the Boston Tea Party, and I think that makes sense.

You say we're telling the story of the Tea Party backwards, that that conventional understanding of it is backwards. What actually happened on Griffin's Wharf in Boston in 1773, and why should I care? I care, but why should our listeners care?

Vanessa Williamson: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think most people would be able to accurately tell you what happened, in the sense that a bunch of Boston mechanics and artisans put themselves in disguises and snuck onto three ships and threw a bunch of tea into the harbor. Completely correct.

The thing that people don't know is that what they were opposing was a tax cut. It was a corporate tax cut. What was happening was that the East India Company, which was a large corporation closely intermingled with Parliament, was in trouble. It needed a bailout, and Parliament decided to give them a bunch of money, but it also gave them a special tax break that allowed them to sell their tea in the colonies on the cheap.

Sam Adams — who led the Sons of Liberty, which was the group that boarded those ships and took on the most powerful empire the world had ever known — Sam Adams said that the problem with this was that it was introductive of monopolies. It was giving one corporation way too big of a break, and it would push out smaller businesses. He said this was introductive of monopolies, which was a danger to public liberty, and that's why they boarded those ships.

I think I start the book with that because I think it's a really useful check for people who might think they know the history, and then to sort of learn, perhaps, that this is, in fact, almost literally the opposite of the history. I hope it can sort of draw people into the book and make them think that maybe there's some other stories from our history that they don't know as well as they might think.

Joseph J. Thorndike: Yeah, no, I think it does exactly that. Also, it reminds me, this is something that comes through a lot in your book, and to me, in my reading of U.S. tax history, is that what often really seems to get people is not that they hate paying taxes so much, but that they hate other people not paying taxes, that that's really quite a strong, motivating force, and I think that that gets to the kind of moral status of taxpaying that you're talking about, in this book and elsewhere that you've written.

Vanessa Williamson: Yeah, that's exactly right. If you ask Americans what bothers them most about taxes, their top two answers are — extremely consistently over many decades — that the wealthy and that corporations are not paying their share. Their third concern is complexity, and I think all of these concerns are very reasonable. Right?

These are all perfectly reasonable things to have questions about or to be concerned about or to be angry about, but the amount that they themselves pay is always coming in fourth or fifth on that list. And I think that that, again, it might be a little surprising given the rhetoric that we hear about taxation, but people see taxpaying — they're very fundamentally committed to the idea of taxpaying as evidence that you're worthy of citizenship.

And so, describing yourself as a taxpayer, it seems sort of bizarre, the first couple of times I remembered hearing this in the Tea Party era. I was like, "Well, it's mandatory. Why are you describing yourself as a taxpayer?" It's like saying that you don't rob banks. What a funny place to put your pride, right, but people have enormous civic pride as taxpayers, despite the fact that this, yes, it's literally mandated by law. I think it's because it taps into that sentiment that people are paying their share and doing their part.

I did interviews for my second book with Americans across the country about taxpaying and what they thought of it, and when I asked them, "What was a thing like taxpaying?" I was expecting jury service or maybe military service to come to mind, right, things that the government can make you do that are a contribution to the nation, and those were extremely rare answers.

What people talked about was helping their neighbors, and the stories were always local. If you lived in a northern city, you'd talk about helping your neighbor shovel their walk or carry their groceries up the stairs, that kind of thing. And if you lived somewhere else, you'd talk about mowing their lawn or whatever, but yeah, people see taxpaying as a contribution to their community, and so being a taxpayer is evidence that you're the kind of person who contributes, that you're a reliable, hardworking, upstanding kind of person.

Joseph J. Thorndike: All right, so one of your big claims here is that tax fights are really fights over democracy, and you can tell us what that means, exactly, but you say, especially when poor or marginalized groups gain political power, then tax fights really become about democracy.

Can you explain the dynamic just more generally, and maybe walk us through a concrete example of when that happened and what that tax battle looked like?

