Progressive 3 Populist
estb 11 24
SEE BERNIE 2 AND THREE
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Blue Future, Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund, Civic Shout, Defeat Republicans, Democracy for America Advocacy Fund, Democratic Values PAC, HollywoodDemocrats.com, Inequality Media Civic Action, Left Click, Patriotic Millionaires, People Power United, Progress America, Progressive Reform Network, Solidarity Action, TakeItBack.Org, The Juggernaut Project, The Labor Force, United for Democracy, and Social Security Works,* the sponsors of this letter campaign.
- You may receive email updates from Inequality Media Civic Action, who shared this letter campaign with you
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The many controversial people appointed to the Trump administration, from Elon Musk to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have at least one thing in common: They dislike and distrust experts.
While anti-intellectualism and populism are nothing new in American life, there has hardly been an administration as seemingly committed to these worldviews.
Take President Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Kennedy, a well-known vaccine skeptic, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy, whose Senate confirmation hearing is Jan. 29, 2025, epitomizes the new American political ethos of populism and anti-intellectualism, or the idea that people hold negative feelings toward not just scientific research but those who produce it.
Anti-intellectual attacks on the scientific community have been increasing, and have become more partisan, in recent years.
For instance, Trump denigrated scientific experts on the campaign trail and in his first term in office. He called climate science a “hoax” and public health officials in his administration “idiots.”
Skepticism, false assertions
This rhetoric filtered into public discussion, as seen in viral social media posts mocking and attacking scientists like Dr. Anthony Fauci, or anti-mask protesters confronting health officials at public meetings and elsewhere.
Trump and Kennedy have cast doubt on vaccine safety and the medical scientific establishment. As far back as the Republican primary debates in 2016, Trump falsely asserted that childhood vaccines cause autism, in defiance of scientific consensus on the issue.
Kennedy’s long-term vaccine skepticism has also been well documented, though he himself denies it. More recently, he has been presenting himself as “pro-vaccine safety,” as one Republican senator put it, on the eve of Kennedy’s confirmation hearing.
Kennedy has mirrored Trump’s anti-intellectual rhetoric by referring to government health agency culture as “corrupt” and the agencies themselves as “sock puppets.”
If confirmed, Kennedy has vowed to turn this anti-intellectual rhetoric into action. He wants to replace over 600 employees in the National Institutes of Health with his own hires. He has also suggested cutting entire departments.
During one interview, Kennedy said, “In some categories, there are entire departments, like the nutrition department at the FDA, that are – that have to go.”
Populism across political spectrum
In lockstep with this anti-intellectual movement is a version of populism that people like RFK Jr. and Trump both espouse.
Populism is a worldview that pits average citizens against “the elites.” Who the elites are varies depending on the context, but in the contemporary political climate in the U.S., establishment politicians, scientists and organizations like pharmaceutical companies or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are frequently portrayed as such.
For instance, right-wing populists often portray government health agencies as colluding with multinational pharmaceutical companies to impose excessive regulations, mandate medical interventions and restrict personal freedoms.
Left-wing populists expose how Big Pharma manipulates the health care system, using their immense wealth and political influence to put profits over people, deliberately keeping lifesaving medications overpriced and out of reach – all of which has been said by politicians like Bernie Sanders.
The goal of a populist is to portray these elites as the enemy of the people and to root out the perceived “corruption” of the elites.
This worldview doesn’t just appeal to the far right. Historically in the United States, populism has been more of a force on the political left. To this day, it is present on the left through Sanders and similar politicians who rail against wealth inequality and the interests of the “millionaire class.”
In short, the Trump administration’s populist and anti-intellectual worldview does not map cleanly onto the liberal-conservative ideological divide in the U.S. That is why Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat and nephew of a Democratic president, might become a Cabinet member for a Republican president.
The cross-ideological appeal of populism and anti-intellectualism also partly explains why praise for Trump’s selection of Kennedy to head the Department of Health and Human Services came from all corners of society. Republican senators Ron Johnson and Josh Hawley lauded the move, as did basketball star Rudy Gobert and Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis.
Even former President Barack Obama once considered Kennedy for a Cabinet post in 2008.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is greeted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on stage during a campaign event on Aug. 23, 2024, in Glendale, Ariz. Tom Brenner for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Anger at elites
Why, then, is disdain for scientific experts appealing to so many Americans?
