AlterNet interviewed historian Thom Hartmann about his new book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told, which argues that current battles over elections, corporate power and democracy have roots in 19th-century legal history.

The interview, conducted by Matthew Rozsa and lightly edited for clarity and context, centered on Hartmann's view that the Supreme Court's treatment of corporations as rights-bearing persons has helped empower wealthy interests for more than a century. Rozsa framed the discussion by citing President Donald Trump's efforts around the 2026 midterm elections, including voter-roll purges, voter ID demands, proposals to send troops to polling places, seizures of ballot boxes and interference with mail-in voting. The conversation linked campaign finance, corporate regulation and voting access as parts of the same broader argument about how legal rules can shape political power.

Hartmann said the book is not only a critique of Trump or MAGA politics, but an account of what he calls a plutocratic project that reaches back to the 1800s.

MATTHEW ROZSA: Your book focuses on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company and argues that, from that case through Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court has followed an anti-democratic pattern by treating corporations as if they have the same rights as people. In layperson's terms, why has that assumption been so harmful?

THOM HARTMANN: For roughly the first 100 years of the Republic, everyone understood that there were natural persons and artificial persons. Natural persons are human beings, such as you and me. We have protections in the Constitution, including rights specified in the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment.

Artificial persons were corporations, nonprofits, churches and other nonhuman entities that needed a form of personhood status to pay taxes, sign contracts, sue or be sued, open checking accounts and conduct similar business. That distinction was clear. Hartmann's objection was not to corporations having legal capacity to operate, but to courts extending constitutional protections written for human beings to entities created by law.

In 1886, the railroads argued that they were being taxed unfairly by two California counties because the tax rates differed, and that this violated equal protection under the law, which the 14th Amendment says all persons are entitled to. The court did not rule in their favor on that argument. But the clerk of the court and one Supreme Court justice conspired to suggest that it had. That assertion appeared in the headnote of the 1886 decision and, in Hartmann's words, lay around "like a hand grenade" until Lewis Powell picked it up in the 1978 Bellotti v. Baird decision. Hartmann said it was then amplified during the Reagan Revolution, by John Roberts, the Reagan Justice Department and the Supreme Court. He called Citizens United in 2010 the classic example.

Hartmann said corporations can spend money to support politicians or campaigns because the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations have First Amendment rights, including free speech rights. Because a corporation does not have a mouth, he said, the Court adopted the workaround that "its money is the same thing as its mouth, so it can speak with its money."

He also cited the Fourth Amendment. Hartmann said the amendment bars the government from invading privacy unless someone swears before a judge that there is reason to believe a crime was committed. He described a case in which Dow Chemical was illegally venting benzene into the air over one of its chemical factories. The EPA flew an airplane over the factory to photograph it and use the images as evidence. Dow Chemical sued, and the Supreme Court ruled that Dow Chemical had privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment. Hartmann said that decision made surprise inspections of factories and polluting facilities by federal and state governments almost impossible.

Hartmann said corporations have also claimed rights under the Fifth Amendment, including protections against compelled self-incrimination and government seizure of assets without due process. In his view, this allows corporations to avoid admitting to crimes, avoid testimony that could harm them and resist government seizure of property after wrongdoing.

"This whole idea that a corporation should have rights under the Bill of Rights, which was specifically designed for human beings, is nuts," Hartmann said.

Hartmann said the doctrine entered law through Stephen J. Field, whom he described as a corrupt Supreme Court justice who had been promised railroad support for a presidential run, and John Chandler Bancroft Davis, the court clerk, whose father had been governor of Massachusetts and who was himself wealthy and a former railroad CEO. Hartmann said the two wrote the idea into the headnote of the 1886 case even though it contradicted the actual decision.

Headnotes, Hartmann noted, have no legal standing and are summaries for law students and researchers. He said the justice quoted in the headnote, Morrison Waite, had died by the time it was published. Waite, Hartmann said, was suffering from congestive heart failure in 1886 and died the next year, or perhaps the year after, while the decision was not published for several years because it took time to write and typeset.

Hartmann said the railroad hired Roscoe Conkling of New York, later a U.S. representative and senator, who had served on the committee that wrote the 14th Amendment.

ROZSA: I'm familiar with him. He had a turkey-gobbler strut, a famous insult from his Republican rival, Sen. James G. Blaine of Maine.

HARTMANN: Exactly. Hartmann said Conkling and another senator whose name he could not recall toured the country for several years, paid by railroads, and told legislatures and legal groups that they had intentionally written the 14th Amendment to say all persons, rather than all natural persons, were entitled to equal protection because they intended it to include corporations.

Hartmann called that claim "a flat-out lie," but said the public relations campaign was effective through the early 1890s. By the late 1890s, he said, the Supreme Court cited the headnote in a decision, which is when he believes it arguably became law. The idea was used in relatively small ways for decades, he said, before Bellotti in 1978 and Citizens United in 2010 turned it into what he called a weapon against democracy and the economy.