Vanessa Williamson: Sure. People are always going to have some amount of arguing about taxation, just the way they have some amount of arguing about all kinds of political policies. If you go to a local government meeting and the question is where they're going to put the speed bumps on the road, those can get quite controversial, right, so it's not that taxation is ever completely uncontroversial, but it often has nothing like the kind of resonance it has, for example, today.

What you see in the contemporary period is the Republican Party becoming increasingly committed to a very extreme antitax agenda, and that is not the old-fashioned Republican idea of austerity, or, "Maybe we should balance the budget." No, it became a very strict protocol that taxes should basically always go down, and especially they should go down for the rich. That's the distinction I want to make. As you said, people are often annoyed by the taxes they pay. They are irritated by the income tax filing process, for example, and I find that extremely reasonable. That doesn't have a ton of sort of huge political content to it. It is, in fact, an annoying bit of paperwork.

Sometimes taxes are like that. Sometimes they are a process, and maybe it's a little irritating and we're trying to figure out how to pay for X, Y, and Z, and that's normal, but sometimes taxation becomes something different. Sometimes taxation becomes part of a political rhetoric that's — you could use the example of Ronald Reagan's "welfare queen." Right? He talked about this. Welfare queen, who had all these different Social Security numbers; and he made up the numbers every time and they varied from story to story, but this sort of racialized dog whistle about undeserving, implied to be minority members of society, right, Black and brown members of society who were sponging off the government and cheating.

The corollary to that was always that there was the hardworking taxpayer, and just in the same way that the dog whistle made the welfare queen Black, the hardworking taxpayer is white. When that kind of rhetoric appears, when there's a sudden turn to talking about the taxpayers as not everyone who follows the law — the vast majority of people pay taxes — but rather that there's a deserving, hardworking group, versus an undeserving, not hardworking group, who doesn't really fundamentally deserve to be part of our polity, right?

That rhetoric, which you can trace from the welfare queen through much of the rhetoric of the Republican Party today, that rhetoric is really poisonous to democratic practice, and it recurs whenever our polity has expanded. Part of the reaction to the Civil Rights Movement is this antitax rhetoric, and you see it as early as [Barry] Goldwater. It was very prominent with Reagan, and it continues through [Grover] Norquist and [Newt] Gingrich and everyone else, but a very, very startlingly similar rhetoric, and if you read my book, you'll see. I mean, it'll all feel very familiar.

You see the same kind of rhetoric 100 years earlier after the first Reconstruction, right? If the Civil Rights Movement was the second Reconstruction, the first Reconstruction, that brief period of multiracial democracy in the American South after the Civil War. Suddenly former Confederates who were trying to find a rhetoric that would allow them to oppose these new multiracial governments, but did not want to oppose them directly because they would, perhaps — and I think accurately — have been seen as continuing to try and fight the Civil War by new means, right, they turned to this language of taxpaying; and they suddenly started describing themselves as the poor hardworking taxpayers who are being forced to pay for this corrupt government that's sending benefits to undeserving people.

Throughout our history, that kind of a rhetoric, that kind of fear that the wrong kind of people are involved in government, racialized in those two examples, but it was about, you see it in early America as well, concern about poorer Americans, even just poor white Americans, participating in politics. Suddenly there's a fear that that power of taxation is dangerous to the elite, and so every time that occurs, there's that expansion of the polity, there's a move by antidemocratic forces to rein in the tax power, because the tax power is what makes democracy potent. It's what makes it strong, right? It makes it have consequences, and so we see that dynamic over and over.

Joseph J. Thorndike: Right, and it's also a lever of control, the tax, as you say, because there's lots of things that a rich person might fear from the government. They might fear regulation, for instance, but controlling the taxpayer, you can actually modulate the regulation too, so it's a very useful tool.

