BE AFRAID, VERY AFRAID

'Cast of dangerous clowns': Columnist claims Cabinet picks reflect 'allure of Trumpism'

Kathleen Culliton
November 19, 2024 9

RAW STORY

People dressed as clowns attend the Zombie Walk, October 20, 2024. REUTERS/Pablo Sanhueza

The kind of man Stephen King would depict luring unsuspecting children into sewers is the kind President-elect Donald Trump would pick for the secretary of education, a political columnist argued Tuesday.

Salon writer Amanda Marcotte on Tuesday made the case that Trump is actively seeking out men accused of sexually assaulting women for top positions in his administration or, as she calls it, his "cast of dangerous clowns."

"It's not just that Trump doesn't care about sexual assault," wrote Marcotte. "He appears to see it as a bonus if one of his nominees or allies has faced such allegations."

Three men Trump has tapped for Cabinet have faced sexual assault accusations, reports show.

The congressional Ethics committee investigated whether former Rep. Matt Gaetz sexually assaulted an underage girl, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been accused of sexually assaulting his children's babysitter and Fox News personality Pete Hegseth has been accused of sexually assaulting a woman in a hotel room, reports show.

The three men have publicly denied the accusations.

Marcotte argued Tuesday that the denials — and the accusations — don't matter to Trump or his voters.

"He expects his base voters to see these ... like they see him, as an aspirational figure," Marcotte wrote. "And not because they believe they're innocent men done wrong, either. The ability to commit crimes — even sex crimes — and get away with it is part of the allure of Trumpism."

Marcotte argued Trumpism came as response to the #MeToo movement that sought to hold men such as film mogul Harvey Weinstein — the convicted rapist Trump recently complained had been "schlonged" — accountable for attacking women.

"Defending a man's 'right' to have sex with underage girls would be making good on a campaign promise," she wrote. "It's tempting to hope this will anger the public and result in consequences for Trump, but frankly, that's unlikely."

'Apparently not a joke': Critics stunned as WWE co-founder reportedly expected for Cabinet as Education Secretary
Matthew Chapman
November 19, 2024 8:01PM ET

Donald Trump is reportedly expected to appoint Linda McMahon, the former co-founder of WWE and the chief of the Small Business Administration in his previous presidency, to head up the Department of Education.

The appointment, which swiftly followed Trump's announcement of TV personality and former Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz to head up the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, prompted an instant reaction from commenters on social media.

"Linda McMahon being tipped for Trump’s education secretary," wrote Telegraph editor Gareth Davies on X, attaching a clip of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's famous "Stunner" finishing move. "Another senior US politician who has been Stunnered."

"Cause nothing says educating our children like being an ex-professional wrestling performer and running the @WWE, which has allegedly failed to protect employees from workplace harassment and sexual misconduct," wrote Kendra Barkoff Lamy, a former spokesperson to President Joe Biden while he served as vice president.

In addition to the reaction on X, others commented on the site's growing competitor, Bluesky.

"And, in further 'apparently not a joke' news, Linda McMahon of the WWE for Secretary of Education. LULZ PWNED as a theory of governance, I guess," wrote McGill University professor and Niskanen Center fellow Jacob T. Levy.

"Sort of like Oz at CMS, it’s not clear to me that McMahon would have an agenda of her own, but that might not be a problem for an administration that wants to shrink and eliminate much of DOE," wrote Yahoo Finance's Jordan Weissmann.

"I wonder if Linda McMahon will allow Jim Jordan and @timgill924.bsky.social [to] settle education policy disagreements in the ring?" wrote Michigan State University professor Brendan Cantwell.

'Betsy DeVos 2.0': Trump education pick raises alarms

Jake Johnson
Common Dreams

November 20, 2024

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced late Tuesday that he intends to nominate Linda McMahon, the billionaire former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, to lead the Department of Education, a key agency that Republicans—including Trump and the authors of Project 2025—have said they want to abolish.

McMahon served as head of the Small Business Administration during Trump's first White House term and later chaired both America First Action—a pro-Trump super PAC—and the America First Policy Institute, a far-right think tank that has expressed support for cutting federal education funding and expanding school privatization.

Trump touted McMahon's work to expand school "choice"—a euphemism for taxpayer-funded private school vouchers—and said she would continue those efforts on a national scale as head of the Education Department.

"We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort," Trump said in a statement posted to his social media platform, Truth Social. (McMahon is listed as an independent director of Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs Truth Social.)

The National Education Association (NEA), a union that represents millions of teachers across the U.S., said in response to the president-elect's announcement that McMahon is "grossly unqualified" to lead the Education Department, noting that she has "lied about having a degree in education," presided over an organization "with a history of shady labor practices," and "pushed for an extreme agenda that would harm students, defund public schools, and privatize public schools through voucher schemes."

"During his first term, Donald Trump appointed Betsy DeVos to undermine and ultimately privatize public schools through vouchers," NEA president Becky Pringle said in a statement. "Now, he and Linda McMahon are back at it with their extreme Project 2025 proposal to eliminate the Department of Education, steal resources for our most vulnerable students, increase class sizes, cut job training programs, make higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle-class families, take away special education services for disabled students, and put student civil rights protections at risk."

"The Department of Education plays such a critical role in the success of each and every student in this country," Pringle continued. "The Senate must stand up for our students and reject Donald Trump's unqualified nominee, Linda McMahon. Our students and our nation deserve so much better than Betsy DeVos 2.0."

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, took a more diplomatic approach, saying in a statement that "we look forward to learning more about" McMahon and that, if she's confirmed, "we will reach out to her as we did with Betsy DeVos at the beginning of her tenure."

"While we expect that we will disagree with Linda McMahon on many issues, our devotion to kids requires us to work together on policies that can improve the lives of students, their families, their educators, and their communities," Weingarten added.

McMahon is one of several billionaires Trump has selected for major posts in his incoming administration, which is teeming with conflicts of interest. During Trump's first term, McMahon and her husband, Vince McMahon, made at least $100 million from dividends, investment interest, and stock and bond sales.

The Guardian noted Tuesday that "in October, [Linda] McMahon was named in a new lawsuit involving WWE."

"The suit alleges that she and other leaders of the company allowed the sexual abuse of young boys at the hands of a ringside announcer, former WWE ring crew chief Melvin Phillips Jr," the newspaper reported. "The complaint specifically alleges that the McMahons knew about the abuse and failed to stop it."

'Declaration of war on expertise': Experts explain danger of Trump 'MAGA zealot' nominees

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump is interviewed by Fox and Friends co-host Pete Hegseth at the White House in Washington, U.S. April 6, 2017. 

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo

David Badash

November 20, 2024

President-elect Donald Trump has surprised and even alarmed many across the country, and “puzzled” and “baffled” some within his own party, with his Cabinet and other top White House nominations. Critics on the left have denounced his picks for their apparent lack of experience or qualifications for the roles they are expected to take on, noting some hold controversial or even false positions in the fields they may soon direct policy on. Meanwhile, experts in the fields of government, fascism, and democracy, are raising serious concerns about the potential “danger” some nominees represent, drawing comparisons to the “professional propagandists” often found in authoritarian regimes.

Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an NYU professor of history and a recognized expert on fascism and authoritarianism, on Wednesday pointed to this report on one of Trump’s most-recent nominations, Linda McMahon:





McMahon was Trump’s former administrator of the Small Business Administration, and is a former CEO of WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment), a major GOP donor, and has recently been the chair of a pro-Trump Super PAC, the board chair of a pro-Trump think tank, and the co-chair of Trump’s second transition team.

“Trump’s cabinet picks are a declaration of war on expertise and facts (that’s why there are several Fox hosts in the mix). The con artists, fraudsters, and professional propagandists that populate authoritarian governments see facts and laws as impediments to their goals,” Dr. Ben-Ghiat wrote.

READ MORE: JD Vance Accidentally Reveals FBI Director Wray Is Likely Being Replaced

Trump, announcing McMahon’s nomination, claimed, “Linda will use her decades of Leadership experience, and deep understanding of both Education and Business, to empower the next Generation of American Students and Workers, and make America Number One in Education in the World.”

McMahon’s only brush with the field of education came about 15 years ago, when she served on the Connecticut State Board of Education. She resigned after 15 months. At the time, her appointment was controversial, with one lawmaker lamenting, “her depth of knowledge regarding education is lacking.”




McMahon is far from the only controversial nominee.

