The only hope
to save ourselves from Trump’s authoritarianism is mass movements. We must
build alternative centers of power — including political parties, media, labor
unions and universities — to give a voice and agency to those who have been
disempowered by our two ruling parties, especially the working class and
working poor.
We must carry
out strikes to cripple and thwart the abuses carried out by the emerging police
state. We must champion a radical socialism, which includes slashing the $1
trillion spent on the war industry and ending our suicidal addiction to fossil
fuels, and lift up the lives of Americans cast aside in the wreckage of
industrialization, declining wages, a decaying infrastructure and crippling
austerity programs.
The Democratic
Party and its liberal allies decry the consolidation of absolute power by the Trump
White House, the repeated constitutional violations, the flagrant corruption
and the deformation of federal agencies— including the Justice Department and
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — into attack dogs to persecute
Trump’s opponents and dissidents. It warns that time is running out.
But at the
same time, it steadfastly refuses to call for mass mobilizations that can
disrupt the machinery of commerce and state. It treats the handful of
Democratic Party politicians who address social inequality and abuses by the
billionaire class — including Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani — as lepers. It
blithely ignores the concerns and demands of ordinary Democratic Party voters
reducing them to disposable props at rallies, town halls and conventions.
The Democratic
Party and the liberal class are terrified of mass movements,
fearing, correctly, that they too will be swept aside. They delude themselves
that they can save us from despotism as they cling to a dead political formula
— mounting vapid, corporate indentured candidates such as Kamala Harris or the
Democratic Party candidate and formal naval officer running for Governor in New
Jersey, Mikie Sherrill. They cling to the vain hope that being against Trump
fills the void left by their lack of a vision and abject subservience to the
billionaire class.
A Washington
Post-ABC News/Ipsos poll, summarized by the Washington Post under the headline,
“Voters broadly disapprove of Trump but remain divided on midterms, poll finds”
— found that 68 percent of those polled believe the
Democrats are out of touch with the aspirations of voters, with 63 percent
saying that about Trump.
A “year out
from the 2026 midterm elections, there is little evidence that negative
impressions of Trump’s performance have accrued to the benefit of the
Democratic Party, with voters split almost evenly in their support for
Democrats and Republicans,” the Washington Post summary reads.
The liberal
class in a capitalist democracy is designed to function as a safety valve. It
makes possible incremental reform. But, at the same time, it does not challenge
or question the foundations of power. The quid-pro-quo sees the liberal class
serve as an attack dog to discredit radical social movements. The liberal class,
for this reason, is a useful tool. It gives the system legitimacy. It keeps
alive the belief that reform is possible.
The oligarchs
and corporations, terrified by the mobilization of the left in the 1960s and
1970s — what political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called America’s “excess
of democracy” — set out to build counter-institutions to delegitimize and
marginalize critics of capitalism and imperialism.
They bought
the allegiances of the two ruling political parties. They imposed obedience
to neoliberalism within academia, government agencies and
the press. They neutered the liberal class and crushed popular movements.
They unleashed the FBI on anti-war protestors, the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords and other groups that empowered the
disempowered.
They broke
labor unions, leaving 90 percent of the American workforce without
union protections. Critics of capitalism and imperialism, such as Noam Chomsky
and Ralph Nader, were blacklisted. The campaign, laid out by Lewis F. Powell Jr. in his 1971 memorandum titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise
System,” set into motion the creeping corporate coup d’etat,
which five decades later, is complete.
The
differences between the two ruling parties on substantive issues — such as war,
tax cuts, trade deals and austerity — became indistinguishable. Politics was
reduced to burlesque, popularity contests between manufactured personalities
and acrimonious battles over culture wars. Workers lost protections. Wages
stagnated. Debt peonage soared. Constitutional rights were revoked by judicial
fiat. The Pentagon consumed half of all discretionary spending.
The liberal
class, rather than stand up against the onslaught, retreated into the boutique
activism of political correctness. It ignored the vicious class war that would
see, under the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton, around one million workers lose their jobs in mass
layoffs linked to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), on top of
the estimated 32 million jobs lost due to
deindustrialization during the 1970s and 1980s.
It ignored
blanket government surveillance set up in direct violation of the Fourth
Amendment. It ignored the kidnapping and torture — “extraordinary rendition” —
and imprisoning of terrorism suspects into black sites, along with
assassinations, even of U.S. citizens. It ignored the austerity programs that saw
social services slashed. It ignored the social inequality that has reached its most extreme levels of disparity in over 200 years, surpassing the rapacious greed of the robber barons.
Clinton’s welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22,
1996, threw six million people, many of them single mothers,
off the welfare rolls within four years. It dumped them onto the streets
without child care, rent subsidies and Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged
into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour,
or less than $15,000 a year. But they were the lucky ones. In some states, half
of those dropped from welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton also slashed Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year
period and cut $14 billion in Medicaid funding. The overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor, as well
as the abandoned mentally ill.
The media,
owned by corporations and oligarchs, assured the public it was prudent to
entrust life savings to a financial system run by speculators and thieves. In
the meltdown of 2008, life savings were gutted. And then these media organizations, catering to
corporate advertisers and sponsors, rendered invisible those whose misery,
poverty, and grievances should be the principal focus of journalism.
Barack Obama,
who raised more than $745 million — much of it was corporate money —
to run for president, facilitated the looting of the U.S. Treasury by
corporations and big banks following the 2008 crash. He turned his back on
millions of Americans who lost their homes because of bank repossessions or
foreclosures. He expanded the wars begun by his predecessor George W.
Bush. He killed the public option — universal health care — and
forced the public to buy his defective for-profit ObamaCare — the Affordable
Care Act — a bonanza for the pharmaceutical and insurance
industries.
If the
Democratic Party was fighting to defend universal health care during the
government shutdown, rather than the half measure of preventing premiums from rising for Obama Care,
millions would take to the streets.
The Democratic
Party throws scraps to the serfs. It congratulates itself for allowing
unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on for-profit
health care policies. It passes a jobs bill that gives tax credits to
corporations as a response to an unemployment rate that — if one includes all
those who are stuck in part-time or lower skilled jobs but are capable and want
to do more — is arguably, closer to 20 percent. It forces taxpayers, one in
eight of whom depend on food stamps to eat, to fork over trillions to pay for
the crimes of Wall Street and endless war, including the genocide in Gaza.
The defenestration of the liberal class reduced it to courtiers mouthing empty platitudes. The safety valve shut down. The assault on the working class and working poor accelerated. So too did very legitimate rage. This rage gave us Trump.
-Chris Hedges
We live in a country where Moody’s Investors Service, FitchRatings and Standard & Poor’s “gave out AAA ratings to sub-prime mortgage-backed securities. These securities turned out to be toxic, but the agencies were paid anyway. What's worse, when Wall Street ran out of questionable mortgages to securitize, it created a whole new market based on bets on those securities, bets called ‘derivatives.’ The Big Three kept on handing out AAA ratings to these complicated new products and were again paid handsomely to do so. The rating agencies made hundreds of millions of dollars, but in the end, it was American taxpayers who paid the price -- losing their savings, their homes and their jobs in addition to having to pay billions to bail out banks…”
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