Rozsa then turned to tariffs and President Grover Cleveland. He said he wrote his master's thesis on Cleveland's 1887 State of the Union message, which focused on tariff reform, and a paper for the Progressive Policy Institute last year arguing that Democrats tend to perform better when they support low tariffs. Rozsa cited Cleveland's 1894 letter referring to high tariffs as a "communism of pelf," noting that pelf is an archaic or derogatory term for money, riches or wealth. Rozsa asked whether Trump's protectionist tariffs created a "communism of pelf" and whether the Supreme Court had made such practices legal.

Hartmann said Cleveland's 1887 State of the Union address discussed trusts and combinations that had arisen and threatened to crush average people. Paraphrasing from memory, Hartmann said Cleveland argued that corporations, which should be carefully constrained servants of the people, had become their masters, leaving ordinary people under the corporations' iron heel.

"Cleveland knew what was going on," Hartmann said.

He said the value or lack of value of tariffs and protectionist policies could be debated, and noted that Alexander Hamilton supported such policies in his Report on Manufactures, though Hartmann was unsure whether the year was 1798 or 1780. Rozsa repeated the phrase "communism of pelf." Hartmann replied that communism had a different meaning at the time. He cited a book of Abraham Lincoln's correspondence with Karl Marx and said Marxism and communism were widely discussed then. In that era, Hartmann said, communism essentially meant sharing wealth and was not viewed as the dictatorial political system associated with the Soviet Union.

Rozsa next asked about what Hartmann calls the "deflection scam," in which Republicans since Ronald Reagan, or perhaps since Richard Nixon according to historian Rick Perlstein, deflected attention from economic inequality and plutocracy by blaming African Americans, immigrants, gay people, trans people, women and the poor themselves. Rozsa asked how people speaking casually with conservatives or Trump supporters could puncture those deflection strategies and refocus the discussion.

Hartmann said the subject was addressed in an op-ed at hartmannreport.com that he expected Raw Story or AlterNet might pick up. His first recommendation was to call out hate directly when it is used as scaffolding for distraction techniques. He suggested saying that using hate is beneath someone, un-American, disappointing and surprising.

Hartmann then argued that from 1981 to the present, a span he described as 45 years, no major piece of legislation proposed by Republicans, passed by a majority of Republicans in the House and Senate, and signed by a Republican president had principally benefited the average working person. He said he has hosted a radio program for 23 years and, throughout that period, has offered an autographed book to anyone who could identify such a law.

He acknowledged a few smaller measures, such as George H.W. Bush's "no call" list, but said that effort largely became a scam. By contrast, Hartmann said every major social advance and the policies that made the middle class possible had been advanced by the Democratic Party since 1933.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1933, Hartmann said, perhaps 20 percent of the U.S. population was in the middle class, depending on the definition. He said that was strong for an industrialized country and that no country had ever surpassed 50 percent. Hartmann said FDR created Social Security, the right to unionize, the minimum wage, workplace protections, vigorous anti-monopoly enforcement, a 90 percent top individual income tax rate and a 50 percent top corporate income tax rate, among other programs that benefited average people and built the infrastructure on which the middle class could rise.

By 1981, when Reagan was elected, Hartmann said two-thirds of Americans, about 65 percent to 66 percent, were in the middle class on a single paycheck. He said he was using Theodore Roosevelt's definition of middle class from the Square Deal: enough income to buy a house, buy a car, put children through school, save for retirement and take a vacation every year.

Hartmann said the middle-class share is now only 41 percent to 45 percent and requires two paychecks. He attributed the change to 45 years of Reaganomics, saying that according to the RAND Corporation, $70 trillion had been transferred out of the wealth, pockets, homes and broader resources of the middle and working classes into the holdings of the top 1 percent. He described the resulting wealth inequality as pharaonic and unlike anything seen in the modern industrialized world.

Because Republicans cannot discuss what they have accomplished, Hartmann said, they identify a villain in every election. He said their only accomplishment has been reducing taxes on billionaires and large corporations while contributing to a national debt of $35 trillion, roughly the same amount as the total impact of the Reagan, Bush and Trump tax cuts. He described recurring scapegoats: Black people, migrant caravans, brown people described as rapists and murderers, women in the workplace labeled "feminazis," and, in 2024, trans people portrayed as coming for children and requiring taxpayer-funded surgeries.

"There's always a villain," Hartmann said. He said the purpose is to shift attention away from Republican policies that he says gutted the American middle class and damaged democracy.

Rozsa then asked about Hartmann's proposed multi-plank platform to revitalize democracy: rebuilding unions, taxing oligarchs, making health care affordable, making education accessible, making housing affordable, enforcing antitrust laws, creating living wages and addressing climate change. Rozsa asked whether the mainstream Democratic Party and the Democratic socialist wing had effective strategies and policies to achieve those goals.

Hartmann said he believed it was possible. With the exception of climate change, he said, the United States had already done every one of those things in the past, and they worked well before Republicans deconstructed them.