On Tuesday, the vice chair of the powerful House Rules Committee Jim McGovern (D-MA) blasted Trump’s nominees as “beyond insane.”

“Someone who is credibly accused of having sex with an underage girl. Someone who sucks up to foreign dictators and has attracted major concern that they can’t be trusted to protect America’s secrets from our adversaries. Someone who paid hush money to cover up a sexual assault accusation, you know, to lead our military, he’s picked because Donald Trump likes him on Fox News? Someone who says that tap water turns kids gay? I mean, this is the dream team? This is the dream team? Really?”

He appeared to be referring to Attorney General presumptive nominee Matt Gaetz, Director of National Intelligence presumptive nominee Tulsi Gabbard, Defense Secretary presumptive nominee Pete Hegseth, and HHS Secretary presumptive nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The Democratic Association of Secretaries of State posted video calling Trump’s nominees “a trainwreck.”

“Gaetz, Gabbard, RFK – none of them have the experience or qualifications for the positions they’re seeking, in addition to the fact they’re all dangerous MAGA zealots,” the organization declared. They posted a video clip (below) from MSNBC with a chyron that noted opposition from the right to Trump’s Attorney General nominee, Matt Gaetz.

MSNBC’s justice and legal affairs analyst Anthony Coley told viewers that Gaetz, the recently resigned U.S. Congressman, “has no national security experience—not anything meaningful—little anti-trust experience, and he certainly has no experience with criminal law, except for being the target of a federal criminal investigation looking into inappropriate sexual contact, allegedly, with a minor.”

Trump has also just appointed his former acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, a strong Trump loyalist, to be the U.S. Ambassador to NATO.

“Whitaker has little evident foreign policy or national security experience, making him an unknown to many in U.S. security circles,” The Associated Press reports. “Previous ambassadors to NATO have generally had years of diplomatic, political or military experience.”

“Before serving Trump,” Mother Jones notes, “he helped a company hawk bizarre products like a ‘masculine toilet’ to help ‘well-endowed men’ avoid unwanted contact with water.”

But The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, a former U.S. Naval War College professor and an expert on Russia and nuclear weapons, served up this warning: “This is just hilarious, but the danger here is that it makes him Senate-confirmed and available for other stuff later.”

In other words, assuming Whitaker is confirmed, Trump could nominate him to another, even more critical role, declaring he’s qualified because he’s already been Senate-confirmed.

Last week, Nichols declared that Trump’s “nominations for intelligence, defense, and justice were revenge on people he thinks are his enemies. This is just endangering millions of innocent people.”

On Monday on MSNBC, Nichols went much further, delivered a scathing analysis of Trump’s nominees, calling them “an all-fronts assault on American democracy,” in another warning.

Trump, he said, is “trying to break the institutions of American government and American society, and what you’ve been seeing for the past few weeks is an all-fronts assault on American democracy, especially with these nominations.”

“I think the most dangerous of these nominations is actually [Pete] Hegseth,” Nichols explained. “And I’m kind of startled that we’re not sitting here talking more about taking a morning Fox [News] host and sticking him in the nuclear chain of command, to lead the largest—one of the largest—bureaucracies in the United States, in the world, including the person that’s supposed to look after the most powerful fighting force on the planet.”

And he concluded, “it’s also important to recognize that we could be in the first phases of a major constitutional crisis, even before Trump is sworn in.”

Watch the video above or at this link.

Dr. Oz nomination seen as potential boon for Medicare privatization

Donald Trump looks on as Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz speaks at a pre-election rally to support Republican candidates in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, U.S., November 5, 2022. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo
Donald Trump looks on as Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz speaks at a pre-election rally to support Republican candidates in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, U.S., November 5, 2022. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo

Eloise Goldsmith, 

Common Dreams

November 21, 2024

Dr. Mehmet Oz, whose unsuccessful 2022 Pennsylvania Senate bid included pitching voters on a plan to expand the privatized Medicare Advantage program, is now in a position to potentially actualize that plan.

President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that Oz, also known by his TV personality name Dr. Oz, is his pick to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

"Dr. Oz—a massive investor in Pharma—told the voters of Pennsylvania his plans to privatize Medicare… and they rejected him. Now Trump is giving him the authority to see his industry-approved plan carried through," wrote the progressive-leaning outlet The Lever, which covered Oz's support for Medicare Advantage back in 2022.

Through Medicare Advantage, which has been promoted by Trump and other congressional Republicans, seniors can opt out of traditional government-run Medicare health plans and instead choose plans administered by private insurers, such as UnitedHealthcare and Cigna.

According to The Lever's 2022 reporting, Oz pushed Medicare Advantage plans on his show The Dr. Oz Show and co-wrote a 2020 column for Forbes with a former healthcare executive in which they argued that a "Medicare Advantage For All" plan can "save" our healthcare system. In the column, Oz and his co-author articulated a plan to expand Medicare Advantage by imposing a 20% payroll tax.

Oz "is not a good pick for a very powerful position in charge of a trillion dollars of healthcare spending," wrote Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project on X, in reference to The Lever's investigation.

The Lever also reported that Oz's plan to expand private plans under Medicare Advantage could "boost companies in which he invests." For example, Oz and his wife owned up to $550,000 worth of stock in UnitedHealth Group, at the time of reporting. UnitedHealthcare and Humana account for nearly half, or 47%, of Medicare Advantage enrollees nationwide, according to the health policy organization KFF.

Additionally, a 2022 investigation by The New York Timesfound that major health insurers have exploited Medicare Advantage to boost their profits by billions of dollars.

Project 2025, a list of right-wing policy proposals led by the Heritage Foundation that Trump has tried to distance himself from, calls for making Medicare Advantage the default option for Medicare beneficiaries, which, if enacted, "would be a multibillion-dollar annual giveaway to corporations at the expense of Medicare enrollees and taxpayers," according to the liberal research and advocacy organization the Center for American Progress.

Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, offered a related critique of Oz: Americans "need someone who will crack down on insurers who want to deny care to the sick, providers who skimp on quality healthcare, corporations that want to privatize Medicare, and Big Pharma profiteers and ideologues who want to slash Medicaid and refuse care to low-income people. What they do not need is a healthcare huckster, which unfortunately Dr. Mehmet Oz appears to have become, having spent much of his recent career hawking products of dubious medical value."

In addition to the potential boon for private insurers, some researchers, news outlets, and members of Congress have also raised concerns about the quality of care administered under Medicare Advantage.

A 2022 government report found that "[Medicare Advantage Organizations] sometimes delayed or denied Medicare Advantage beneficiaries' access to services, even though the requests met Medicare coverage rules" and also "denied payments to providers for some services that met both Medicare coverage rules and [Medicare Advantage Organization] billing rules."

In October, a group of three Democratic lawmakers wrote to the current CMS administrator about increasingly widespread abuses and care denials by for-profit Medicare Advantage insurers.

"We are concerned that in many instances MA plans are failing to deliver, compromising timely access to care, and undermining the ability of seniors and Americans with disabilities to purchase the coverage that’s right for them," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), and Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.) wrote in a letter.

"We continue to hear alarming reports from seniors and their families, beneficiary advocates, and healthcare providers that MA plans are falling short, and finding a good plan is too difficult," they wrote.


In particular, they pointed to Medicare Advantage plans' growing reliance on prior authorization, a complex, barrier-ridden process whereby doctors must demonstrate a proposed treatment is medically necessary before the insurer will cover it.

"Overuse of prior authorization is not only harmful to patients, it hinders healthcare providers' ability to offer best-in-class service," they added.

Social Security Works, a progressive advocacy group, warned in a social media post Tuesday that "Dr. Oz wants to fully privatize Medicare."

"That's why Donald Trump put him in charge of Medicare," the group added. "We will fight to stop this charlatan from getting anywhere near our Medicare system."

Trump nomination of crypto banker Howard Lutnick another 'win for the billionaire class'

Howard Lutnick, Chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, gestures as he speaks during a rally for Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden, in New York, U.S., October 27, 2024. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/File Photo

Julia Conley

Common Dreams

November 20, 2024

Consumer advocacy group Public Citizen feigned surprise on Wednesday over President-elect Donald Trump's nomination of Wall Street CEO Howard Lutnick to lead the U.S. Department of Commerce.

"Oh look, another billionaire has made his way into Trump's Cabinet," said the group, noting Lutnick is also a promoter of cryptocurrency and a Trump megadonor. "The conflicts of interest are almost too many to count."