What you've done is now you've led into this larger story about taxpayer language, which, it seems so self-evident, so descriptive. Taxpayer. It's just a normal word. It's a person who pays taxes. That describes you and me and everyone else, and it seems natural, and I think that you're attempting to denaturalize it or to problematize it, to use these academic phrases we enjoy so much, but I think that's really useful, right, because it's those words that seem obvious and without ideological content but that end up doing a lot of ideological work; that's the mark of really successful rhetoric, really.

Vanessa Williamson: That is exactly right. Yeah, so the idea of the taxpayer, it is genuinely hard to imagine a nontaxpayer, because you don't have to just not be paying income tax. You have to not be paying payroll taxes. You have to not be paying sales taxes. How are you getting your food? Are you living on a small farm by yourself? But then, don't you pay property taxes?

I mean, it's genuinely hard to conceive of the nontaxpayer, if we're being empirical about what it means to pay taxes, right, and yet the phrase is used all the time, and there's often a presumed nontaxpayer, that they maybe don't pay enough in taxes. Yeah, it's an ideological category that usefully papers over other categories that perhaps people want to talk about as who is deserving of citizenship, right? Papering over that and using this other apparently neutral language that's just about whether you're a contributor.

It's exactly the same with government beneficiary. Who among us is not a beneficiary of government, right? I don't know. I walked on the sidewalk just this morning, so it's very hard to imagine. Similarly, when we're talking in political terms about who benefits from government, who are these government beneficiaries and are they deserving? We're not talking about everybody. We're talking about a specific group, but we're just trying to stay away from the words that might describe who we mean.

Joseph J. Thorndike: Okay. You did take us back through Reconstruction a little bit, but let's go even further back again to the founding era, and look at some of these institutions of American democracy, and the Constitution being maybe the most obvious one. The Constitution gets built with some really important antitax guardrails, especially around the taxation of wealth. How'd that happen? Why did it happen? Tell us about it.

Vanessa Williamson: A thing that Americans often don't think very much about is that we start our war for independence in 1776, and we get a Constitution, and we have the government that we're familiar with today in 1790, 1791. What happened between the two? Right? It's amazingly rarely taught.

For a while we had something called the Articles of Confederation, which was basically a very, very weak central government that let the states operate largely independently; and the central government, such as it was, did not have the power to tax. It could only do requisitions, which was basically, "Please, states, give us some money," and it didn't work very well, as you might imagine.

The other thing to know about the period is that all wars are fought on debt, but, wow, did we rack up some debts in becoming an independent nation from Britain. We really racked up the debts, and we did that a lot of different ways. Huge numbers of different kinds of IOUs and different kinds of paper money, different bills, and things, all put forward to cover things like paying the Continental army or requisitioning all the supplies that we needed to feed that army.

At the end of the war, there's all this debt paper, and it's been issued to some extent centrally, to some extent by all the different states, and it's very confusing. How much is any of it worth, and who knows? The Continental dollar, for example, cratered and was basically valueless. Right? There was rampant inflation of some of this paper money, and so what happens in the immediate postwar period when we don't have a central government that is powerful enough to straighten anything out is all that debt paper starts getting collected by speculators, right? Because who could afford to buy it? Only people who had some money, right, so all of that government debt starts accumulating in incredibly few hands.

We were a small country back then, so in some states, it's really a few dozen people who are holding huge amounts of the state debt. Now, all these little states have to tax, because somehow they've got to pay that debt back. What that means on the ground is that people who just spent an awful lot of time complaining about British taxation, right, and taxation without representation, now they're represented, but there's still the taxation, and it's really high, and it's not going to build roads and schools or anything that people might want. Right? It's all going to pay this debt that they don't hold anymore, that someone bought from them.

If you're a soldier and you had some debt papers, you might have sold it just to get home, and you sold it for pennies on the dollar, and now that rich guy who bought that is going to get paid full freight on those debt papers with your tax dollars. Worst of all, you're going to have to pay with what was called specie. This is gold and silver coin, and there really, really wasn't enough money.