Much of the public supports this worldview because of perceived ineffectiveness and moral wrongs made by the elites. Factors such as the opioid crisis encouraged by predatory pharmaceutical companies, public confusion and dissatisfaction with changing health guidance in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the frequently prohibitive cost of health care and medicine have given some Americans reason to question their trust in science and medicine.
Populists have embraced popular and science-backed policies that align with an anti-elite stance. Kennedy, for example, supports decreasing the amount of ultra-processed foods in public school lunches and reducing toxic chemicals in the food supply and natural environment. These stances are backed by scientific evidence about how to improve public health. At the same time, they point to the harmful actions of a perceived corrupt elite – the profit-driven food industry.
It is, of course, reasonable to want to hold accountable both public officials for their policy decisions and scientists and pharmaceutical companies who engage in unethical behavior. Scientists should by no means be immune from scrutiny.
Examining, for example, what public health experts got wrong during the COVID-19 pandemic would be tremendously helpful from the standpoint of preparing for future public health crises, but also from the standpoint of rebuilding public trust in science, experts and institutions.
However, the Trump administration does not appear to be interested in pursuing good faith assessments. And Trump’s victory means he gets to implement his vision and appoint people he wants to carry it out. But words have consequences, and we have seen the impact of anti-vaccine rhetoric during the COVID-19 pandemic, where “red” counties and states had significantly lower vaccine intent and uptake compared with the “blue” counterparts.
Therefore, despite sounding appealing, Kennedy’s signature slogan, “Make America Healthy Again,” could – in discouraging policies and behaviors that have been proven effective against diseases and their crippling or deadly outcomes – bring about a true public health crisis.
Dominik Stecuła, Assistant Professor of Communication and Political Science, The Ohio State University; Kristin Lunz Trujillo, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of South Carolina, and Matt Motta, Assistant Professor of Political Science, *Boston University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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So many of you have asked me how one of the most loathsome people in America was just reelected president that I thought you might find it helpful if I shared with you some personal history. This may also suggest how to root out Trumpism.
In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina while doing research on the changing nature of work in America.
I spoke with many of the people I had first met when I was secretary of labor in the 1990s. Several brought their friends and grown children to my informal meetings, which became a kind of free-floating focus group spread across states that had once been economic powerhouses but were now economic basket cases.
With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked my “focus groups” which candidates they found most attractive. At that time, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush were the likely Democratic and Republican candidates, respectively.
Yet almost no one I spoke with mentioned either Clinton or Bush. They talked about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, oftentimesboth,as candidates they’d support for president.
When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up,” “make the system work again,” “stop the corruption,” or “end the rigging.”
In the 1990s, many of these people (or their parents) had expressed frustration that they weren’t doing better. By 2015, that frustration had morphed into raw anger.
The people I met were furious with their employers, the federal government, and Wall Street. They were irate that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirements, upset that they had no job security, indignant that their children weren’t doing any better than they had at their children’s age, and outraged that houses were unaffordable, schools second-rate, and everything far more expensive.
Several people I talked with had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the financial crisis of 2008 or the Great Recession that followed it. Now most were back in jobs, but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before in terms of purchasing power.
I heard the term “rigged system” so often that I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.”
These complaints came from people who identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats, and independents. A few had joined the Tea Party; some had briefly been involved in the Occupy movement. Yet most of them didn’t consider themselves political.
They were white, Black, and Latino, from union households and non-union. The only characteristic they had in common was their position on the income ladder: middle class or below. All were struggling.
Many of the conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers I met condemned big corporations getting sweetheart deals from the government because of lobbying and campaign contributions.
A group of farmers in Missouri were livid about the emergence of “factory farms” — owned and run by big corporations — that abused land and cattle, damaged the environment, and ultimately harmed consumers. They claimed that giant food processors were using their monopoly power to squeeze the farmers dry, and the government was doing squat about it because of Big Agriculture’s money and influence.
In Cincinnati, I met with Republican small-business owners who were still hurting from the bursting of the housing bubble and the bailout of Wall Street. “Why didn’t underwater homeowners get any help?” one of them asked rhetorically. She answered her own question: “Because Wall Street has all the power.” Others nodded in agreement.
