It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
A year after the collapse of the canopy of the Novi Sad train station, which killed 16 people, the Serbian political landscape has been radically shaken by a student social movement of an intensity not seen in decades. A delegation from the Fourth International, composed of comrades from the GA (Gauche anticapitaliste, Belgium) and the NPA-A (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, France), went to meet political, trade union, associative and student activists, to build bonds of solidarity with them and to bring their words back to our countries.
Violence, corruption, nepotism, nationalism: these words would probably not be enough to characterize the police state regime of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, who has been at the country’s helm since 2012. Its hold on the country’s institutions and land heritage is sprawling. To obtain a basic job in many sectors, or even a simple place to live, it is strongly recommended to take your card from the ruling party, the SNS (Serbian Progressive Party), and to participate in its propaganda meetings. Many Serbs consider themselves “under occupation.” And they speak of imperialist interference coming from the East as well as from the West, which closes its eyes to the reality of the regime. Students as driving force of resistance
The Novi Sad disaster, a symptom of corruption that has devastated the country’s economic infrastructure, acted as a detonator. Teaching staff, going beyond its traditional corporatism, initiated a strike movement. It was quickly joined, and massively, by students from all over the country. Organized in assemblies that apply strict democratic practices, they have set up long marches throughout the country. From village to village, they are welcomed by the inhabitants as heroes. The majority of people enthusiastically supported the movement of those they call “our children.”
One of the most striking and moving symbols was the meeting of students from Novi Pazar, a city with a Muslim and Bosnian majority, with students from the rest of the country: a scene of incredible symbolic force in this region of Europe haunted by a genocidal civil war. “It was the first time I felt like a Serbian citizen,” said a student from Novi Pazar when he arrived in Belgrade.
Movement plans electoral challenge
Since September, the movement has struggled to find a second breath; blockades of universities have stopped almost everywhere. Lack of political coordination? Is the movement running out of steam over the long term? Failed convergence with the trade union movement? Conflictual relationship with a discredited political opposition? Intensification of repression by the regime? Structural blockage linked to Serbia’s position in the world economy? There are many explanations for the current impasses, and they testify to the richness of the strategic debates that run through the Serbian left.
To find a political outlet, the student movement, demanding Vučić’s departure and the holding of free and democratic elections, has chosen to present an independent electoral list. A student list that has engaged in extensive programmatic and organizational work, in conjunction with the rest of the population and civil society. Some polls credit them with more than 45% of voting intentions. The regime has understood this well, rejecting any early election and playing the card of rot and repression to the full. We will stand by them in this perilous fight and send them our full solidarity.
International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.
Saturday, November 01, 2025
No Kings, Fascism, and Democracy
by Michael K. Smith / October 28th, 2025
The disease gets worse and worse every year, and the only remedy that will have permanent effect is to abolish private ownership of industry and production for profit, and substitute public ownership with production for use.
— Upton Sinclair, “Production For Use” in New Deal Thought, 1933, edited by Howard Zinn
Donald Trump, after talking with the San Francisco mayor and wealthy business leaders in the Bay Area, has at least temporarily backed off from unleashing a Chicago-style ICE spectacle there.
This is but the latest un-fascist display by the Orange “Hitler,” who couldn’t even bring down Jimmy Kimmel, much less conquer and subdue a string of countries on multiple continents.
In reality, the fascist thesis as applied to Trump doesn’t really hold together well, especially if it is seen as a repetition of Nazism. Unlike Hitler, who was probably the most popular political leader in German history before WWII, Trump struggles to maintain approval in the low-forties and has yet to find a single issue that can forge a robust national unity behind the Dear Leader.
More importantly, he does not seek to establish a new system of representation beyond parliaments and traditional parties to replace the liberal model, as the Nazis did, but to enhance his own fame and fortune by picking the carcass of a collapsing U.S. empire while promising an impossible return to its “glorious” past. He’s a con-man, not a conqueror.
Do we really think that blowing up fishing boats and trying to finish wars in a single weekend to avoid stock market losses (Trump’s strategy in bombing Iran last June) represent the martial glory fascists live for?