It's hard to imagine now, but there just wasn't. If you lived on the frontier, you didn't pay for things with coins. You had an account with your neighbor, you didn't use coins that often. You were a subsistence farmer. There really weren't many opportunities where you really needed to actually have money-money. This is one of the things the British got wrong, right? They kept trying to tax us out of our silver that we didn't have. This is one of the reasons people were mad about taxes.

Now we've got this great new republic, and all these states are trying to do the thing the British did that we just fought a revolution about, and so people are really mad. What you see is a bunch of tax revolts in this early period, and they're not saying they don't want to pay taxes. They're saying, "Can we please pay with paper money? Because we don't have any of these coins that you want us to pay with."

And so there was actually deflation, right? Money became more and more valuable, because everyone had goods, everyone had farm goods or whatever, but they couldn't get their hands on any money, so that money became hugely valuable, especially around tax time, and you couldn't get the coin you needed to pay, even if you had, sitting there, grain or whatever it was you would otherwise be able to exchange for money. People kept asking, "Oh, can we please have paper money so we can pay our taxes?"

To the people who had all the debt paper, they were worried about inflation. They were worried that this was just a scam to make debts disappear, right, because if inflation goes up fast enough, debts become very, very easy to pay, and so they didn't want to do that. They wanted hard money used to pay taxes, and that led to a series of tax revolts that were very similar to the revolts Britain had seen in the Colonies. But now it's against these new governments, and that means that when we get to the point of finally dealing with the fact that we don't have a central government — a little known fact, New York and Vermont were at war with each other during this period. We really, really needed a central government, OK?

When we get to the point of dealing with that very obvious straightforward problem that we needed a stronger central government, all the elites are looking at the common people and saying, "Oh, maybe this democracy stuff went too far. Maybe those constitutions we put in place during the sort of fervor of the early independence period, maybe that's too much. We've got to rein that in." That's why we live under a Constitution today that is actually quite antidemocratic, on purpose. It's why we have a Senate with long terms, where we only turn over a third of the Senate at any time.

[Alexander] Hamilton wanted the president to be elected for life, a somewhat terrifying prospect, but that was what he wanted, because this is a period where the elites did not trust the power of the people. Right? There had just been this expansion of political power and elites were looking at that and saying, "We can't trust the regular people to decide about taxes, because they're going to put in this paper money that we don't want." That's why we end up with a Constitution that's far more conservative than the state constitutions that had proceeded it, and it put in place many of the structures that continue to limit mass democratic power at a federal level today.

Joseph J. Thorndike: Yeah, like the direct tax clause. Well, tell us a little bit about it, because it's at work today, let's put it that way. Whether or not it should be is really a question for the lawyers, but tell us about it and where it came from.

Vanessa Williamson: Going into the Constitutional Convention, there's a widespread agreement that the government should not be very democratic. We need lots of controls, lots of limits. Can't just be the House, it's got to have the Senate and all these things, but there was a disagreement about how strong the federal government should be.

People like Hamilton wanted very strong centralized government. [James] Madison actually wanted a lot of this too. But there was also, at the same convention, a lot of concern, particularly among slaveholders, that the government would be too strong, particularly in its taxing powers, because what they were afraid of in the South — the Southern elite were afraid of — is that this new government, even one that was only elected by propertied white men, but now that this government was going to have the power to tax, they would achieve abolition by taxation. Every single tax limitation that exists in our Constitution, right, our Constitution has a bunch of antidemocratic components. It also has a bunch of antitax components. Every single one of those comes out of a compromise with slaveholders.

Slaveholders demand extra representation through the three-fifths clause, and right there next to it is this thing called the direct tax clause. My favorite part, I think to some extent, of the Constitutional Convention is the part where someone asks, right there in the convention, they've got this part in about the direct taxes, and it says that direct taxes need to be apportioned just like representation. Right? That meant then, according to the three-fifths clause, now, because the three-fifths clause is gone, but the direct tax clause is still there, it means that the amount of taxes coming from a state has to be, if they're direct taxes, that has to be proportionate to the number of people in that state.