Among the conflicts are Lutnick's involvement in the crypto industry and federal and state cases against Cantor Fitzgerald.

In addition to running the Wall Street firm, Lutnick is a banker for the "stablecoin" company Tether; purchasers receive a Tether token for $1, with the proceeds invested in reserves and Treasury bonds managed by Lutnick's Cantor Fitzgerald.

As Public Citizen noted, New York Attorney General Letitia James found in 2021 that Tether and another crypto firm "recklessly and unlawfully covered up massive financial losses to keep their scheme going and protect their bottom lines."

The company is also reportedly under federal investigation over alleged criminal violations of anti-money laundering rules and sanctions.

Public Citizen also said that while co-chairing Trump's transition team, Lutnick "may also have helped arrange a meeting between Trump and Coinbase chief Brian Armstrong," who "helped steer a record amount of political spending from the crypto industry into the 2024 election."

Crypto firms poured over $119 million into directly influencing the 2024 federal elections, Public Citizen found in August, making the industry's spending second only to that of fossil fuel companies.

As Politico reported in October, even other members of Trump's inner circle have accused Lutnick of using his transition team co-chair position to take meetings on Capitol Hill and "talk about matters impacting his investment firm, Cantor Fitzgerald—including high-stakes regulatory matters involving its cryptocurrency business."

Lutnick's nomination, said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, serves as a reminder that "Trump serves the oligarchy, not the people."

"Debris from crypto's political spending tsunami will jam up more halls in Washington than ever before if Lutnick is confirmed as secretary of commerce," said Bartlett Naylor, a financial policy advocate for Public Citizen. "The president-elect, who once correctly called bitcoin a scam, now surrounds himself with even more crypto enablers. Cryptocurrency won't return good jobs to the heartland or reduce food prices; it will only thin the wallets of those vulnerable to a now government-legitimized con."

Government watchdog Accountable.US pointed to more than $19 million in political donations Lutnick has made since 2009, nearly all of which went to GOP candidates and political action committees. He contributed $6 million to Trump's super PAC, Make America Great Again, Inc., in 2024 alone.


"Howard Lutnick's questionable qualifications to lead the Department of Commerce begin and end with his loyalty to the president-elect," said Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk.

Tether isn't the only Lutnick-linked company that's been investigated for wrongdoing. The Securities and Exchange Commission fined Cantor Fitzgerald $1.4 million in 2023, saying the company repeatedly failed "to identify and report customers who qualified as large traders." The company also agreed to pay $16 million in fines to the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2022 for using unauthorized communication channels.

Should Lutnick be confirmed as commerce secretary, Accountable.US said a "major regulatory conflict" could arise due to a dispute between the BGC Group, a spin-off brokerage of Cantor Fitzegerald, and futures and commodities exchange CME Group, over a competing trading platform BGC Group is launching.

"Lutnick's company's violations resulting in financial regulator fines and millions in right-wing political donations shows that political devotion takes precedence over actual experience to do the job in Trump's Cabinet," said Carrk.

Trump campaigned as a champion of working people as he railed against high grocery prices. As The New Republicreported on Tuesday, Lutnick has showered Trump's plan for across-the-board tariffs with effusive praise—even as leading economists warn the plan to impose tariffs on foreign imports will pass higher costs onto consumers, not foreign countries.

"In September, Lutnick told CNBC that 'tariffs are an amazing tool for the president to use—we need to protect the American worker,'" wrote Edith Olmsted. "Lutnick also gushed about tariffs at Trump's fascistic rally in Madison Square Garden last month, claiming that America was better off 100 years ago, when it had 'no income tax and all we had was tariffs.' His high praise for tariffs came even as he admitted Americans would face higher prices as a direct result."

Lutnick's nomination, said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), "is a win for the billionaire class at the expense of working people.


"The across-the-board tariff plan," she said, "is a distraction from the MAGA scam to extend tax giveaways for giant corporations and billionaires like Howard Lutnick."

Trump's Cabinet of horrors exposes his totalitarian drift

John Stoehr
November 19, 2024 

Former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard attends a campaign rally of Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump in Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S. October 22, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Donald Trump nominated an alleged rapist and sex trafficker to be attorney general. He picked a Russian asset to be director of national intelligence. He chose a religious fanatic and Kremlin stooge to be secretary of defense. And for secretary of health and human resources, he selected an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who once had a literal brain worm, and who habitually takes (“legal”) steroids to maintain, at the age of 70, the appearance of a physique of a man half his age.

There are the obvious things to say about this motley crew. Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr are , respectively, not qualified to lead the agencies they have been chosen to lead. None has managed anything larger than an office. None has the expertise required. Gaetz has never worked in law enforcement, Gabbard in intelligence, Hegseth in military leadership or Kennedy in public health. Their only qualification is their loyalty to the man who picked them, and how they look to him when they are on television.

Right now, the discussion seems to be concentrated on the Senate Republicans, who will have majority control of that chamber in January. They will be responsible ultimately for vetting Trump’s cabinet picks. The question is whether they will find the courage to restrain the President-elect or roll over, either by approving them or by letting Trump have what he wants through recess appointments.

Among liberals, the discussion seems to be limited to the absurdities each of these people brings to governance as well as the dangers they pose. “Yes, shake your head at the seeming absurdity of these picks,” wrote MSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “But don’t stop there. These choices aren’t just controversial; they require us to stay vigilant about how each potential new Cabinet member could negatively affect our lives.”

But I think we’re missing the bigger picture. These nominations signal the totalitarian drift that’s coming to Washington and the country. Yes, that’s right. No, I’m not exaggerating. It’s time to start using that word.

Totalitarianism seeks dominion over the individual to the point where individuality is erased. That’s what happened to the Republican Party. Individuals have looked the same, talked the same, acted the same and thought the same for a long time. (The men sometimes literally dress the same as Donald Trump, with a blue suit and a long red tie.) After the election, however, Republican behavior has finally been totalized.

As one GOP congressman said, Trump “is the leader of our party. … His goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it. Every single word. If Donald Trump says jump three feet high and scratch your head, we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads.”

The objective is forcing the rest of America to conform the way the Republican Party has conformed. This can be seen in the anger expressed by some MAGAs. It wasn’t enough to win. Losers must now shut up and get in line, too. As a Trump attorney said recently: “You’ve got to own when you lose and say: this is America. We have to stand behind President Trump.” Senate Republicans are likely to approve his picks, no matter how bad, because the losers must be taught a lesson.

Totalitarianism also seeks to dominate the individual’s mind by going to war against facts, reason, science and any useful meaning of the word “proof.” In normal times, pre-Trump, we could expect the Senate to have a spirited debate over a President-elect's cabinet nominations, beginning with whether they’re qualified. Such debate is going to be impossible now, because “being qualified” is a meaningless term.

It is a stone-cold fact that Kennedy’s views on vaccines are not only insane, but in direct opposition to the moral principles of public health. But that fact won’t be accepted as fact. It will be taken as evidence of Trump’s enemies trying to sabotage his presidency. And there’s no way to break through this "conspiracist mindset," as Lindsay Beyerstein calls it. It is impervious, she said. “When scientists or the government or journalists come forward with evidence that vaccines save millions of lives and prevent untold suffering, the conspiracist answer is: Well, that’s what conspirators to kill our children would say.”

Because there’s no empirical anchor to conspiratorial thinking, totalitarians can make reality into whatever they want. Up is down, left is right – or in the words of the totalitarian regime in George Orwell’s 1984: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Therefore, the Republicans are likely to see nothing wrong with his picks. His nominee for the law is anti-law. His nominee for national intelligence is anti-intelligence. His nominee for national defense is anti-defense. His nominee for science is anti-science. But there’s no dissonance in the world of conspiratorial thinking. Up is the new down, and the only measure of morality is whether it pleases the dear leader.

The drift toward conformity and away from individualism isn’t limited to the GOP. Thanks to the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, totalizing groupthink has also been growing in the culture at large. The trick is that it comes disguised as subversive individualism.

During his interview with Trump, popular podcaster Joe Rogan said, “the rebels are Republicans now. They’re like, you want to be a rebel? You want to be punk rock? You want to, like, buck the system? You’re a conservative now. That's how crazy. And then the liberals are now pro-silencing criticism. They’re pro-censorship online. They’re talking about regulating free speech and regulating the First Amendment.”

If you are listening to liberals directly, you know there are no such efforts. But if you are listening to the right-wing media apparatus, or if you just feel the conspiratorial ambiance that it generates, it’s possible to cast yourself as a person who’s bucking the system, as if the party of billionaires is the party of the common people, as if people who look the same, talk the same, act the same and think the same are punk rock.