Even if Trump wanted to be a Nazi cult leader, he wouldn’t be able to, as mass culture doesn’t exist today like it did in the 1930s. Cultural space these days is highly fragmented due to neo-liberal stratification and anti-social media, which make mass mobilization much more difficult than it was for the Nazis. So while Trump can give us more January 6s, he can’t deliver anything like Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, and his capacity to transform U.S. culture as a whole is nil.
His talent is for division, not unity, and his erratic policies look more like a staccato sequence of lunatic reality TV episodes than they do the unfolding of a fascist ideological program. Programmatic change requires order, after all, whereas Trump is an agent of chaos, which by definition can’t be normalized.
As a response to Trump’s admittedly harrowing second term, repeatedly declaring, “This is fascism!” in a rising tone of righteous indignation really does not constitute opposition, nor does it achieve anything more than a demonstration of the highly agitated state of the outraged person, which only delights the MAGA base, as such reactions are proof of their “owning the libs.”
Government of the triggered, by the triggered, and for the triggered will not win the day.
Realistically, we are in for an extended period of trench warfare, not a violent subjugation by “fascists.” The contending parties are Trump, who aspires to personal dictatorship based on his victories at the polls, and the dictatorship of money, which has never been elected by anyone. In the middle are we-the-people, who must quickly find a way to create real democracy or else be crushed by polarized elites who agree on nothing more than that the people must shut up and obey.
The beginning of this process may be the fact that Trump has stirred up a broad, uneasy “resistance” movement in the nine months since he returned to the White House. Although still too superficial in its approach, it’s definitely a plus that some seven million people in more than 2700 demonstrations throughout the fifty states of the fragmenting American union recently came together to reject the anti-democratic regression propelled by his administration. Under the slogan “No Kings,” political activists, celebrities, and concerned citizens from all parts of the country denounced the magnate’s ploys to dismantle institutional checks on executive power in an effort to amass boundless personal power unto himself, warning that he has set himself on a path that may soon convert the American republic into a monarchy or worse.
Unfortunately, the “King” thesis appears to be poorly thought through. If Trump is King, then Netanyahu must be the King of Kings, able to reduce the U.S. monarch to his personal lackey at the snap of his fingers. This has to be a major concern for any authentic resistance movement, but at the “No Kings” march in New York City, there was (1) an approved list of chants (!) and (2) “Free Palestine!” wasn’t on it (!)
Hopefully, the movement’s paternalism will disappear and its priorities improve.
In any event, the “King” problem is hardly restricted to the Republican side of the aisle. We got Trump in the first place because Democrats rigged the 2016 elections against the most popular politician in the country — Bernie Sanders — then pumped up Trump as the opponent they could most easily beat, but then couldn’t do so. They barely defeated him in 2020 only thanks to Covid, but then refused to hold primaries in 2024 and put up the vegetable Biden, replacing him late in the campaign with Kamala Harris, who never won a single delegate when she ran for president in 2020. Meanwhile, “King” Trump has taken on and defeated a wide field of candidates running against him over the course of the decade he has dominated American politics.
If Trump is a King, then what are James Clyburn and Nancy Pelosi? They are as entrenched in their positions as any King could be, tolerating no primaries or debates, ruling apparently until death with no possible successful challenge from within the Democratic Party.
If we are serious about transforming U.S. politics we must not only remove Donald Trump from office, but also what the late economist Edward Herman called the un-elected dictatorship of money, the massive centers of private wealth that dominate the state and fund both political parties, precisely in order to prevent any possibility of citizen-led democracy. It is these conglomerations of capital and their fatuous dream of limitless profit (at public expense) that are at the root of our most pressing political problems today.
We have an “immigration problem” because Big Capital holds down living standards abroad then welcomes fleeing workers as “cheap labor” when they reach the U.S., flouting the law and passing on the social costs to others.
We have a “homeless problem” because there is more private profit in dislodging the poor from their homes and “gentrifying” them, than in guaranteeing housing to all as a matter of right.