Whenever I suggested in a public appearance that big Wall Street banks be busted up — “any bank that’s too big to fail is too big, period” — I got loud applause.
In Kansas City, I met with Tea Partiers who were angry that hedge-fund and private-equity managers had wangled their own special “carried interest” tax deal. “No reason for it,” said one. “They’re not investing a dime of their own money. But they’ve paid off the politicians.”
In Raleigh, I heard from local bankers who thought Bill Clinton should never have repealed the Glass-Steagall Act that separated investment banking from commercial banking. “Clinton was in the pockets of Wall Street just like George W. Bush was,” said one.
Most of the people I met in America’s heartland wanted big money out of politics and thought the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision was shameful.
Most were also opposed to trade agreements, including NAFTA, that they believed had made it easier for corporations to outsource American jobs and destroy their communities.
Regardless of political party, most thought the economic system was biased in favor of the rich.
The more conversations I had, the more I understood the connection between people’s view of “crony capitalism” and their dislike of government. They didn’t oppose government per se. In fact, most favored additional spending on Social Security, Medicare, education, and infrastructure.
Rather, they saw government as the vehicle for big corporations and Wall Street to exert their power in ways that hurt them.
They called themselves Republicans, but many of the inhabitants of America’s heartland were economic populists. Heartland Republicans and progressive Democrats remained wide apart on cultural issues, such as immigration or abortion or LGBTQ+ rights. But wherever I went, the economic populist upsurge was real.
In 2016, Sanders — a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primary — came within a whisker of beating Hillary in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, garnered over 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention from primaries and caucuses.
Had the Democratic National Committee not tipped the scales against him by deriding his campaign and rigging campaign financing in favor of Hillary Clinton, I believe Sanders would have been the party’s nominee in 2016.
Trump, a 69-year-old egomaniacal billionaire reality TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party and who lied compulsively about almost everything, of course won the Republican primaries and went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America.
Something very big was happening: a rebellion against the establishment.
Hillary and Jeb Bush had deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisers, all the name recognition you could want — but neither of them could convince voters they weren’t part of the system, and therefore part of the problem.
When I did my interviews, the overall economy was doing well in terms of the standard measures of employment and growth. But those indicators didn’t reflect the economic insecurity most Americans felt and continue to feel, nor did they show the seeming unfairness most people experienced.
The indicators didn’t reveal the linkages many Americans saw, and still see, between wealth and power, crony capitalism and stagnant real wages, soaring CEO pay and their own loss of status, the emergence of a billionaire class and the undermining of democracy, and globalization and the loss of their communities.
The standard measures didn’t show the frustration of American workers without college degrees, who for decades have had to work harder with very little to show for it, and whose lifespans have shrunk.
Fast forward to today. Much of the political establishment denies what has just occurred. They prefer to attribute Trump’s reelection to political paranoia, xenophobia, white Christian nationalism, and the weaponization of the internet with racism, misogyny, or nativism.
Wrong. Trump has been able to channel the intensifying anger of the white working class away from the real causes of working-class distress — away from the big corporations, wealthy individuals, and denizens of Wall Street whose money has rigged the game against average working people.
It was not the first time in history that a demagogue has used scapegoats to deflect public attention from the real causes of their distress, and it won’t be the last.
In 2016 and then again in 2024, Trump galvanized millions of blue-collar voters living in communities that have never recovered from the tidal wave of factory closings and loss of good jobs.
Big money in politics has been the root of the problem. Campaign donations from wealthy individuals and big corporations have turned the economy over to large corporations, CEOs, and billionaires.
Large corporations, CEOs, and billionaires have embraced global trade without giving blue-collar workers any means of coping with it.
They have turned Wall Street into a gambling casino without insuring the rest of America against the risk that those bets would turn bad.
They have allowed giant corporations to monopolize without giving workers the countervailing power to unionize.
This was the premise of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. It was also central to Trump’s appeal (“I’m so rich I can’t be bought off”) — although once elected he delivered everything big money wanted. And, of course, his promises were empty ones.
In the 2016 primaries, Bernie Sanders did far better than Hillary Clinton with blue-collar voters. He did this by attacking trade agreements, Wall Street greed, income inequality, and big money in politics. Sanders sought to remedy the disease of the Democratic Party — its abandonment of economic populism and of the American dream.