He cited his own family history. His mother graduated from Michigan State University, paid her own way while poor and worked as a lifeguard during the summer in Charlevoix, Michigan. His father went to college on the GI Bill, came from a poor family of Norwegian immigrants and had a father who worked as a woodworker. Hartmann's father got a job in a tool-and-die shop and, on one paycheck, bought a house and a new car every three years. He raised four sons, put them all through school, retired and traveled the world with his pension and Social Security.

"We've done it before, so it shouldn't be that difficult to do again," Hartmann said. He added that such an agenda could tap into the nostalgia behind MAGA, noting that "Make America Great Again" was a Ronald Reagan phrase that Donald Trump appropriated.

The challenge, Hartmann said, is that about half of elected Democrats are, in his words, legally "on the take" because of the Supreme Court decisions discussed in the book, receiving support from corporations that benefit from preventing those reforms. He said this began in the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton faced the reality that Reagan had weakened unions. Hartmann said the Democratic Party had historically been funded by unions, but Reagan reduced unionization from about one-third of American workers to under 10 percent in less than 12 years.

When Clinton ran for president, Hartmann said, unions could no longer support him at a level sufficient to elect him. According to Hartmann, Clinton concluded Democrats would have to align with corporations and sought "good corporations," such as banks and insurance companies, because they did not poison the air or pollute the water. Hartmann said that strategy got Clinton elected and was necessary at the time, but did not work out well.

Hartmann said Barack Obama later demonstrated that fundraising could be done online, enabling the rise of the Sanders wing, the progressive wing and the AOC wing of the party, which relies on individual donations. At the same time, he said, Citizens United massively tilted the playing field based on what he calls the 1886 lie. That contrast underscored one of Hartmann's central themes: small-dollar fundraising may broaden participation, but the legal framework for large-scale outside spending remains central to disputes over democratic reform.

He said some Democrats are openly "on the take" and frequently vote against their own party, including a little more than a dozen who did so in the week of the interview. Hartmann said both the party and the country have work to do, but added that he remains optimistic. He said Americans are recognizing what is happening, that Trump's excesses and abuses have been extreme, and that GOP support for them has been self-interested. Hartmann said Americans want honest government and the return of the middle class.

Rozsa then asked whether Trump's efforts to crush protests and seize voting machines would be effective or whether Democrats could counter them. Rozsa said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had apparently convened a Democratic caucus earlier that day to discuss counterstrategies.

Hartmann said he did not know much about Schumer's plans, joking that it might involve another strongly worded letter. He then cited Greg Palast, whom he described as a friend, former BBC and Guardian reporter, and the journalist who broke the 2000 story about Jeb Bush purging 90,000 Black people from the voter rolls weeks before the 2000 election, helping his brother win Florida and become president. Hartmann said Palast has a master's degree in statistics, a journalism background and studied under Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago.

After the 2024 election, Hartmann said, Palast reviewed official government statistics at the state and federal levels about who was allowed to vote and who was purged from voter rolls before and during the election. Hartmann said Palast found that about four million legally qualified citizen voters were not allowed to vote.

About half, Hartmann said, were removed in large voter purges, with Georgia serving as what he called an epicenter. He noted that Palast made a film about the subject called Vigilantes, Inc. The other half, Hartmann said, were affected by other techniques, including Republican poll workers challenging mail-in ballot signatures and voters receiving provisional ballots instead of regular ballots. In most states, Hartmann said, voters with provisional ballots must appear in person at the Secretary of State's office within a week or two to have the ballot counted, a process known as curing.

Hartmann also cited reduced polling-place hours, polling places moved without notice and phoned-in bomb threats. He said he could not say the Republican Party was responsible for the threats, but that they occurred often in 2024 in critical swing districts for Democrats.

Hartmann said Palast had published findings showing that if those four million people had been able to vote, and because those voters can now be identified, Kamala Harris would have become president and Democrats would have controlled the House and Senate. Hartmann said voter suppression had already worked and that, next time, its backers would understand that purging four million people would not be enough and would seek to purge six, eight or 10 million.

He said the question is whether Democrats can turn out enough voters and whether Republican voters will be sufficiently disheartened by the Trump administration's failures to produce what he called an overwhelming blue wave. If the election is tight, Hartmann said, voter suppression efforts will probably succeed. "So we've got a big job ahead of us," he said.

Rozsa's final question asked whether Trump represents a revolution or an evolution of politics that began with Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes.

Hartmann said he was searching for a word meaning a return to an old system, something related to evolution or revolution but not devolution. He described Trump as a reactionary trying to reinvent the Confederacy. Hartmann said Trump is literally doing so by bringing back Confederate statues and names and rewriting history to celebrate the Confederacy.

Hartmann said the Confederacy was hostile to voting and democracy and had lost democracy by the 1850s. He said it then declared war against what remained of democracy in the northern half of the United States in an attempt to eliminate democracy nationwide and establish a coast-to-coast oligarchy.

"I would argue that that's Trump's mission right now — to recreate that," Hartmann said. "So whatever word you want to use to describe it, that's what it is."