We have a “healthcare crisis” because capitalism defines medical care as a commodity and rations it according to ability to pay, not medical need. The poorest and sickest people get the worst care and die the youngest; the wealthiest and healthiest people get the best care and live the longest. Got a problem with that? Fuck you.
There is no solution to these and many other problems without challenging the right of capital to transform societies into collections of profitable commodities to be bought and sold by the highest bidder.
American society must be de-commodified by a popular democratic movement aiming to reconstitute the state in order to establish the dignity of labor and broad social equality. This admittedly ambitious goal will necessarily take us far beyond the Democrat-Republican ideological fight into the realm of establishing a culture of social justice, which is what Dr. King gave his life for.
A state dedicated to social justice cannot content itself with being a neutral arbitrator between rival criminal organizations (the DNC and the GOP), but must strive to meet the demands of justice for all. It must cease looking for guidance from financial markets and begin to look to the needs and talents of the people it is supposed to serve. It must dismantle the vast networks of private wealth fastened like barnacles to the state and build democratic legitimacy through policies in the interest of and articulated by an organized majority. Those policies must reverse neo-liberal austerity and return to national development, this time under the aegis of public profit. Private profit can and should continue to exist, but released from subordination to monopoly interests, which will help small business and the entire culture to flourish.
Wages must be substantially raised, employment and medical care guaranteed to all (the latter free at the point of service), and a sovereign financial system capable of channeling savings to innovation and the productive sector established. A public banking system must be created to free the economy from the shackles of usury and convert production into an engine of national development rather than an intermediary of parasitic capital. Without democratic control over credit there can be no real political economy; without political economy there is no real sovereignty.
As things stand right now, we are a nation of dependent paycheck nomads, not independent citizens. We might reasonably call ourselves the United Corporations of America, but not the United States of America, and certainly not a democracy. There can be no democracy under plutocracy.
This is not a call to hand over the economic steering wheel to pointy-headed government bureaucrats, but to subordinate capital to the national interest. Massive concentrations of private wealth can be of no general benefit unless brought under democratic citizen control. Capital should propel a broad network of small and medium-sized productive units to fulfill the economic needs of the American people, not shower the Elon Musks of the world with public money so they can create a trillionaire class. Who needs a trillionaire class?
A citizen-directed state can and should direct, regulate, and guard against private interests re-capturing public decisions and distorting national priorities. Private capital can be an ally of democracy, but never its boss, for it ceases to be democracy at that point. We must create a strong government grounded in democratic legitimacy and technical capacity, capable of disciplining private economic power and putting it at the service of the common good. Only in that way can the state and productive sector be instruments of national sovereignty, rather than a doorway through which an un-elected dictatorship of profiteers enters to restore private domination of public policy.
Our economic goal should not be to administer stagnation and decline, as the neo-liberals have done, nor to surrender to delusions of restoring the robber baron era of U.S. capitalism, which is neither desirable nor achievable. We should dedicate ourselves to crafting a national economic policy that articulates the needs and goals of science, energy, and business, to be carried out by an efficient state planning body capable of coordinating public and private investment in fulfillment of a chosen democratic purpose. Without state direction, the best-laid plans will fizzle out; without broad democratic legitimacy, the economy will fragment and popular sovereignty melt away.
Economic transformation will require educational transformation. We should not have to rely on brain-draining talent from other countries. Our own schools should produce the talent we need. This means an education system oriented towards national production, innovation, and work. Treating workers as mindless atoms of production and lazy maximizers of consumption is an abysmal failure. There is no justification for divorcing production from learning and consumption from creativity – except to perpetuate a professional servant class and highly undemocratic elite governing a failing society. We have had enough of that already.
Of course such an agenda will be dismissed as “Bolshevism” and worse, but we should not let disingenuous calls for “consensus” and “pragmatism” lead to capital subordinating public interest to private gain all over again. Public functions should be plainly in public hands, animated by a program of public profit, democratically determined.
Real transformation does not come from conciliation and deference to private power. It comes from confrontation, breaking with dependence, bureaucratic mediocrity, and parasitic elites. This is a historic necessity, not a misguided indulgence of the non-existent “radical left.” Every real gain, from the abolition of slavery to legal labor unions to universal suffrage of the adult population, was a battle against fear, complacency, and bureaucratic inertia.