This is goofy in various ways, and we can discuss that, but my favorite part of the convention is when someone raised their hand and asked, "What's a direct tax?" No one answered. It's right there in Madison's notes that no one defined this at the time, so we say that direct taxes need to be apportioned by population and leave it at that. It gets abandoned there in the Constitution.

In early America, they decide — and probably basically rightly — what the founders had in mind was two things, either direct taxes on people, that is a poll tax, or direct taxes on land, so a property tax. Those were the two kinds of things that were probably meant as direct taxes, and the poll tax is the part that would've endangered slavery, right, that if they could put an especially high poll tax on people who are enslaved, you could tax slavery out of existence. That was part of what the slave owners were afraid of, so direct taxes have to be apportioned by state population. Some states have almost no slaves. Some states have literally no slaves by this time, and so you can't just tax slaves and apportion it by state, because you'll get — how are people going to pay that tax in states that don't have any enslaved people?

The direct tax clause has this magical power, in its absurdity, to keep the federal government from being able to tax anything that is seen as a direct tax and is only in certain states. The Supreme Court back then decides that this is basically — they describe it as absurd, when they try and work out the math on this, because it doesn't make any sense to apportion taxes by population. And they decide that anything that can't be apportioned is therefore not a direct tax, because that would be crazy, and that's the rule that goes on for about nearly 100 years. We have an income tax in the Civil War, and it's determined not to be a direct tax. Ha, ha.

Arrive at the Gilded Age, and now there's all this concern, once again, that the poor have too much power, and we can't trust them. There would be a war of the poor against the rich. This is something that one of those Gilded Age Supreme Court justices says, and so now they decide, against all precedent, that an income tax is a direct tax. That is why, as you well know, we had to have an income tax amendment to the Constitution.

Joseph J. Thorndike: It's interesting, because at the time, there are a lot of people who say this [Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Company] decision is ridiculous and inconsistent with the Court's previous opinions. We don't actually need an income tax amendment. These are not direct taxes, but it was a workaround.

It was the easiest workaround to this direct tax problem that the Court had created, this long hand of slavery reaching forward, and so they used the amendment to do that, but of course the amendment is circumscribed. Right? It only applies to income taxes, not to other kinds of taxes which might run afoul of someone's notion of a direct tax, like a wealth tax.

Vanessa Williamson: Exactly. Yeah, so to this day, if people say that a wealth tax is unconstitutional, it's almost undoubtedly the direct tax that they are using to make the case. Right? This special little time bomb that was put into our Constitution by the slave owners continues to protect oligarchy to this day.

Joseph J. Thorndike: All right, let's jump forward a little bit. World War II transforms the income tax into a mass tax, when it was originally focused just on the very rich.

How does that reshape Americans' relationship to this state, and how has that changed as the scope of the income tax has actually now narrowed in recent decades? I have a feeling that there might be a process there that begins in the war.

Vanessa Williamson: Well, I'm a little embarrassed to tell you about it, Joe, because obviously you've done the work on this. I'm basically quoting you back to you.

There's basically a moment in the early part of the war effort, World War II, where we could have done, in principle at the federal level, one of two things. Right? We could have extended our income tax, which was at the beginning just a class tax on the very rich, or at least really quite rich. We could extend that, bring the bottom bracket down, more or less, and have everyone pay income taxes, or we could have put in place a national sales tax, a VAT, something along those lines, right?

What we do, in large part because it's what Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted to do, was extend the income tax, and so this is a sort of wonderful period of history, just because the effort involved with making it so that everyday Americans could fill out a page-long form and submit — and there wasn't withholding yet, right, so you actually had to pay your taxes, you had to save up and be able to pay your taxes — that they could fill out the form, figure how much they owed, submit that money. There's no calculators.

