What Trump's win really means for America

Thom Hartmann
November 9, 2024 


Stephen Miller, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner listen as Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks onstage following early results from the 2024 U.S. presidential election in Palm Beach County Convention Center, in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 6, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria


We just elected a guy who’s fine with the planet melting down, kids getting shot in school, insurance companies going back to denying coverage for preexisting conditions, and wanting to weaponize the federal government in a way dictators do.

What happened?

Democrats thought the 2024 election would be all about Donald Trump’s embrace of fascism and the future of our democracy. And abortion.

Pretty much all of us thought that. As did most of the news media and pundits.

But now that the exit polls and research are largely in, we’re finding, instead, that the election was all about who’d be best able to “blow up the system.”

By “the system,” voters didn’t mean democracy (although we may get the end of that); they meant the neoliberal system that Ronald Reagan introduced to replace FDR’s New Deal policies in 1981, which was subsequently embraced by Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama.


In other words, they said, “We want the jobs like we had before Reagan’s neoliberalism, when one person could support a household.”

If that word intimidates or confuses you (as it does most Americans), here it is broken down: Neoliberalism (as I lay out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America) combines free trade, low taxes, and an end to the power of unions. Neoliberals typically also embrace open borders, as in the world’s most complete neoliberal experiment that’s called the European Union (which is also in trouble now).

The result of Reagan’s version of neoliberalism has been that good jobs (over 20 million of them) and even entire factories (over 15,000 of them) moved to low-wage countries, unions were destroyed, and wealth exploded at the top while the middle class shrank into near poverty.


In the 2016 primaries, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were the first two candidates for either of the two major parties to call for an end to neoliberalism. Americans were enchanted by both.

It’s why people from Joe Rogan to Howard Stern were endorsing Bernie Sanders, and blue-collar workers across the country were taking Trump seriously.

Bernie’s call to end neoliberalism was complete: End the offshoring and bring jobs back, pass Card Check to reinvigorate unions, and raise taxes on the morbidly rich and profitable corporations.


Trump’s call was only partial; while he embraced bringing our jobs and factories back to America, he wanted to keep the neoliberal “reforms” of low taxes on billionaires and an end to union representation. (He went so far as to publicly congratulate Elon Musk on his union-busting/union-preventing activities.)

Sadly, the elders of the Democratic Party had already decided that Hillary Clinton was going to inherit her husband’s neoliberal dynasty so, when voters were confronted with Clinton’s defense of neoliberalism versus Trump’s partial attack on it, they chose the latter. Something’s better than nothing, they seemed to think.

And Trump gave it a shot during his first term, throwing up tariffs in such an incoherent and uninformed way that he provoked an unnecessary trade war with China that cost America hundreds of billions. But at least, voters thought this year, he gave it a shot. Maybe he’ll do better this time around.


Working class people of all races (particularly men) know that neoliberalism sent our jobs overseas, made rich people fantastically rich, and destroyed our unions. Few associate it with Reagan, though, as those policies didn’t really start to bite until the Clinton years.

Still, even not knowing when or where it all started, they hated it. And, we just learned with the outcome of this presidential election, it turns out that voters will tolerate the chance that their kids will get shot, their insurance companies will rip them off, and their government will imprison dissenters in exchange for the promise of the well-paying jobs that come with ending neoliberalism.

Back in 2010, I published a book to guide Democrats through policies that could win the 2012 election. Rebooting The American Dream was a book about how to end neoliberalism (although I never used that wonky word) that Bernie Sanders famously read on the floor of the Senate during his eight-hour filibuster of the Bush tax cuts, and got me an invitation to discuss economics in the Obama White House.


The first two chapters are titled Bring My Job Home and Roll Back the Reagan Tax Cuts, followed by calls for an end to corporate union-busting, free college, Medicare for All, reversing Citizens United, immediate action to stop global warming, an end to predatory foreign policy (Iraq, etc.), genuine immigration reform, an end to corporate personhood, and more widespread employee-owned companies.

Bernie had been a guest on my radio program for an hour every Friday, taking and answering questions from listeners, for a full six years at that time (he ended up doing it for eleven years) and we shared a public disgust for Reagan’s — and then Clinton’s and Bush’s — embrace of neoliberalism.

For the 21 years that I’ve been doing my daily radio program I’ve been arguing that illegal immigration hurts working class people (just ask anybody in the construction industry); that we should bring our factories back home and the fastest way to do that is to return to a gradual and rational tariff-based system; and that we need to raise taxes on the morbidly rich and corporations above 50 percent like other developed nations to cap great wealth and incentivize companies to invest in R&D and their employees.


That call has been largely ignored until the last four years.

In a true American political tragedy, Clinton and Obama were so enthralled by neoliberalism they couldn’t even get around to passing Card Check to bring back unions (although both promised to), much less ending job offshoring or meaningfully raising taxes on the morbidly rich.