But the strongest evidence of totalitarian drift is the plain awfulness of Trump’s cabinet picks. They have not earned the right to be called on. They haven’t studied or mastered their disciplines. They haven’t built reputations among leaders, peers and professionals in their fields. They haven’t overcome adversity and hardship. They haven’t reached high and achieved. They certainly haven’t followed the road toward the American dream, which asks us to work hard and play by the rules.

And that’s the point. Totalitarians fear individual excellence, first because they can’t understand it, and second because excellence threatens their goal of totalizing conformity. They are not humble enough to admit that they are mediocre people but they are arrogant enough to believe they can force the rest of us down to their level.


With this cabinet, Trump can pick up where his second campaign left off, which is a movement toward “the consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity …” as Hannah Arendt once wrote.

“Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable,” she said. “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty” (my italics).

The Plague of Disaster Nationalism

Review of Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization by Richard Seymour (Verso, 2024)

By Chris Green
November 13, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

In case you have not heard, Donald Trump was just elected President of the United States for a second time. The United States is in for some extremely difficult months and years ahead. The situation is made worse by the narrow vision and cluelessness of mainstream liberals pooh poohing legitimate voter concerns about the cost of living increases which played a major role in securing Trump’s victory. At their worst, these liberals have argued that the Biden economy was absolutely marvelous and anyone disagreeing was brainwashed by right wing propaganda. They have cited strong economic indicators achieved under Biden’s presidency but are oblivious to the fact that all too many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, barely keeping their heads above water. It is foolish to think that Trump will do anything but make the affordability crisis of health care, child care, transportation, housing and groceries worse. But the Democrats have been feeble in offering their own solutions to these problems. 

From mainstream media analysis in recent years it has been easy to get the impression that Trump is a populist with a “white working class” base but that is misleading. As political scientist Anthony Dimaggio and others have shown, the core of the MAGA base is in the middle and upper middle classes. In this year’s election, 37% of the eligible voting population did not participate. Trump was elected with the votes of only 29% of the eligible electorate. Poor and working class people are significantly overrepresented among non-voters, the largest group among the electorate in this and every presidential election in recent memory. 

Nonetheless, as this year’s election showed, Trumpism has a visible foothold in the working class. Exit polls indicate he won 45% of union voters, 53% of voters with household incomes between $30,000 and $50,000 and 51% with household incomes between $50,000 and $100,000

Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism

How did we get to this point? Is there anything we can do to effectively defeat Trumpism? Some heavy food for thought on these questions is provided by the book Disaster Nationalism: the Downfall of Liberal Civilization, published late last month. 

The book’s author, Richard Seymour, is a highly impressive intellectual with an interesting life story. He had a troubled childhood in Northern Ireland but eventually achieved a PhD in sociology at the London School of Economics. He rose to public notice in the 2000s as the proprietor of a blog called Lenin’s Tomb and as a luminary in the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In 2013, being of courageous and independent minded character, Seymour made a public break with the SWP’s leadership after revelations emerged that the party had covered up multiple sexual assaults by a leading party member. He has published numerous books on subjects such as British politics, social media, the history of American anti-imperialism and the intellectual decline of the late Christopher Hitchens. These days his main publishing forum is a Patreon page. Along with the noted Marxist fiction writer China Mieville, he is a member of the editorial collective of Salvage, a UK based radical left journal of fiction, sociological and political essays. He also periodically writes for The Guardian. 

In Disaster Nationalism, Seymour seeks to understand the far right populism that has become ascendant in the United States and around the world. He attaches the term “disaster nationalism” to these movements. For Seymour, disaster nationalism has not yet reached outright fascist proportions–although he allows that in many cases it has made significant strides towards that end. 

For example, he observes that during the George Floyd summer of 2020, MAGA took on the characteristics of an outright counterrevolutionary insurgency. Trump was faced with mass protests–which had significant popular support, at least initially–seeking fundamental progressive transformation of US law enforcement. The response by MAGA officialdom at the national level and among local police was to cooperate with violent, far right thugs like the Proud Boys. They embraced the vigilante murderer Kyle Rittenhouse and seemingly quietly approved of the dozens of vehicular assaults by vigilantes on BLM protestors. Meanwhile, federal law enforcement agents, operating secret police style in unmarked vehicles, started snatching BLM activists from the streets of Portland, Oregon, and in Washington state, local police deputized as US Marshals conducted an apparent extrajudicial execution of Michael Reinoehl, an antifascist activist accused of murdering Proud Boy Aaron Danielson. 

Seymour suggests that among Trump’s global allies, Israel governed by Netanyahu and India under Narendra Modi’s premiership have reached the farthest on the road to facism. Netanyahu, of course, is currently waging a literal war of extermination in Gaza. Modi’s Hindu fundamentalist government has imposed a regime of outright totalitarian terror in Kashmir and actively eroded citizenship rights for India’s Muslim minority, while police terror and mob violence against the latter has soared under his watch. For example, since Modi rose to power in 2014, hundreds of Indian Muslims have been lynched by Hindu vigilantes enforcing government laws banning the slaughter of cows and consumption of beef.

Modi, of course, is most famous for being the chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002, leading the incitement of Hindu mobs that–with police complicity–massacred hundreds, perhaps thousands of Muslims. Seymour devotes a few paragraphs to describing the gruesome methods through which many of those Muslims were murdered. Another major Muslim pogrom overseen by Modi was the Delhi riots of February 2020, incited by politicians of Modi’s BJP party in response to mass protests against the erosion of the citizenship rights of the country’s Muslims. As Seymour observes, this pogrom occurred concurrently as Modi–-making the ultimate symbolic statement–received his friend Trump on an official state visit, just a few miles from the central area of the violence. 

Disaster Nationalism: Fascist or Prefascist?

Seymour is reluctant to label disaster nationalist movements as outright fascist: he states that, at the moment, they show predominantly prefascist characteristics. None of the movements Seymour studies have fundamentally destroyed preexisting institutions of bourgeois democracy. None of them have the ideological coherence of Hitler or Mussolini and none of them–Modi’s BJP is perhaps an exception–are able to mobilize the sort of political and social organizations with deep and widespread roots among ordinary people that Hitler and Mussolini could.. Unlike the movements of Hitler and Mussolini (to say nothing of the neoconservatives ascendant during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), adherents of disaster nationalist movements like MAGA show no particular fervor for global military expansionism. Unlike Hitler and Mussolini, leaders like Trump and Modi have made no pretense of eliminating the economic stratification produced by unregulated capitalism. Trump, Modi and their ilk worldwide accept the fundamental inequalities produced by neoliberal capitalism–although they have sometimes offered rhetoric criticizing aspects of that capitalism. 

Seymour notes there is another major difference between the disaster nationalists of today and the classical fascists of yesteryear. First and foremost, ruling classes of both Germany and Italy backed fascist politics as their primary method in destroying vibrant radical left and labor movements that were ascendant in both countries. In contrast, disaster nationalists in the United States and around the world face a political landscape where radical left movements and labor unions have been in serious long term decline. 

Unlike classical fascists, disaster nationalists are notable for a complete lack of rationality. There is no organized group or political current that presents any serious threat to overturn existing social and economic hierarchies in the United States (or practically anywhere else in the world). However, the minds of MAGA adherents are often filled with the most idiotic paranoia and fantastical conspiracy theories about George Soros, Antifa, undocumented immigrants, pro-transgender teachers, Chinese communists and similar malefactors imminently poised to completely destroy American institutions and traditions. Many adherents of disaster nationalist movements like MAGA–in their capacity as political thinkers and activists–are profoundly stupid people. The irrationality and ineptitude of MAGA followers led to a serious setback for their movement on January 6th and we can only hope that there will be more cases of them self-destructing. 

For Seymour, a prime illustration of disaster nationalist idiocy and irrationality is the spread of the rumor during the Summer of 2020 that wildfires in eastern Oregon were set by Antifa activists. Scores of armed MAGA sympathizer vigilantes spread out in the region, setting up checkpoints on roads and in other ways harassing people in order to hunt down the mythical Antifa malefactors. Seymour observes that the actual primary trigger for the wildfires was climate change. 