It was an enormous propaganda effort, right, to teach people how on earth to pay your income taxes, a thing that we, at a federal level, never really asked most people to do. There's a wonderful propaganda campaign. Donald Duck is brought on board to explain the income tax to people. Irving Berlin writes a wonderful song, "I Paid My Income Tax Today," and what's amazing is that it worked. Right? There are billboards everywhere, and people do. People do manage to pay their income taxes, right, because it's part of this extraordinary effort for the war, and the top rates are, of course, extremely high, and people, generally speaking, people are very positive about that experience of taxpaying. They see it as part of the war effort, they see as part of their patriotism, and we get a mass income tax.

Then, when the war ends, we never really build, properly, I think, the case for the income tax in peacetime, right, for the mass public. We keep using it because it's a useful tool, and in the mid-20th century, incomes are rising and there's bracket creep to keep the money flowing in, but we never really build the case for the income tax in a nonwar setting, and I think that left it vulnerable when times got harder and when the old racist argument about who is participating in government and who deserves and who's getting benefits, when that reemerges in the post-Civil Rights era.

Joseph J. Thorndike: Right, so now you're getting us to the 1970s here, and the sort of counterreaction to this progressive revolution in taxation of the 1930s and '40s. Now we're at 1970, and what's happening?

Vanessa Williamson: First of all, of course, Black people have returned to the polity with their full citizenship, and you see not just the Civil Rights revolution across the South, the end of the sort of legal part of Jim Crow, but you're seeing a lot of activity in the northern cities, trying to address segregation that's not just on the books, but that's been built into our cities, right, that's been built into our segregated school system, that's been built into our housing policies.

It's in that era that you see new fights over taxation emerge, and particularly, I think it's a very interesting phenomenon from that sort of later mid-century period that it's poorer white people who start identifying themselves as taxpayers. To their mind, what they have bought with their tax dollars is white communities.

Richer white people are not reliant on the state to maintain their segregation. They can keep their neighborhoods exclusionary simply by the fact that they're very, very expensive. They can send their kids to the private schools. Well, for poorer people, poorer white people, it's their neighborhoods who are getting integrated, and there is a very concerted effort to reidentify as taxpayers, just as it happened in the reaction to Reconstruction, to try and demand racial exclusion as part of their rights as citizens.

That's where you start to see this sort of, the welfare queen rhetoric popping back up again, and I think that the great question looking forward, right, is: Are we going to manage to overcome that recurring stumbling block in our capacity for solidarity? Are we ever actually going to manage to accept that "we the people" are all the people? I don't know. It is certainly the question on the table for all of us again today.

One of the things I hope my book achieves is to help people recognize the absolute con involved in sort of tricking people into believing that the problem is those other people, those other people getting benefits. Right?

Because anytime that rhetoric recurs and there's all the concern about the taxpayer, when white supremacists came back to power — for example, after Reconstruction — did that work out really well for poor whites in the South? It absolutely did not. Taxes were cut for the rich and shifted onto the poor, including poor whites. Right? The schools were underfunded, right, so you see a lot of that same stuff happening again, that there's a rhetoric of taxation that points the finger at minorities and is an excuse for profiteering by the very rich.

Joseph J. Thorndike: Yeah, so if I'm hearing you right, what you're saying now is that this project is what you say we never actually did after the war, which is, we have to create an affirmative case for the existence of the income tax and for taxpaying that will sustain that tax, or at least that approach to taxation. Maybe it's not the income tax exactly, because — and we really probably won't have time to get into this — but you make the good point that progressive taxes are not the be-all and end-all.

I've always thought that if progressives really wanted to land on one word about taxes that should matter to them, it should be "enough," because that's really the only thing that matters. That's the lesson from the rest of the world, is that it doesn't actually matter so much how you raise your taxes. It matters more just that you have enough of it.