Let’s abandon the rearguard struggle to hold on to the remnants of past gains without challenging the legitimacy of private interests dominating the state and leading us to ever greater disaster. We shouldn’t want to perpetuate power, but transform it.
Admiral Alvin Halsey resigned his post as the Pentagon’s Southern Commander after a fraught meeting with Pete Hegseth involving the US military’s unconstitutional attacks on Venezuelan fishing boats. Since then, the Trump administration has shown ever increasing signs of wanting to wage war on Venezuela.
Picture and think this through: Seagoing US vessels, leaving US ports, carrying cargo far more deadly than cocaine e.g., weapons bound for genocide-crazed Israel.
Imagine: If a foreign power began attacking said vessels claiming they were engaged in transporting deadly substances. The rage for blood vengeance would deafen the ears and numb the collective soul of the nation.
To wit, the US, via the MAGA-Reich, is perpetuating a murderous rampage on innocuous fishing boats in the Caribbean waters off the shores of Venezuela. The soul-dead Big Liars of the Trump, “the Peace President” regime insist they are entitled, by the guiding Almighty hand (caucasoid, of course) of the Sky Daddy to kill, sans consequence, to wage war, without congressional consultation and consent, and simply violate any law, domestic or international, at their Third Reich-adjacent caprice.
The beneficiaries and operatives of US imperialism believe it is their birthright to impose their blood-drenching will (in the service of their kleptocratic value system) upon the nations of the Southern hemisphere of the Americas (as well as on a global basis).
The only difference here is: the open display of bloodlust evinced by Trumpian psychopathy.
Question for the ages: Why is Uncle Sam sporting a mullet?
In the Nixon tapes, Richard Nixon and his three piece suit clad goon squad can be heard positing the so-called War On Drugs, in their bigotry rancid minds, was, in reality, a war they were waging on hippies, leftist radicals, Black people and other US citizens of color.
To wit, fascism is imperialism turned homeward. At present, military patrols lumber through domestic cities as the dogs of war are unloosed on weaker nations abroad, all as the worst among us pretend that not only things are normal but the hand of God — reigning over the US’ fifty-first state i.e., White supremacist Heaven — is guiding Trump’s et. al. acts of fascist/imperialist aggression.
Steve Bannon, in an interview with The Economist,
“Well he’s gonna get a third term. Trump is gonna be president in ‘28 and people ought to just get accommodated with that. At the appropriate time we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan and President Trump will be the president in ‘28. […] “…He’s an instrument. He’s very imperfect. He’s not churchy, not particularly religious, but he’s an instrument of divine will, and you can tell this of how we’ve, how he’s pulled this off. We need him for at least one more term, right, and he’ll get that in 28.”
“[H]e’s an instrument of divine will.”
You heard it: Bannon, White’s Supremacist Heaven’s prophet on this sin-sullied earth, has foretold the future. Watching from his eternal throne room, MAGA red hat-crowned God has ordained the Third Coming of Jesus J. Trump.
The Celestial Autopen’s writing is on the wall of left-tard Babylon.
What divine punishment will befall those who do not heed the Word the Lord Of MAGA Eternity? Will the Potomac run red with blood as it did in Pharaoh’s kingdom? Will a plague of boils disfigure the pampered epidermises of Woke Hollywood? Will a rain of righteous frogs fall from Heaven to dispatch to Hell the demoniac legions of Antifa frogs of Portland?
History has revealed, whenever a nation’s rulers and assorted minions proclaim they are acting as vessels of God’s will they, in fact, are possessed by the mode of mind and modus operandi of a death cult.
We are, at present, not being confronted by the moral and spiritual equivalence evinced by followers of the First Century mystic/renegade rabbi/challenger of prevailing orthodoxy Jesus of Nazareth; we are subject to the blood-lusting rule of devotees of Moloch.
“Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!”
“They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!”
— excerpts, Howl, Allen Ginsberg
They will, in the end, break their backs attempting to lift their ruling God Moloch to heaven — but not before they break the (already cracking up) US republic.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro: “There is no superior race. There is no ‘chosen people of God’. neither the United States nor Israel. The ‘chosen people of God is all of humanity.”