At the same time, as noted above, Seymour is willing to allow that modern disaster nationalism does share characteristics with classical fascism. Obviously, leaders like Trump and Modi-as with Hitler and Mussolini before them–use racist demagoguery, scapegoating of alleged subversives–immigrants, Muslims and political progressives in the case of Trump and Modi– to mobilize their base. Seymour predicts that destruction caused by climate change in the years and decades ahead will provide further opportunities for fascist style politics. He points out that this is already the case in the Indian state of Assam where Modi’s regime has been inciting violence and conducting terror against Muslim Bangladeshi refugees who have fled climate disaster in their native country. 

Although modern disaster nationalists lack the fervor for state economic intervention of HItler and Mussolini, they often call for governments to adopt industrial policies that will supposedly reverse deindustrialization (for example Trump’s fervor for imposing tariffs on Chinese imports). Like Hitler and Mussolini, disaster nationalists often adopt a populist tone, posing as the champion of a “deserving” (i.e. white) working class whose hard-earned income has supposedly been siphoned off for welfare payments to undocumented immigrants and who have been abused and exploited by “woke” big business. 

Seymour notes that a region like eastern Oregon is particularly vulnerable to far right propaganda. Its key industries of fishing and logging in long term decline at the time of the Great Recession in 2008, the region was hit with particularly severity by the meltdown and has not recovered since. In connection to this dynamic of social and economic disintegration, Seymour quotes a 2020 statistic that 12% of the population of Oregon overall were alcoholics. 

Similar to the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, the disaster nationalism of Trump has gained its initial core support among middle class elements fearful of downward mobility in the midst of economic and social breakdown caused by neoliberal economic policies.Seymour observes that this core support rooted in the middle class–in the case of both classical fascism and modern day disaster nationalism–eventually makes inroads into other economic classes, including the working class. 

Seymour writes that in spite of Trump’s promise to provide material bounty for American workers, “average incomes under Trump grew more slowly than under his predecessor, and the rich gained far more than anyone else.” What really has drawn masses of Americans to Trump’s movement is not material improvement but what Seymour calls the “psychological surplus offered by nationalist renewal” and “the ethic of popular war against national enemies” e.g. undocumented immigrants, Antifa, “wokeness,” etc. 

Seymour notes that this dynamic of a charismatic demagogic leader enchanting masses of ordinary people and inciting them to their worst instincts of hatred and cruelty was clearly on display in the Philippines after the election of Rodrigo Duterte as president in 2016. By the time Duterte left office in 2022 he was the most popular head of state on the planet, gaining an almost unanimous approval rating from all economic classes of Filipinos–in spite of the fact that poverty in the already deeply impoverished country steadily increased under his presidency. As president, Duterte incited regular police and private vigilantes to form death squads that murdered tens of thousands of alleged drug addicts and street criminals. This anti-crime campaign served as a convenient cover for a reign of terror against Duterte’s political dissidents, particularly those on the left. 

Marx and Freud

Seymour’s argument that demagogues like Trump and Duterte divert ordinary peoples’ attention from the injustices caused by economic elites with the device of demagogic scapegoating of society’s weakest groups–or that they pretend to be populist while actually serving economic oligarchy–is not particularly original. What is original are the tools of analysis he brings, fusing Marxist analysis with psychoanalysis. At some point, perhaps 7 or 8 years ago, references to the psychoanalytic theory of the likes of Sigmund Freud and Jacque Lacan started to appear in his writings–to the distaste of a few of his Marxist admirers. He latched onto psychoanalysis at least in part as a way of understanding his own childhood traumas–but also in order to mine it for insight into the human mind that might facilitate the revolutionary socialist goal of achieving the full flowering of human freedom. Like a true revolutionary socialist, Seymour argues that the best antidote to the disaster nationalism of Trump & company is the creation of conditions for the full flowering of what Karl Marx called the “species-being”: the fundamental needs of humans to create, live, work, love and play, without coercion and in solidarity with other people. 

There is one point in the book where Seymour’s laborious psychoanalytic dissection of the motivations of followers of disaster nationalist movements has me a little lost. It is in the book’s chapter where he makes an argument, which I find unconvincing, relating to persons who believe the conspiracy theory that the Covid vaccine contains a microchip which allows Bill Gates to spy on persons receiving the vaccine. In holding such beliefs, according to Seymour, people are really attempting to unconsciously suppress “erotic fantasies of bodily penetration.” I think he is on stronger ground when he applies this same Freudian analysis to fans of Andrew Tate, the American-British, pro- Trump misogynist influencer and reputed sex trafficker. Tate, who has achieved an alarmingly wide influence among young males in the UK, has heavily implied publicly that he would be willing to rape women if he felt like it. In defending Tate’s stance–that he deserves to get away with rape because he is a “top G”–Seymour posits that the influencer’s “extremely suasible male fans” are really displaying an unconscious openness to being raped by Tate himself, should their hero desire it. 

One of a Kind

I fully admit that I don’t always follow some of Seymour’s Freudian analysis or fully understand all of his theoretical arguments, at least upon first reading. As when I read essays on his Patreon page, Disaster Nationalism had me periodically resorting to the proverbial dictionary (Google) because the author sometimes peppers his prose with advanced vocabulary (for example, detumescence and misprision). I can report that the author’s use of such vocabulary didn’t derail my understanding of his fundamental arguments. 

I also believe that Disaster Nationalism (and his other writings) show Richard Seymour to be an extremely intelligent person with whom I never fail to feel intellectually stimulated after I’ve read him. In Disaster Nationalism, I particularly recommend chapter 6, which features Seymour applying his concept of disaster nationalism to Israel’s current genocide in Gaza. It is the best part of the book. It contains really first rate writing and analysis. 

In the breadth of his knowledge, intellectual curiosity and intelligence, Seymour, in important ways, is comparable to the late Mike Davis. He is a treasure amongst the English speaking Marxist left. 

Sanders Slams 'Big Money Interests' and Consultants That Control Democratic Party After Loss to Trump

"While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change," said the Vermont Independent. "And they're right."


U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks at a labor rally for the Harris-Walz campaign in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on October 27, 2024.
(Photo: Nathan Morris/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Nov 06, 2024
COMMON DREAMS

Shortly before Vice President Kamala Harris delivered her concession speech on Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders forcefully called out Democratic Party leadership for losing the White House and at least one chamber of Congress to Republicans.

"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," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement. "First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well."

"While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change," said the senator, who decisively won reelection on Tuesday as Republicans reclaimed the upper chamber. "And they're right."

After seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, Sanders spent this cycle campaigning for Harris, warning of Republican President-elect Donald Trump's return, blasting billionaire involvement in U.S. politics, and urging Democrats to better serve working people.

"Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? ...Probably not."


In Sanders' new statement, he highlighted U.S. income and wealth inequality, worker concerns about artificial intelligence, and the federal government's failure to provide paid leave and universal healthcare while pouring billions of dollars into Israel's war on the Gaza Strip.

"Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful oligarchy which has so much economic and political power?" he asked. "Probably not."

"In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions," Sanders concluded. "Stay tuned."

Progressives—who have responded to Trump's Electoral College and popular vote win by criticizing billionaires who backed him and promising "unprecedented resistance" during his second term—echoed Sanders' remarks.



Sharing Sanders' statement on X—the social media platform owned by billionaire Trump backer Elon Musk—United Auto Workers (UAW) communications director Jonah Furman said: "The task has been clear for a decade. The question is only whether and when we will rise to the task."


Separately, the union's president, Shawn Fain, said in a Wednesday statement that "UAW members around the country clocked in today under the same threat they faced yesterday: unchecked corporate greed destroying our lives, our families, and our communities."

"We've said all along that no matter who is in the White House, our fight remains the same," Fain continued, pointing to the battle against "broken trade laws" like the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement and fights for good union jobs, a secure retirement for everyone, a living wage, affordable healthcare, and time for families.

"It's time for Washington, D.C. to put up or shut up, no matter the party, no matter the candidate," added Fain, whose union endorsed Harris. "Will our government stand with the working class, or keep doing the bidding of the billionaires? That's the question we face today. And that's the question we'll face tomorrow. The answer lies with us. No matter who's in office."

"Will our government stand with the working class, or keep doing the bidding of the billionaires?"

In a post-election column, Chuck Idelson, former communications senior strategist for National Nurses United, made the case that "amid the postmortems and reckoning that will now follow the wreckage of Donald Trump's return to 'absolute' power, as authorized by the Supreme Court, there are... two notes in particular that deserve a deeper dive."