Now, sure, you can imagine a wealth tax that will constrain great fortunes, or an estate tax that will eliminate [the rich] by taxing them out of — although, in reality, that's not the way those taxes have ever actually worked, either, but that if you want to hurt the rich, because they're just too damn rich, then you do need something like a draconian estate tax, but if you want to help poor people be less poor and expand the middle class and make the middle class existence better, what you might need is a bunch of regressive taxes that are spent well. I think you make that point about Social Security.

Vanessa Williamson: That's exactly right. One of the sort of questions I was left with as I was writing the book is, okay, so there's a question we had at the origin of the country, is: What does taxation for a republic look like? Right? What is the right tax system for a democracy to help it maintain its status as a democracy?

I think it's twofold, right? I think on the one hand, you absolutely do need to have taxes at the top that prevent people from getting too rich. This is something [Thomas] Paine worried about. I talk about this in the book.

Tom Paine — who wrote Common Sense and said the United States shouldn't have a king, it was the most popular pamphlet in early America, real radical — he also argued in his book, The Rights of Man, that we needed a progressive tax on the income from wealth that went up to 100 percent. That 100 percent bracket went in at a level of wealth that was like the Duke of something or other in England. No one in America had that much money at the time, but he thought that there had to be a limit to property, because the problem of the very rich was they created corruption at elections. That's a quote.

I mean, he knew what he was talking about, right? We can all see the way in which our political process is corrupted by wealth, and I think it is a fundamental danger, right, so there's a democratic case for high progressive taxation, no doubt.

The thing that — sometimes you hear Democrats talk about that a little bit, like capital-D Democrats, talk about that a little bit — the thing that Democrats do not do anymore that FDR did, that Lyndon B. Johnson did, that lots of other people who have been progressive in the general sense have said, is that regular people need to pay taxes too, because what we need is enough money. Exactly what you said, right? We need to have enough money for the schools and for the roads and for all the other things like Social Security, which is funded with a regressive tax.

I think that to me, the biggest piece of evidence I could imagine looking forward that our democracy was really on sound footing again is that people were willing to talk about our government being worth paying for. Not just that we're going to put taxes on the five people who have too much money, that we're actually going to contribute to our own government because it's our government.

Joseph J. Thorndike: Honestly, I think that is the most important point to make going forward, is, again, that affirmative case for unpleasant things like taxes. To me, it's the unpleasantness of it, actually is important. It's that this is aversive and we don't want to do it, but it's a shared responsibility.

Whenever you have a thing that's aversive and nobody wants to do it but needs to get done, you have to make the case, like, "All right, we've got to do this. We've got to fight a war. Let's do this together in the best way possible." Wars make that easy. You hate to say that about a war, but wars do clarify things like that, and without the clarifying moment of a war, it's really hard to figure out how to do that. I mean, you lay out the challenge. I don't know that I see exactly how we get there, but that it's clear that we need to get there.

Vanessa Williamson: To me, there is some room for some optimism on this subject, because even as the rhetoric of our politics has moved to a very extreme place on taxation on the right, knee-jerk absolute antitax position, the views of most Americans have actually not shifted at all in decades. Right? Again, the things I said at the beginning about what bothers you most about taxation, that's true if you look at a poll in 1985. It's true if you look at a poll in 1995, 2005, it doesn't matter. There's the same data all the time. Of course, slight variations, but mostly this is very stable stuff, and the idea that you have a civic responsibility to pay taxes, absolutely stable over many decades.

I think there's a base thing to work with in terms of how people think about taxation. What we've really seen is an abdication of leadership that I think speaks to the corruption of our politics by wealth. There's been a real abdication of leadership in terms of defending government at all, and in particular, defending government as something worth paying taxes for.

Joseph J. Thorndike: Yeah. I think that's a great point to end this on, because that is, I think, really the point that I take from the book, among many other great ones. All right. Well, hey, thanks very much for being with us today, Vanessa. It's been a delight.

Vanessa Williamson: Oh, thank you so much, Joe. This is great.

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