Chilean Poet Pablo Neruda limned in lines of verse the avarice-possessed worshipers of Moloch when the Yankee kleptocratic financial elite focused upon and set into motion their greedhead agendas towards the southern hemisphere of the Americas:
With the bloodthirsty flies came the Fruit Company [i.e., any and all US corporate class fascists and their US government operatives], amassed coffee and fruit [and oil] in ships which put to sea like overloaded trays with the treasures from our sunken lands. Meanwhile the Indians fall into the sugared depths of the harbors and are buried in the morning mists; a corpse rolls, a thing without name, a discarded number, a bunch of rotten fruit thrown on the garbage heap. — excerpt, “United Fruit Co.” by Pablo Neruda
The US imperialist installed authoritarian leadership was, in time, deposed in Chile, due to a widespread popular uprising that included nationwide general strikes.
Is a similar popular uprising possible in the US?
It would be a hard sell, due to the US citizenry-become-consumers internalization of the (false) value system concomitant to corporatism.
Reality revealed, as the MAGA-Reich’s boot of state is being lowered on the necks of marginalized outsider groups i.e., people bereft of representation, insofar as for the majority of the citizenry, the illusion of everyday normalcy continues unabated.
On a personal basis, my life story makes the inclination to normalize the abhorrent psychologically undoable. In the late 1930s, in Berlin Germany, the Gestapo entered the family home of my maternal grandparents and arrested my grandfather. He, the Jewish owner of a scrap metal business, was accused of crimes against the state.
Henrik Meyer was the treasure of an anti-Nazi resistance group. For the crime of dissent against fascism he was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Later, my grandmother placed her two daughters, my mother and my aunt, on a Kindertransport bound for the UK. Thus whether it is Israel’s genocidal rampage through Gaza with the agenda of a Zionist version of Lebensraum1 or Christian-nationalist deification of the rightwing propagandist Charlie Kirk or ICE fascistic thuggery perpetrated on those human beings labeled alien others — I feel outrage rising from ancestral memories stored in my very DNA.
Yet under authoritarian rule, life goes on as official cruelty is passed off as the rule of law Trump snarls, US urban areas are crime plagued hellscapes in which lawlessness threatens all that is good and decent. Therefore the only lawless permitted…is the caprice of his fascist shock-troops. Lawlessness should be an exclusive privilege of the state.
An ICE thug in Addison, Illinois, donning an American flag mask, smashes a woman’s car window with her terrorized children inside the vehicle.
All coming to pass as Steve Bannon and his fellow Christian-nationalist asylum inmates of the MAGA dayroom would have us believe the hand of The Lord is guiding the handcuffing of children and the rendering of detainees — innocent of any having committed any crime — to undisclosed “black sites” across the globe wherein they are confined to what are, in essence, no-exit death camps.
Spanish Prisoner, 1939, by Henry Moore.
Are you angry yet? Do you feel a sense of animus rising from your gut? Anger is libido. For the moment, do not attempt to push it away.
While rightist demagogues retail in displaced anger, on-target, sacred vehemence changes the world for the better.
In closing, I proffer this request: to consider, what is the fate of empire? And, finally, to ask yourself, what will be my part in the unfolding scene?
“Destiny is what you are supposed to do in life. Fate is what kicks you in the ass to make you do it.” — apocryphal, but often attributed to novelist Henry Miller
Henry Moore, Three Fates
ENDNOTE:
1
Lebensraum is a German term meaning “living space” that was used by the Nazis to justify their policy of territorial expansion and aggression, particularly eastward into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. This concept was a central part of Nazi ideology and foreign policy, aimed at acquiring more land for German settlement by conquering and displacing the existing populations, whom the Nazis considered racially inferior.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist, and essayist. His poems, short fiction, poetry and essays have been published in numerous print publications and anthologies; his political essays have been widely posted on the progressive/left side of the internet. Read other articles by Phil, or visit Phil's website.
No Kings?