"In Missouri, a state Trump won by 58%, voters also acted to increase the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour and to require employers to provide paid sick leave to workers," he pointed out. "In Nebraska, another red state won by Trump, voters also passed a paid sick leave measure, Initiative 436, by 75%."

In addition to the ballot measures, Idelson highlighted that "in the multitude of exit poll results, one particularly stands out—94% of registered Republicans voted for Trump, the exact same percentage he received in 2020. The heavy campaign focus on pulling away Republican voters from Trump turned out to be a pipe dream. The old cliché 'it's the economy stupid,' triumphed again."

Harris' campaign, he argued, "reflected the direction the Democratic Party establishment has taken, away from working-class issues since the advent of neoliberal policies in the 1970s and carried out by most Democratic Party presidents since."

Historian Harvey J. Kaye, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, took aim at the Democratic Party on social media Wednesday, noting failures to stand up to billionaires, raise the minimum wage, and pass the Richard L. Trumka Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act.

Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires and a former managing director at BlackRock, said in a Wednesday statement that "a self-avowed authoritarian successfully wielded the economic frustrations of millions to win the most consequential election of our nation's history. The Democratic establishment has only itself to blame."

"Voters demanded a fundamental overhaul of a rigged economic system. When neoliberal Democrats dithered, Donald Trump offered to clear the board, and voters chose the dark unknown rather than the status quo," Pearl added. "The only question remaining is, why are Democrats surprised? This is the entirely predictable result of a multidecade strategy to appease the rich that met no serious resistance."

The Sunrise Movement—a youth-led climate group that worked to reach millions of young voters in swing states to defeat Trump—similarly stressed on social media Wednesday that "last night's results were a call for change. Millions of people are fed up after living through decades of a rigged economy and corrupt political system. They are looking for someone to blame. It's critical the Dem Party takes that seriously."

"For decades, Democrats have prioritized corporations over people. This is the result. Every working American feels the crisis. We can't pay rent. Our government can't pass basic legislation. The WEATHER has turned against us. And Dems look us in the eye and say it's fine," the group continued. "Trump loves corporations even more than Democrats do, but he ran an anti-establishment campaign that gave an answer to people's desire for change."

"We can stop him, and we must," Sunrise said of Trump. "But it's going to take many thousands of people taking to the streets and preparing to strike. And it's going to take mass movements putting out a better vision for our country than Trumpism and proving that we can make it happen."

What Lesson Should the Dems Take From the 2024 Election? Return to the Working Class


Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and UAW President Shawn Fain (left) speak at a rally in support of United Auto Workers members as they strike the Big Three automakers on September 15, 2023 in Detroit, Michigan.
(Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

The party should use this inflection point to shift ground—from being the party of well-off college graduates, big corporations, and vacuous “centrism”—to an anti-establishment party ready to shake up the system on behalf of the vast majority of Americans.

Robert Reich
Nov 09, 2024

robertreich.substack.com

A political disaster such as what occurred Tuesday gains significance not simply by virtue of who won or lost, but through how the election is interpreted.

This is known as The Lesson of the election.

The Lesson explains what happened and why. It deciphers the public’s mood, values, and thoughts. It attributes credit and blame.

Democrats shouldn’t move to the right if that means giving up on democracy, social justice, civil rights, and equal voting rights.

And therein lies its power. When The Lesson of the election becomes accepted wisdom—when most of the politicians, pundits, and politicians come to believe it—it shapes the future. It determines how parties, candidates, political operatives, and journalists approach future elections.

There are many reasons for what occurred on Tuesday and for what the outcome should teach America—about where the nation is, and about what Democrats should do in the future.

Yet inevitably, one Lesson predominates.

Today, I want to share with you six conventional “lessons” you will hear for Tuesday’s outcome. None is, and none should be considered, The Lesson of the 2024 election.

Then I’ll give you what I consider the real Lesson of the election.
None of These are The Lesson of the 2024 Election:It was a total repudiation of the Democratic Party, a major realignment. Rubbish. Harris would have won had there been a small, less than 1% vote shift in the three main battleground states. The biggest shift from 2020 and 2016 was among Latino men. We don’t know yet whether Latino men will return to the Democrats; if they don’t, they will contribute to a small realignment. But the fact is America elected Trump in 2016, almost reelected him in 2020, and elected him again in 2024. We haven't changed much, at least in terms of whom we vote for.
If the Dems want to win in the future, they have to move to the right. They should stop talking about “democracy,” forget “multiculturalism,” and end their focus on women’s rights, transgender rights, immigrant’s rights, voting rights, civil rights, and America’s shameful history of racism and genocide. Instead, push to strengthen families, cut taxes, allow school choice and prayer in public schools, reduce immigration, minimize our obligations abroad, and put America and Americans first. Wrong. Democrats shouldn’t move to the right if that means giving up on democracy, social justice, civil rights, and equal voting rights. While Democrats might reconsider their use of “identity” politics (in which people are viewed primarily through the lenses of race, ethnicity, or gender), Democrats must not lose the moral ideals at the heart of the party and at the core of America.
Republicans won because of misinformation and right-wing propaganda. They won over young men because of a vicious alliance between Trump and a vast network of online influencers and podcasts appealing to them. The answer is for Democrats to cultivate an equivalent media ecosystem that rivals what the right has built. Partly true.Misinformation and right-wing propaganda did play a role, particularly in reaching young men. But this hardly means progressives and Democrats should fill the information ecosystem with misinformation or left-wing propaganda. Better messaging, yes. Lies and bigotry, no. We should use our power as consumers to boycott X and all advertisers on X and on Fox News, mount defamation and other lawsuits against platforms that foment hate, and push for regulations (at least at the state level for now) requiring that all platforms achieve minimum standards of moderation and decency.
Republicans cheated. Trump, Putin, and election deniers at county and precinct levels engaged in a vast conspiracy to suppress votes. I doubt it. Putin tried, but so far there’s no sign that the Kremlin affected any voting process. There is little or no evidence of widespread cheating by Republicans. Dems should not feed further conspiracy theories about fraudulent voting or tallying. For the most part, the system worked smoothly, and we owe a huge debt of gratitude to election workers and state officials in charge of the process.
Harris ran a lousy campaign. She wasn’t a good communicator. She fudged and shifted her positions on issues. She was weighed down by Biden and didn’t sufficiently separate herself from him. Untrue. Harris ran an excellent campaign but she only had a little over three months to do it in. She had to introduce herself to the nation (typically a vice president is almost invisible within an administration) at the same time Trump’s antics sucked most of the oxygen out of the political air. She could have been clearer about her proposals and policies but her debate with Trump was the best debate performance I’ve ever witnessed, and her speeches were pitch perfect. Biden may have weighed her down a bit, but his decision to step down was gracious and selfless.
Racism and misogyny. Voters were simply not prepared to elect a Black female president. Partly true. Surely racism and misogyny played a role, but bigotry can’t offer a full explanation.
Here’s the Real Lesson of the 2024 Election:

On Tuesday, according to exit polls, Americans voted mainly on the economy—and their votes reflected their class and level of education.

While the economy has improved over the last two years according to standard economic measures, most Americans without college degrees—that’s the majority—have not felt it.

In fact, most Americans without college degrees have not felt much economic improvement for four decades, and their jobs have grown less secure. The real median wage of the bottom 90% is stuck nearly where it was in the early 1990s, even though the economy is more than twice as large.

Only by reducing the power of big money in our politics can America grow the middle class, reward hard work, and reaffirm the basic bargain at the heart of our system.

Most of the economy’s gains have gone to the top.

This has caused many Americans to feel frustrated and angry. Trump gave voice to that anger. Harris did not.

The basic bargain used to be that if you worked hard and played by the rules you’d do better and your children would do even better than you. But since 1980, that bargain has become a sham. The middle class has shrunk.

Why? While Republicans steadily cut taxes on the wealthy, Democrats abandoned the working class.

Democrats embraced NAFTA and lowered tariffs on Chinese goods. They deregulated finance and allowed Wall Street to become a high-stakes gambling casino. They let big corporations become huge, with enough market power to keep prices (and profit margins) high.

They let corporations bust unions (with negligible penalties) and slash payrolls. They bailed out Wall Street when its gambling addiction threatened to blow up the entire economy but never bailed out homeowners who lost everything.

They welcomed big money into their campaigns—and delivered quid pro quos that rigged the market in favor of big corporations and the wealthy.