Now that Trump has been reelected and his Republican lapdogs are in control of the Senate and likely to be in control of the House, it’s critically important for Democrats, progressives, and everyone concerned about social justice to see where the anger in America’s heartland has come from, to channel it toward its real causes, and to commit to taking power back from the big corporations, CEOs, and billionaires.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
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no lnx
https://www.alternet.org/americas-story/
alternet
Trump has offered extreme versions of America's four basic stories
Robert Reich December 12, 2024
Democrats are finally waking up to the fact that Trump Republicans have succeeded in framing issues to their advantage. While it’s true that Kamala Harris lost by a small margin, the overriding reality is that through many elections, Democrats have failed to speak to America in ways that most Americans understand.
The challenge facing Democrats is deeper than simply finding the right words and phrases. To win back the heart and soul of America, Democrats must retell the four basic stories that have defined and animated the United States since its founding.
For most of the 20th century, Democrats did this instinctively. But in this century, they have tended to speak in technocratic terms, giving Republicans — culminating in Trump — the dominant political narrative.
I want to tell you about how the four basic American stories have been told and explain why it’s urgent that the real story of our era be told: that wealth and power concentrated at the top are corrupting American democracy and shafting most working people.
There are four essential American stories. The first two are about hope; the second two are about fear.
The Triumphant Individual. This is the tale of the little guy who works hard, takes risks, believes in himself, and eventually gains wealth, fame, and honor.
It’s the story of self-made people who buck the odds, spurn the naysayers, and show what can be done with enough gumption and guts. They’re plainspoken, self-reliant, and uncompromising in their ideals — underdogs who make it through hard work and faith in themselves.
Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is the first in a long line of U.S. self-help manuals about how to make it through self-sacrifice and diligence. The same story is epitomized in the life of Abe Lincoln, born in a log cabin, who believed that “the value of life is to improve one’s condition.”
The identical theme was captured in Horatio Alger’s hundred or so novellas, whose heroes all rise promptly and predictably from rags to riches. It’s celebrated in the tales of immigrant peddlers who become millionaire tycoons. And it’s found in the manifold stories of downtrodden fighters who undertake dangerous quests and find money and glory. Think Rocky Balboa, Norma Rae, and Erin Brockovich. The moral: With enough effort and courage, anyone can make it in the United States.
Trump wants Americans to think of him as the Triumphant Individual, and he has extolled others, such as JD Vance and Elon Musk, as similarly triumphant.
The Benevolent Community. This is the story of neighbors and friends who roll up their sleeves and pitch in for the common good.
Its earliest formulation was John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” delivered on board a ship in Salem Harbor just before the Puritans landed in 1630 — a version of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, in which the new settlers would be “as a City upon a Hill,” “delight in each other,” and be “of the same body.”
Similar communitarian and religious images were used by the abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s. “I have a dream that every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low,” said Martin Luther King Jr., extolling the ideal of the national community.
The story is captured in the iconic New England town meeting, in frontier settlers erecting one another’s barns, in neighbors volunteering as firefighters and librarians, and in small towns sending their high school achievers to college and their boys off to fight foreign wars. It suffuses Norman Rockwell’s paintings and Frank Capra’s movies. Consider the last scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” when George learns he can count on his neighbors’ generosity and goodness, just as they had always counted on him.
Trump Republicans have distorted the story of the Benevolent Community to show what America would be without “woke”ism, Critical Race Theory, transgender kids using bathrooms or being on high school sports teams inconsistent with their sex assigned at birth, “cat ladies” who choose not to have children, and other cultural bogeymen.
The Mob at the Gates. In this story, the United States is a beacon light of virtue in a world of darkness, uniquely blessed but continuously endangered by foreign menaces. Hence our endless efforts to contain the barbarism and tyranny beyond our borders.
Daniel Boone fought Native Americans — white America’s first evil empire. Davy Crockett battled Mexicans. The same story is found in the Whigs’ anti-English and pro-tariff histories of the United States, in the anti-immigration harangues of the late 19th century, and in World War II accounts of Nazi and Japanese barbarism.
It animates modern epics about space explorers (often sporting the stars and stripes) battling alien creatures bent on destroying the world. The narrative gave special force to Cold War tales during the 1950s of an international communist plot to undermine U.S. democracy, and subsequently of “evil” empires and axes.