(Part 1)
by John Rachel / October 27th, 2025
No Kings! YES! Of course!
That’s what inspired American independence in the first place.
But autocracy takes many shapes.
How about No Oligarchs? Or No Deep State? No Police State? No Mass Surveillance? No Compromised Politicians? No Corrupt Judiciary?
There was much enthusiasm and excitement. And talk of channeling that energy into constructive action. There would be regular Calls to Action sent across social media platforms and by direct email.
“Call your Senator today and urge …”
“Call your Representative today and object to …”
“Go to your congressman’s local office and …”
What? Is this a joke?
Let me get this right. We’re supposed to call the AIPAC-funded, MIC forever war politicians, the folks that haven’t raised the minimum wage since 2009, the Big Pharma Big Health Insurance lapdogs who STILL have not instituted affordable, quality, universal health care in our country, the warmongering blowhards who have funded the slaughters in Gaza and Ukraine to the tune of $200 billion and counting, the misguided fools who have decided to allocate $1 trillion next year to the wasteful, self-destructive DOD, the elected representatives who kneel at the altar of Wall Street, hedge funds and the big banks, the incompetents who couldn’t even get it together to keep the government open for business … WE’RE SUPPOSED TO CALL THEM?
I will believe that No Kings is a real, legitimate, grass roots uprising of the people, by the people, and for the people, when they declare unequivocally that the “movement” will devote its energy and resources, direct the preponderance of its organizing efforts, to one vital task — the only one that can make a real difference.
Creating real choice at the polls by putting real people’s candidates on the ballot. When the spokespersons announce that every call to action must unwaveringly focus on true representative government. When all the enthusiasm and excitement is channeled into giving voters in every single contest — 435 House seats and 33 Senate seats — the absolutely essential opportunity in 2026 to vote for a candidate who will listen to and faithfully serve the needs and priorities of every U.S. citizen, not just the wealthy and powerful elite class.
John Rachel has a B.A. in Philosophy, has traveled extensively, is a songwriter, music producer, neo-Marxist, and a bipolar humanist. He has written eight novels and three political non-fiction books. His most recent polemic is The Peace Dividend: The Most Controversial Proposal in the History of the World. His political articles have appeared at many alternative media outlets. He is now somewhat rooted in a small traditional farming village in Japan near Osaka, where he proudly tends his small but promising vegetable garden. Scribo ergo sum. Read other articles by John, or visit John's website.
The human condition includes a vast array of unavoidable misfortunes. But what about the preventable ones? Shouldn’t the United States provide for the basic needs of its people?
Such questions get distinctly short shrift in the dominant political narratives. When someone can’t make ends meet and suffers dire consequences, the mainstream default is to see a failing individual rather than a failing system. Even when elected leaders decry inequity, they typically do more to mystify than clarify what has caused it.
While “income inequality” is now a familiar phrase, media coverage and political rhetoric routinely disconnect victims from their victimizers. Human-interest stories and speechifying might lament or deplore common predicaments, but their storylines rarely connect the destructive effects of economic insecurity with how corporate power plunders social resources and fleeces the working class. Yet the results are extremely far-reaching.
“We have the highest rate of childhood poverty and senior poverty of any major country on earth,” Senator Bernie Sanders has pointed out. “You got half of older workers have nothing in the bank as they face retirement. You got a quarter of our seniors trying to get by on $15,000 a year or less.”
Such hardship exists in tandem with ever-greater opulence for the few, including this country’s 800 billionaires. But standard white noise mostly drowns out how government policies and the overall economic system keep enriching the already rich at the expense of people with scant resources.
This year, while Donald Trump and Republican legislators have been boosting oligarchy and slashing enormous holes in the social safety net, Democratic leaders have seemed remarkably uninterested in breaking away from the policy approaches that ended up losing their party the allegiance of so many working-class voters. Those corporate-friendly approaches set the stage for Trump’s faux “populism” as an imagined solution to the discontent that the corporatism of the Democrats had helped usher in.
While offering a rollback to pre-Trump-2.0 policies, the current Democratic leadership hardly conveys any orientation that could credibly relieve the economic distress of so many Americans. The party remains in a debilitating rut, refusing to truly challenge the runaway power of corporate capitalism that has caused ever-widening income inequality.