The Republican Party is worse. It says it’s on the side of the working class but its policies will hurt ordinary workers even more. Trump’s tariffs will drive up prices. His expected retreat from vigorous antitrust enforcement will allow giant corporations to drive up prices further.

If Republicans gain control over the House as well as the Senate, as looks likely, they will extend Trump’s 2017 tax law and add additional tax cuts. As in 2017, these lower taxes will mainly benefit the wealthy and enlarge the national debt, which will give Republicans an excuse to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—their objectives for decades.

Democrats must no longer do the bidding of big corporations and the wealthy. They must instead focus on winning back the working class. They should demand paid family leave, Medicare for all, free public higher education, stronger unions, higher taxes on great wealth, and housing credits that will generate the biggest boom in residential home construction since World War II.

They should also demand that corporations share their profits with their workers. They should call for limits on CEO pay, eliminate all stock buybacks (as was the SEC rule before 1982), and reject corporate welfare (subsidies and tax credit to particular companies and industries unrelated to the common good).

Democrats need to tell Americans why their pay has been lousy for decades and their jobs less secure: not because of immigrants, liberals, people of color, the “deep state,” or any other Trump Republican bogeyman, but because of the power of large corporations and the rich to rig the market and siphon off most of economy’s gains.

In doing this, Democrats need not turn their backs on democracy. Democracy goes hand-in-hand with a fair economy. Only by reducing the power of big money in our politics can America grow the middle class, reward hard work, and reaffirm the basic bargain at the heart of our system.

If the Trump Republicans gain control of the House, as seems likely, they will have complete control of the federal government. That means they will own whatever happens to the economy and will be responsible for whatever happens to America. Notwithstanding all their anti-establishment populist rhetoric, they will become the establishment.

The Democratic Party should use this inflection point to shift ground—from being the party of well-off college graduates, big corporations, “never-Tumpers” like Dick Cheney, and vacuous “centrism”—to an anti-establishment party ready to shake up the system on behalf of the vast majority of Americans.

This is, and should be The Lesson of the 2024 election

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Robert Reich
Robert Reich, is the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. His book include: "Aftershock" (2011), "The Work of Nations" (1992), "Beyond Outrage" (2012) and, "Saving Capitalism" (2016). He is also a founding editor of The American Prospect magazine, former chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality For All." Reich's newest book is "The Common Good" (2019). He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.
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How Harris Lost the Working Class

Workers rejected Kamala Harris because she chose to campaign in a fantasy world where villains other than Trump are rarely named and nobody has to choose whether regular people or billionaire oligarchs get to wield power.

By David Sirota

November 10, 2024

Source: Jacobin



For liberals, Donald Trump’s victory this week prompts adjectives like “scary,” “terrifying,” “depressing,” and “demoralizing.” But one word it should not evoke is this: “surprising.” In a downwardly mobile country, Democrats’ rejection of working-class politics — and the party’s open hostility to populist politicians in its midst — was always going to end up creating prime political conditions for a conservative strongman promising to make America great again.

Trump and his cronies spun tales of overbearing bureaucrats, DEI warriors, and migrant gangs to weave a narrative that the government of elites is so out of touch — or focused on identity politics — that it doesn’t care about the affordability crisis ruining everyone’s day-to-day lives. Democrats countered by trotting out Hollywood stars, the Cheneys, and billionaire Mark Cuban to tell a story of an assault on establishment norms that is imperiling brunch and jeopardizing a West Wing reboot.

Shocker: the working class responded by giving Trump a decisive popular vote victory.

I’ve spent much of my adult life working to prevent this — both in the slog work of campaigns and in my reported articles, books, and audio series. One of those articles was published twenty years ago at what felt like a very similar point in American history, when a Republican running for reelection won big swaths of the working class. Change the names and it reads like a description of the current moment.

Vindication is not consolation. I’m angry about what happened and how predictable it all was. I feel like Randall Mindy in the film Don’t Look Up — specifically in thescene where he’s just scream-weeping up at the sky, saying he tried to warn everyone. And I’m enraged by those still purporting to be surprised, whether it’s cable TV–addled liberals personifying the proverb about blindness, or pundits and politicos who embody the famous Upton Sinclair aphorism.

But perhaps there’s a silver lining here. Maybe the shellacking will prompt an awakening. Maybe everyone will finally tune out the pundits still claiming Democrats ran a “flawless” campaign. And maybe people will finally acknowledge, accept, and internalize realities that were obvious so long ago. And maybe from there, things can improve.

What follows here are some big questions so many people have been asking me and my preliminary answers. Think of it as a FAQ about what just happened — a proverbial handbook for the politically deceased.
What Is the Democratic Party’s Theory of Winning Elections?

Just before the 2016 election, Democratic senator Chuck Schumer said: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two [or] three moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” The key undecided swing voters, he asserted, were “not the blue-collar Democrats; they are college-educated Republicans.”

Despite that viewpoint being repudiated by the 2016 election results, Schumer was appointed to lead his party as the Senate majority leader, and Democrats ran their 2024 campaign with his same operating theory in the final weeks of the race.

“In making her closing argument this month, Ms. Harris has campaigned four times with Liz Cheney, the Republican former congresswoman, stumping with her more than with any other ally,” as the New York Times described it. “She has appeared more in October with the billionaire Mark Cuban than with Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers and one of the nation’s most visible labor leaders.”Democrats need to accept the reality that Never Trump Republicans don’t actually exist as a significant swing voting bloc and that a much larger (and growing) working-class electorate is the real swing vote.

The strategy yielded no significant swing of GOP voters, but a massive swing of working-class voters to the Republicans.
Why Do Democrats Seem Unwilling to Focus on Persuading Working-Class Voters?

In the Democratic Party’s Venn diagram, there’s one circle full of policies that its corporate and billionaire donors want or can accept, and there’s another circle full of initiatives that voters want.

During campaigns, the party typically eschews stuff that working-class voters really want but that might anger donors profiting off the status quo — things like housing, health care, higher wages, and other initiatives preventing corporations from grinding the nonrich into Soylent Green. Instead, the party often chooses to campaign on items that overlap in both circles — reproductive rights, odes to democracy, Michelle Obama speeches, and “good vibes.”

The middle of this Venn Diagram theoretically appeals to socially liberal, economically conservative Rockefeller Republicans. Democratic leaders want to believe these are the key swing voters because that doesn’t screw up their donor-appeasement formula.

For Democrats to accept the reality that Rockefeller Republican/Never Trump Republicans don’t actually exist as a significant swing voting bloc — and for them to further accept that a much larger (and growing) working-class electorate is the real swing vote — would require centering a populist economic program that offends Democrats’ big donors.

But that’s a no-go as the party is currently oriented, which explains the final self-destructive weeks of the Democrats’ 2024 campaign.
Why Have Working-Class Voters Been Fleeing the Democratic Party for Years?

When Bill Clinton rammed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through a Democratic Congress in the early 1990s, the most Democratic trade-exposed districts in America quickly became the country’s most Republican districts. As this deep-dive study shows, culturally conservative working-class voters who had been sticking with the Democratic Party because of its economic policies saw the trade deal as proof there was no reason to stick around anymore.

Then came former President Barack Obama’s populist 2008 campaign, raising the prospect of a real crackdown on the Wall Street villains who pillaged the working class during the financial crisis. The appeal delivered a huge electoral mandate, which Obama then used to continue bailouts for his bank donors and hand out get-out-of-jail-free cards to Wall Street executives while doing little to help millions of working-class voters being thrown out of their homes.

The betrayal prompted a working-class surge for Trump’s first presidential bid and a resurgence of right-wing populism (following a similar pattern in most countries after a financial crisis). Obama later wrote from his Martha’s Vineyard castle that doing anything differently “would have required a violence to the social order, a wrenching of political and economic norms.” Only now, sixteen years later, do Obama’s acolytes seem to sorta, kinda have an inkling that their decisions converting a populist election mandate into a bankers’ bailout might have shaken working-class voters’ faith in Democrats — and democracy.

Of course, Democrats had a third chance to staunch the bleeding with President Joe Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan, which was a huge and wildly popular investment in the working class. But then the legislation expired, and millions of working-class families saw popular benefits ripped away as inflation and poverty skyrocketed. And then came the Election Day backlash. Again.
How Does All This Relate to the Democratic Party’s Internal Fights Over the Last Few Years?

Democrats underperformed among working-class voters, young voters, male voters, and Latino voters — the particular voting blocs that Bernie Sanders performed so well with in his presidential campaigns.