The underlying lesson: We must maintain vigilance, lest diabolical forces overwhelm us.
Trump and his Republican enablers have emphasized this story to scare Americans into believing we’re being overridden by undocumented immigrants and taken advantage of by foreign nations who are allied with us and major trading partners.
The Rot at the Top. The last story concerns the malevolence of powerful elites. It’s a tale of corruption, decadence, and irresponsibility in high places — of conspiracy against the common citizen.
It started with King George III, and, to this day, it shapes the way we view government — mostly with distrust.
The great bullies of American fiction have often symbolized Rot at the Top: William Faulkner’s Flem Snopes, Willie Stark as the Huey Long-like character in All the King’s Men, Lionel Barrymore’s demonic Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and the antagonists who hound the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath.
Suspicions about Rot at the Top have inspired what historian Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in U.S. politics — from the pre-Civil War Know-Nothings and Anti-Masonic movements through the Ku Klux Klan and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts.
The myth has also given force to the great populist movements of U.S. history, from Andrew Jackson’s attack on the Bank of the United States in the 1830s through William Jennings Bryan’s prairie populism of the 1890s.
Trump and his Republicans have used this story against government workers, civil servants, independent agencies, the FBI, and other examples of a so-called “deep state.”
Speak to these four stories and you resonate with the tales Americans have been telling each other since our founding — the two hopeful stories rendered more vivid by contrast to the two fearful ones.
These four mental boxes are always going to be filled somehow, because people don’t think in terms of isolated policies or issues. If they’re to be understandable, policies and issues must fit into these larger stories about where we have been as a nation, what we are up against, and where we should be going.
Major shifts in governance — in party alignments and political views — have been precipitated by one party or the other becoming better at telling these four stories.
In the early decades of the 20th century, progressives and Democrats filled all four boxes.
They accused leaders of big business of being the Rot at the Top. They argued that the large industrial concentrations of the era, the trusts, were stifling the upward mobility of millions of potential Triumphant Individuals and poisoning democracy.
During his 1912 campaign, Woodrow Wilson (who also promoted racism) promised to wage
“a crusade against powers that have governed us ... that have limited our development, that have determined our lives, that have set us in a straitjacket to do as they please.”
The struggle to break up the trusts would be nothing less than “a second struggle for emancipation,” by a national Benevolent Community intent on restoring freedom and democracy.
Wilson’s Mob at the Gates was composed of the large, bellicose states of prewar Europe who posed similar challenges to democratic freedoms. Wilson grimly rallied Americans to “defeat once and for all ... the sinister forces” that rendered peace impossible.
Theodore Roosevelt shared Wilson’s antipathy toward trusts, but by the 1920s, Republicans were mostly apologists for big business and Wall Street. That was okay with Americans as long as the economy roared, but it left the Grand Old Party vulnerable in harder times, which soon came.
Like today’s Trump Republicans, the GOP’s approach to foreign policy through most of the 20th century was mainly to avoid the Mob at the Gates — close the doors to immigrants, erect tariff walls, and isolate the nation.
They celebrated the wealth of Triumphant Individuals but didn’t champion upward mobility or equal opportunity, and they offered no particular view of the United States as a Benevolent Community. As such, they stayed firmly in the minority most of the first half of the 20th century.
The Great Depression and World War II presented the United States with palpable illustrations of the Democratic stories.
By the 1930s, the Rot at the Top included Wall Street as well as big business. In the 1936 presidential campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt warned against “economic royalists” who had impressed the whole of society into service. “The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor ... these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship,” he warned. What was at stake, he concluded, was nothing less than the “survival of democracy.”
To cope with the Depression, Americans needed a national Benevolent Community. “I see one third of our nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” FDR told a nation whose citizens clearly understood they were all in this together. He described the purpose of the New Deal as “extending to our national life the old principle of the local community.” “We are determined,” Roosevelt said, “to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern.”
The Social Security Act was not just a social insurance scheme but the very symbol of national solidarity. Henceforth, all American families would share the risk of becoming unemployed or losing the family’s breadwinner or retiring without adequate savings.
Then came Adolf Hitler’s war, which cemented this national unity as FDR led the country — over the objections of Republican isolationists — into battle with the most fearsome Mob at the Gates it had ever encountered.