“Opportunity” as a Killer Ideology
The Democratic Party establishment now denounces President Trump’s vicious assaults on vital departments and social programs. Unfortunately, three decades ago it cleared a path that led toward the likes of the DOGE wrecking crew. A clarion call in that direction came from President Bill Clinton when, in his 1996 State of the Union address, he exulted that “the era of big government is over.”
Clinton followed those instantly iconic words by adding, “We cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.” Like the horse he rode into Washington — the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which he cofounded — Clinton advocated a “third way,” distinct from both liberal Democrats and Republican conservatives. But when his speech called for “self-reliance and teamwork” — and when, on countless occasions throughout the 1990s he invoked the buzzwords “opportunity” and “responsibility” — he was firing from a New Democrat arsenal that all too sadly targeted “handouts” and “special interests” as obsolete relics of the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society.
The seminal Clintonian theme of “opportunity” — with little regard for outcome — aimed at a wide political audience. In the actual United States, however, touting opportunity as central to solving the problems of inequity obscured the huge disparities in real-life options. In theory, everyone was to have a reasonable chance; in practice, opportunity was then (and remains) badly skewed by economic status and race, beginning as early as the womb. In a society so stratified by class, “opportunity” as the holy grail of social policy ultimately leaves outcomes to the untender mercies of the market.
Two weeks before Clinton won the presidency, the newsweekly Timereported that his “economic vision” was “perhaps best described as a call for a We decade; not the old I-am-my-brother’s-keeper brand of traditional Democratic liberalism.” Four weeks later, the magazine showered the president-elect with praise: “Clinton’s willingness to move beyond some of the old-time Democratic religion is auspicious. He has spoken eloquently of the need to redefine liberalism: the language of entitlements and rights and special-interest demands, he says, must give way to talk of responsibilities and duties.”
Clinton and the DLC insisted that government should smooth the way for maximum participation in the business of business. While venerating the market, the New Democrats were openly antagonistic toward labor unions and those they dubbed “special interests,” such as feminists, civil-rights activists, environmentalists, and others who needed to be shunted aside to fulfill the New Democrat agenda, which included innovations like “public-private partnerships,” “empowerment zones,” and charter schools.
Taking the Government to Market
While disparaging advocates for the marginalized as impediments to winning the votes of white “moderates,” the New Democrats tightly embraced corporate America. I still have a page I tore out of Time magazine in December 1996, weeks after Clinton won reelection. The headline said: “Ex-Investment Bankers and Lawyers Form Clinton’s Economic Team. Surprise! It’s Pro-Wall Street.”
That was the year when Clinton and his allies achieved a longtime goal — strict time limits for poor women to receive government assistance. “From welfare to work” became a mantra. Aid to Families with Dependent Children was out and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families was in. As occurred three years earlier when he was able to push NAFTA through Congress only because of overwhelming Republican support, Democratic lawmakers were divided and Clinton came to rely on overwhelming GOP support to make “welfare reform” possible.
The welfare bill that he gleefully signed in August 1996 was the flip side of his elite economic team’s priorities. The victims of “welfare reform” would soon become all too obvious, while their victimizers would remain obscured in the smoke blown by cheerleading government officials, corporate-backed think tanks, and mainstream journalists. When Clinton proclaimed that such landmark legislation marked the end of “welfare as we know it,” he was hailing the triumph of a messaging siege that had raged for decades.
Across much of the country’s media spectrum, prominent pundits had long been hammering away at “entitlements,” indignantly claiming that welfare recipients, disproportionately people of color, were sponging off government largesse. The theme was a specialty of conservative columnists like Charles Krauthammer, John Leo, and George Will (who warned in November 1993 that the nation’s “rising illegitimacy rate… may make America unrecognizable”). But some commentators who weren’t right-wing made similar arguments, while ardently defaming the poor.