As Breaking Points’ Krystal Ball notes, one logical conclusion is that the 2024 exit polls reflect the Democratic establishment’s vindictive ostracization of Sanders and his movement over the last eight years.When Bill Clinton rammed NAFTA through a Democratic Congress in the early 1990s, the most Democratic trade-exposed districts in America quickly became the country’s most Republican districts.

Indeed, marginalizing Sanders’s acolytes from Democratic-aligned media, keeping Sanders-affiliated figures out of the Biden administration, pejoratively gendering supporters of his class-first agenda as “Bernie Bros,” booing him for touting universal social programs rather than pandering to identity politics — it all preceded Trump this week constructing the multiracial working-class coalition that was supposed to be the Democratic Party’s entire reason for existing.

Democratic leaders’ hostility to Sanders-style populism extended to the Kamala Harris campaign’s themes. While some of her television ads focused on economics, it wasn’t a central thrust of her campaign — and that’s reportedly thanks to pressure from her donors and her team of oligarchs.

“Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests — and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business,” the Atlantic’s Franklin Foer reported this week. “Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer. To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues.”
But Aren’t Democrats Being Smart by Trying to be a Big-Tent Party?

The central question in every political campaign — the question by which voters end up judging candidates — is the one from Pete Seeger’s song: Which side are you on?

No matter how dishonest and fraudulent his answer to that question was, Donald Trump at least pretended to offer a clear one — his answer was “America First.”

Democrats, by contrast, refused to seriously entertain the query. Under the banner of being a “big tent,” the party instead chose to depict a fantasy world where villains other than Trump are rarely named, and nobody has to choose who has power, money, authority, and credibility — and who doesn’t.

In their telling, there are no zero-sum choices and always third ways. It is a world where a president can “bring together labor and workers and small-business owners and entrepreneurs and American companies,” as Harris promised — without ever having to pick a side.

It is a world where warmonger Dick Cheney, pop singer Taylor Swift, and Sanders are all equally meritorious validators, as Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz insinuated — and no moral judgments should be made.

It is a world where Democrats schedule a Bernie Sanders convention speech bashing billionaires, immediately followed by a speech from a billionaire bragging about being a billionaire, and then a speech by a former credit card CEO declaring that Democrats’ presidential nominee “understands that government must work in partnership with the business community.”

It is, in short, a world where Democrats never have to choose between enriching their donors and helping the voters who those donors are fleecing.

Americans know this world doesn’t exist, which is why candidates and parties that pretend it does so often lose, even to right-wing con men.
What Were Republicans’ Most Effective Tactics to Court Working-Class Voters?

Trump pulled a Ross Perot and campaigned for tariffs — a popular idea designed as both a policy proposal and a callback to Democrats’ original NAFTA betrayal. And — of course! — Democrats took the bait by slamming the initiative, rather than countering with something smarter.

Trump and his Republican machine also put tons of money behind morally repugnant anti-trans ads. No doubt this was a specific appeal to transphobic bigots, but the framing of the ads were also designed to portray Harris and Democrats as (to use their term) “weird” — that is, too focused on social causes and identity politics rather than kitchen-table issues like inflation.

The ads’ cynical tagline reiterated the Trump campaign’s which-side-are-you-on message: “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you.”
Why Weren’t Democrats Able to Sell Working-Class Voters on Their Economic Record?

America’s macroeconomic performance remains strong. Many of Joe Biden’s policies contributed to that performance and also — for the first time in decades — actually challenged some of the worst corporate predators in the economy. So why didn’t that persuade more working-class voters to stick with Democrats?

Some pundits have depicted the working class as an unthinking mob misled by a negaholic media that refuses to transmit good economic news. There’s probably truth to the media critique, but Americans aren’t dumb — the macroeconomy may be robust, but for the nonrich, the day-to-day experience of that macroeconomy is brutal. After forty-plus years of a master plan that shredded the New Deal and the social contract, it’s become a morass of ever–increasing costs and red tape to obtain the most basic necessities of life.

In four out of the last six presidential elections — and three of the last three — Americans have expressed their understandable anger at this reality by exercising one of the few democratic powers the public still retains: voting the incumbent party out of the White House. And this time, the incumbent was the Democratic Party.Biden proved that a political party cannot sell an economic agenda without a salesman.

Adding to this structural problem were Biden’s own limitations. Earlier this year, White House aides depicted Biden’s cognitive troubles as not interfering with his ability to do the job — but that misportrayed what the job actually is. Being president is far less about sitting in the Oval Office making decisions and far more about selling an administration’s policies. Biden proved that a political party cannot sell an economic agenda without a salesman. Democrats also proved that despite Obama’s scolding to the contrary, there’s no honor in deliberately refusing to sell the party’s accomplishments.
Why Did Americans Decide to Vote Against “Saving Democracy”?

Trump won the majority of votes from those who told exit pollsters that democracy is threatened. So even as the Democratic Party tried to cast itself as the One True Defender Of Democracy, many Americans believed the opposite — hardly surprising considering the party’s presidential candidate became the nominee without a single vote cast, and without even an open convention.

Authoritarian antidemocratic tendencies certainly exist in parts of the electorate. And if Americans’ lived economic experience worsens and the government is seen as complicit, those tendencies will probably intensify, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned.

“Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations, not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership,” he said in a 1938 radio address. “Finally, in desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat.”

What Could Democrats Have Done to Win the Election?

Harris deliberately ran as a generic Democrat, wagering that risk-aversion would be enough to defeat an unpopular Trump. But risk-aversion is itself risky for an incumbent party amid simmering discontent.

One alternative could have been Harris betting the campaign on one or two major, easy-to-understand proposals whose benefits would be undeniably clear to working-class voters. For instance: just before being put on the ticket, Governor Tim Walz said that Democrats’ top priority should be universal paid family leave — a wildly popular idea. But once Walz was the vice-presidential nominee, that was the last anyone heard of it.

Another strategy could have been Harris channeling the John McCain 2000 presidential campaign and going all-in on an anti-corruption crusade. Leaning into her law-and-order brand, there could have been promises to increase public corruption prosecutions and pass new ethics and campaign finance laws — all implicitly spotlighting Trump’s corruption. But a campaign whose biggest donor was a dark money group decided not to do that.

Still another strategy could have been Harris betting the whole race on a promise to fix and overcome the unpopular, flagrantly corrupt, Trump-packed Supreme Court. We’re talking court expansion, judicial term limits, ethics rules — anything and everything that would highlight the court becoming a weapon of the corporate and far-right master plan. But again . . . that didn’t happen.

These are all counterfactuals, so we can’t know if they would have made a difference. But considering how close the election was in the key swing states, it’s entirely possible that a different strategy would have resulted in a far different outcome.
How Did Both Parties Approach the Media During the Election?

Conservatives have built a robust independent media ecosystem that Republicans regularly engage with, and that Trump exploited to reach large audiences of disaffected swing voters.

Liberals, by contrast, trust and fetishize traditional corporate media, leaving non-MAGA independent media meagerly resourced (all while Democrats’ big donors have bankrolled political groups pretending to be independent news outlets). Democratic politicians don’t like to engage with or cultivate independent media that might ask them uncomfortable questions. Instead, they focus on getting booked on MSNBC to communicate with affluent liberal voters who already vote for Democrats. Consequently, Harris spent much of the campaign hiding from media generally and avoiding independent media specifically.

This asymmetry between Republicans and Democrats is likely to become an even bigger political liability for the latter as corporate media loses audience share amid its credibility crisis.

What Do We Do Now?

This is always the big question after elections. Take a deep breath. Meditate. Hug your friends and family. Stay calm and remember nothing has ever been under control.

Direct your anger at the right target — the national Democratic Party, which decided to be the Cheeto lock between us and authoritarianism. Its operatives kept Biden in the race until it was too late for a contested primary, and then they made millions off losing another campaign to Trump. Channel your anger into fixing and taking over that party so this never happens again.

Don’t disengage. Run for local office. Pressure your local officials to use whatever power and platform they have to obstruct Trump’s extreme agenda. Join a civic group or a union. Build community. Look at the victories of direct democracy in Nebraska, Maine, and Missouri — and then run a ballot measure in your own state.

Diversify your sources of information so that you are exposed to more than just oligarch-owned news that continues to look like a George Orwell parody, even after the election. Encourage your family and friends to stop sealing themselves inside a bubble of corporate media and its punditry, and support left-wing media so that we can hire more reporters to do the journalism that holds power accountable.

 

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