Democrats managed the transition from Depression and world war to postwar prosperity and the Cold War with only slight alterations in story line. The Benevolent Community remained at the core of Harry S Truman’s Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
The upwardly mobile Triumphant Individual depended on federal provisions — the GI Bill, government-backed mortgages, a guarantee of equal civil rights.
Meanwhile, the Democrats continued their assault on the Mob at the Gates, but now the Mob was the dangerous and expansive Soviet Union. Truman stopped the communists in Korea. Kennedy stopped them in Berlin and during the Cuban missile crisis. And he tried to stop them in Vietnam, which he saw as “the finger in the dike” holding back the Soviets.
Johnson, of course, tragically tried and failed to erect a dam against the North Vietnamese and their patrons.
While Republicans continued to wrestle with the isolationists and nervous Nellies — such as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio — Democrats spoke of paying any price and bearing any burden to protect the United States.
In the 1960s, the Rot at the Top gradually dropped out of the Democratic message. Gone were tales of greedy businessmen and unscrupulous financiers.
This was partly because the economy had changed profoundly. Postwar prosperity allowed the middle class to explode in size and the gap between rich and poor to shrink. White-collar workers were now abundant, and blue-collar workers got generous wage increases that could be absorbed by the huge postwar market.
Rot at the Top rhetoric was also a casualty of the Vietnam War, which spawned an anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian New Left and split Democrats down the middle.
For many liberals, the Rot came to be personified by Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and even the federal government itself. (Ironically, Richard Nixon’s White House and the Watergate scandal would hurt the Democrats, too, by confirming that the Rot at the Top was to be found in government rather than among business elites.)
The Vietnam War also undermined Democrats’ confidence about the Mob at the Gates. Soviet communism remained dangerous, to be sure, but the McGovern wing of the party had no clear plan of action. Indeed, its approach seemed redolent of the Republican isolationists of the earlier part of the century, who wanted the United States simply to turn its back on the Mob.
After President Carter and the hostage crisis, even when Democrats did try to tell this story, they seemed uncertain of themselves.
In short, Democrats and progressives came off as confused and conflicted about the dangers the United States faced. They stopped talking about both the Rot at the Top and the Mob at the Gates and thus ceased giving Americans convincing stories about what the nation was up against.
Tomorrow, in Part 2, I discuss why the Democrats left Trump to tell his fake version of the Rot at the Top, not the real one.
NOW READ: A reckoning is coming for the people who didn't care about their country
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
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The Congressional Progressive Caucus on Thursday elected its leaders for the next term, including Rep. Greg Casar as chair.
"The members of the Progressive Caucus know how to fight billionaires, grifters, and Republican frauds in Congress. Our caucus will make sure the Democratic Party stands up to corporate interests for working people," said Casar (D-Texas), who will replace term-limited Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.).
"I'm honored to build on the legacy of Chair Jayapal," Casar continued. "I've fought back against extremist, egocentric autocrats in Texas for my entire adult life. The Democratic Party must directly take on Trump, and it'll be CPC members boldly leading the way and putting working people first."
Casar, who is currently the CPC whip and ran unopposed, will be joined for the 119th Congress by Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) as deputy chair and Jesús "Chuy" García (D-Ill.) as whip.
"The Congressional Progressive Caucus has always served as an incredible vehicle for transformative change, justice, and movement building," noted Omar. "I am honored to have the support of my colleagues to serve another term as the deputy chair of the Progressive Caucus. Over the next term, we are going to fight to build an inclusive movement that meets the moment."
García said that "I am proud to join incoming Chair Casar, Deputy Chair Omar, and all members of the newly elected executive board as we prepare for the 119th Congress—in which I believe the role the CPC plays will be more critical than ever."
"We are a caucus that gives platform to ideas deeply popular across the political spectrum, and a caucus that builds diverse coalitions to get things done," he continued. "I look forward to working with my colleagues in Congress and partners across the country who believe in people-centered policies rooted in equity and justice for all."
The CPC, first led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 1991, when he was still in the U.S. House of Representatives, has nearly 100 members. The new caucus leaders are set to begin their terms on January 3 and will face not only a Republican-controlled House and Senate, but also U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who is set to be sworn in on January 20.