Newsweek star writer Joe Klein often accused inner-city Black people of such defects as “dependency” and “pathology.” Three months after Clinton became president, Klein wrote that “out-of-wedlock births to teenagers are at the heart of the nexus of pathologies that define the underclass.” The next year, he intensified his barrage. In August 1994, under the headline “The Problem Isn’t the Absence of Jobs, But the Culture of Poverty,” he peppered his piece with phrases like “welfare dependency,” while condemning “irresponsible, antisocial behavior that has its roots in the perverse incentives of the welfare system.”
Such punditry was unconcerned with the reality that, even if they could find and retain employment while struggling to raise families, what awaited the large majority of the women being kicked off welfare were dead-end jobs at very low wages.
A Small Business Shell Game
During the 1990s, Bill and Hillary Clinton fervently mapped out paths for poor women that would ostensibly make private enterprise the central solution to poverty. A favorite theme was the enticing (and facile) notion that people could rise above poverty by becoming entrepreneurs.
Along with many speeches by the Clintons, some federal funds were devoted to programs to help lenders offer microcredit so that low-income people could start small enterprises. Theoretically, the result would be both well-earning livelihoods and self-respect for people who had pulled themselves out of poverty. Of course, some individual success stories became grist for upbeat media features. But as the years went by, the overall picture would distinctly be one of failure.
In 2025, politicians continue to laud small business ventures as if they could somehow remedy economic ills. But such endeavors aren’t likely to bring long-term financial stability, especially for people with little start-up money to begin with. Current figures indicate that one-fifth of all new small businesses fail within the first year and the closure rate only continues to climb after that. Fifty percent of small businesses fail within five years and 65 percent within 10 years.
Promoting the private sector as the solution to social inequities inevitably depletes the public sector and its capacity to effectively serve the public good. Three decades after the Clinton presidency succeeded in blinkering the Democratic vision of what economic justice might look like, the party’s leaders are still restrained by assumptions that guarantee vast economic injustice — to the benefit of those with vast wealth.
“Structural problems require structural solutions,” Bernie Sanders wrote in a 2019 op-ed piece, “and promises of mere ‘access’ have never guaranteed black Americans equality in this country… ‘Access’ to health care is an empty promise when you can’t afford high premiums, co-pays or deductibles. And an ‘opportunity’ for an equal education is an opportunity in name only when you can’t afford to live in a good school district or to pay college tuition. Jobs, health care, criminal justice and education are linked, and progress will not be made unless we address the economic systems that oppress Americans at their root.”
But addressing the root of economic systems that oppress Americans is exactly what the Democratic Party leadership, dependent on big corporate donors, has rigorously refused to do. Looking ahead, unless Democrats can really put up a fight against the pseudo-populism of the rapacious and fascistic Trump regime, they are unlikely to regain the support of the working-class voters who deserted them in last year’s election.
During this month’s federal government shutdown, Republicans were ruthlessly insistent on worsening inequalities in the name of breaking or shaking up the system. Democrats fought tenaciously to defend Obamacare and a health-care status quo that still leaves tens of millions uninsured or underinsured, while medical bills remain a common worry and many people go without the care they need.
“We must start by challenging the faith that public policy, private philanthropy, and the culture at large has placed in the market to accomplish humanitarian goals,” historian Lily Geismer has written in her insightful and deeply researched book Left Behind. “We cannot begin to seek suitable and sustainable alternatives until we understand how deep that belief runs and how detrimental its consequences are.”
The admonitions in Geismer’s book, published three years ago, cogently apply to the present and future. “The best way to solve the vexing problems of poverty, racism, and disinvestment is not by providing market-based microsolutions,” she pointed out. “Macroproblems need macrosolutions. It is time to stop trying to make the market do good. It is time to stop trying to fuse the functions of the federal government with the private sector… It is the government that should be providing well-paying jobs, quality schools, universal childcare and health care, affordable housing, and protections against surveillance and brutality from law enforcement.”
Although such policies now seem a long way off, clearly articulating the goals is a crucial part of the struggle to achieve them. Those who suffer from the economic power structure are victims of a massively cruel system, being made steadily crueler by the presidency of Donald Trump. But progress is possible with clarity about how the system truly works and the victimizers who benefit from it.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, is published by The New Press.