"It is my great honor to pass the torch to the next class of elected leadership of the Progressive Caucus: My dear friends and trusted colleagues Reps. Greg Casar, Ilhan Omar, and Chuy García," said Jayapal.
"I was proud to establish term limits when I became chair in 2018, and have full confidence in the abilities of our new class to lead this caucus in the fight against the worst of the incoming Trump administration while rebuilding our party with a focus on economic justice for working people," she added. "I will be cheering these three new leaders and our new vice chairs at every turn as chair emerita come next year, and my heart is very full knowing we will have them at the helm of the CPC."
Speaking with NBC News on Wednesday, 35-year-old Casar said that "the progressive movement needs to change. We need to re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up."
"So when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn't deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did—with Republican help," he explained. "We need to connect the dots for people that the Republican Party obsession with these culture war issues is driven by Republicans' desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket."
According to NBC:
That means the Democratic Party needs to "shed off some of its more corporate elements," to sharpen the economic-populist contrast with Republicans and not let voters equate the two parties, he said. He predicted Trump and the Republican-led Congress will offer plenty of opportunities to drive that distinction, including when it pursues an extension of tax cuts for upper earners."The core of the Republican Party is about helping Wall Street and billionaires. And I think we have to call out the game," Casar said. "The Democratic Party, at its best, can hold people or can have inside of its tent people across geography, across race and across ideology. Because we're all in the same boat when it comes to making sure that you can retire with dignity, that your kids can go to school, that you can buy a house."
Others—including Sanders, who sought the Democratic nomination for president in 2016 and 2020—have issued similar calls since Democrats lost the White House and Senate in last month's elections.
"In the recent elections, just 150 billionaire families spent nearly $2 billion to get their candidates elected," Sanders said Saturday. "Our job in the coming months and years is clear. We must defeat the oligarchs and create an economy and government that works for all, not just the few."
On Thursday, both Sanders and Jayapal, who have led the congressional fight for Medicare for All, reiterated calls for a single-payer healthcare program in response to a social media post by Elon Musk, who is set to co-lead Trump's forthcoming Department of Government Efficiency with fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy.
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morn joe NY lt gov
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ymail 11 24 action call NLRB
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an 11 24
The results of last week's U.S. elections were cataclysmic for the Democratic Party, which lost control of the White House and Senate as the Republicans gained a trifecta, but economic justice advocates on Wednesday said that for many working people, the fight for a better standard of living and a political system that places people over Wall Street profits remains the same.
United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain acknowledged in aletter to membersthat while the election outcome was not one that "our union advocated for, and it's not the outcome a majority of our members voted for, our mission remains the same."
"We must raise the standard of living for our members and the entire working class through unity, solidarity, and working-class power," said Fain. "No matter who is in the White House."
Noting that "in a democracy, the four most important words are: The People Have Spoken," Fain suggested that the Democratic Party did not convince a key constituency—working people, including an estimated78% of Americans who live paycheck-to-paycheck—that it represents their interests, and as a result handed the presidential victory to President-elect Donald Trump.
While the UAW endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris and Fain campaigned with her, he said, "for us, this was never about party or personality. As we have said consistently, both parties share blame for the one-sided class war that corporate America has waged on our union, and on working-class Americans for decades."
Trump ran an openly xenophobic campaign, but won the support of low-income voters from a range of ethnic backgrounds as he demonized undocumented immigrants and made outlandish, racist claims about Ohio residents from Haiti, sticking to his longtime narrative that immigration—not corporate greed—is to blame for the country's housing crisis, economic inequality, and stagnant wages.
"The task for the Democrats is what it should have been all along: remaking the party into the party of the bottom 90%... the party that rejects Elon Musk and the entire American oligarchy."
As numerous progressives have pointed outsince the election, the Biden administration has introduced a host of pro-worker policies and Harris unveiled numerous economic justice proposals during her brief campaign—but her decision to campaignwith billionaire businessman Mark Cuban and unveil a more Wall Street-friendly tax proposal have been criticized moves that highlighted the Democratic Party's close ties to rich donors and muddied her message to working families.
With the Democratic Party still taking part in the "one-sided class war" referenced by Fain, the UAW leader said that the union "stand[s] today where we stood last week."
"We stand for bringing back American jobs," said Fain. "We stand for taking on corporations that break their promises to American workers. And we stand against the same things we've always stood against. We will never support the destruction of the union movement. We will never support efforts to divide and conquer the working class by nationality, race, and gender. We will never support handouts to the ultra-wealthy or paying for it by cutting crucial federal investments."
"We are unafraid to confront any politician who takes actions that harm the working class, our communities, and our unions," he said.
Fain's comments came as progressive lawmakers including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) spoke at an event titled Delivering for the Working Class.
While the caucus is set to be in the minority in the House and Senate for at least the next two years, the senators used the event to rally Democratic leaders to "learn the right lessons" from Trump's victory.
As Democrats decide who they answer to, Warren asked, "Is it going to be a handful of billionaires? We know what kind of policy they want to set. Or are we going to show voters that Democrats are the ones who are willing to unrig this economy?"
Sanders suggested that Fain's rallying of the UAW's more than 400,000 members will also be a key to fighting Trump's agenda, including Republicans' plans to make cutsto Social Security and Medicare and hislikely reversalof Biden's pro-worker policies.
"The antidote to enormous economic and political power on the part of the few is mass organizing at the grassroots level among working people—to stand up and fight for an economy that works for all," said Sanders.
Just after the election last week, Sanders became one of the first members of the Democratic caucus to release a statementon the party's major losses, driving home the same message he has repeated during his decades in public service: "It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."
On MSNBC on Wednesday, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the election results in several red states proved that many of Trump's supporters prioritized working class issues.
"Voters actually want the populist, popular ideas that we have been pushing at the Progressive Caucus, certainly, for quite some time," said Jayapal. "They went to the ballot in three states that voted for Donald Trump... and they voted for a higher minimum wage, they voted for paid sick leave."
Voters in Alaska and Missouriapproved ballot measures requiring a higher minimum wage and demanding that employers provide paid sick leave; Nebraska voters also supported a measure allowing workers to earn paid sick leave.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich on Thursday also took a close look at voting figures, writing at his Substack newsletter that the election didn't deliver "a very big mandate" to Trump as the president-elect claimed, or even "a 'red shift' to Trump and the Republicans."
"It was a blue abandonment," he wrote. "We now know that 9 million fewer votes were cast nationwide in 2024 than in 2020. Trump got about a million more votes than he did in 2020 (700,000 of them in the seven battleground states). That's no big deal... The biggest takeaway is that Biden's 9 million votes disappeared... So what happened to the 9 million?"
Reich posited that 9 million potential voters refused to vote for Trump, but also didn't turn out for the Democratic Party because they were left thinking, "They don't give a damn about me."
"The task for the Democrats is what it should have been all along: remaking the party into the party of the bottom 90%—the party of people who don'tlive off stocks and bonds, of people who are not CEOs or billionaires like Mark Cuban, the party that rejects Elon Musk and the entire American oligarchy," he wrote. "Instead, the Democratic Party must be the party of average working people whose wages have gone nowhere and whose jobs are less secure."
He continued:
Blue-collar private-sector workers earned more on average in 1972, after adjusting for inflation, than they are earning now in 2024. This means today's blue-collar workers are on average earning lessin real dollars than their grandparents earned 52 years ago.
Yet the American economy is far larger than it was 52 years ago. Where did the additional money go? To the top. So what's the Democrats' task? To restructure the economy toward more widely shared prosperity.
In his statement on Wednesday, Fain said the lives and daily struggles of many working class voters are unchanged after the election.
"Today, our members clock in to the same jobs they clocked into last week," said Fain. "You face the same threats—corporate greed, Wall Street predators, and a political system that ignores us. And we are driven by the same force, as outlined in our UAW Constitution generations ago: 'The hope of the worker in advancing society toward the ultimate goal of social and economic justice.'"
Fain urged union members to get involved in "political action on every level of government, in every state, in every sector has an impact on every contract, every organizing drive, and every standard we win as a union," while Sanders implored the Democratic Party to urgently "determine which side it is on in the great economic struggle of our times."
"It needs to provide a clear vision as to what it stands for," wrote Sanders in a Boston Globe op-ed on Tuesday. "Either you stand with the powerful oligarchy of our country, or you stand with the working class. You can't represent both."
NOW READ:It's time for Democrats to declare class warfarethom FDR
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