Those steps would have taken us back to the era when the majority of American workers could buy a home and a car, take an annual vacation, put their kids through school, and retire with dignity on a single paycheck. The era, in other words, that Trump constantly points to, only this time we’d be able to do it without the racial segregation and gay-bashing.

The great irony here is that Joe Biden has been the first president since Jimmy Carter to reject neoliberalism and embrace Bernie’s and FDR’s New Deal system of government and Keynesian economics:
— He’s kept most of Trump’s tariffs in place and added a bunch of his own.
— He raised taxes on corporations and billionaires significantly.
— He tightened up the border and wanted to sign a major reform of our immigration system.
— He was the first president in history to walk a picket line.


President Biden, in other words, made a real and sincere effort to roll back neoliberalism, and would have done a lot more had Republicans not seized the House two years ago.

He is the true anti-establishment guy, taking an axe to Reagan’s, Bush’s, Clinton’s, Bush’s, and Obama’s embrace of the policies that have impoverished much of the American middle class.

The problem was that nobody knew Biden had so explicitly repudiated neoliberalism and taken such extraordinary and successful steps forward that, even in the face of a massive interest rate increase by the Fed, we did not have a recession. Our economy is doing better than any president’s economy since John Kennedy's.


If Biden had just stepped out of the White House every day to let the press know what he was doing — like Trump did for four years (but with lies and BS) — and Kamala Harris had explicitly confirmed that she, too, wanted to end neoliberalism, the exit polls tell us today she would have won in a sweep.

But Harris and her team assumed that the message of rescuing democracy from fascism — an abstraction that most American voters don’t even understand — and protecting the right to abortion would beat Trump.

And they ridiculed Trump’s push for tariffs — even though Biden has embraced them — as a “middle class sales tax” when most people living in the Rust Belt know exactly what tariffs are and how they work to bring factories back home. Hell, we studied them in fifth grade civics when I was in elementary school growing up in Michigan.


As a result, voters went to the polls and voted to rescind abortion bans while simultaneously filling in the circle for Trump, thinking he’d bring back the prosperity that neoliberal economic policies stole from them.

As Damon Linker noted at his Notes from the MiddlegroundSubstack (reprinted in today’s New York Times), commenting on how Harris’ embrace of Liz Cheney was a dud:
“Reaganism is now well and truly dead, with no substantial base in either party.”

Similarly, Financial Times US National Editor Ed Luce wrote this morning after quoting Bernie Sanders’ comment that Democrats had lost the working class and citing Trump’s most successful ad that says “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you”:
“Tuesday night strongly reaffirmed that Democrats are no longer the party of the working class. … It would be a big error for Democrats to write off America’s working classes as hidebound know-nothings. Nor should they dismiss the tens of millions of lower income households that voted for Trump as economically illiterate.”

This decisive vote for Trump tells us this is truly one of those “hinge points” of history that I’ve written about over the years.

And the double irony today is that the billionaires who support Trump want more neoliberalism; they want to keep the tax cuts, deregulation, and to keep the unions out of their companies while retaining their offshore manufacturing facilities. But nobody ever told the American public in a way they could hear that that’s what most of Trump‘s billionaire supporters are all about.

Instead, Trump ran on faux populism, saying he’d use tariffs to bring jobs home while cutting taxes on tips and Social Security. To paraphrase James Carville, Trump’s pitch was, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

This is why two days ago Bernie came right out and said it:
“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. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

DNC Chair Jaime Harrison (also a regular guest on my program) reacted with outrage, tweeting on Xitter:
“This is straight up BS… Biden was the most-pro worker President of my life time- saved Union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line and some of MVP’s plans would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country. From the child tax credits, to 25k for a down payment for a house to Medicare covering the cost of senior health care in their homes. There are a lot of post election takes and this one ain’t a good one.”

Sadly, Harrison’s message that Biden repudiated neoliberalism isn’t shared by all Democrats, and was barely even mentioned by the Harris campaign. Even significant numbers of Black and Hispanic men were willing to embrace a demagogue who openly hates them in the hope of getting good manufacturing employment that beats inflation.

It’s not enough to just do a good job at governing; you must make sure everybody knows about it. Deep down in their bones. Every day. Month after month, year after year. In that, Biden, Harris, and Harrison all failed, while Trump performed like an Olympic athlete.

If Democrats want a chance to return to power in America, they must — like President Joe Biden largely did — completely repudiate neoliberalism and openly re-embrace FDR’s system, promising to bring our jobs back home, limit illegal immigration, reestablish union power, and raise taxes on the rich.

And make damn sure everybody in America knows it!

Only then can Democrats regain enough of a base across working-class America to credibly campaign on more “esoteric” issues like protecting democracy, tackling climate change, expanding healthcare and education, boosting housing support, and embracing equal opportunity for all.

Democrats must recognize how the winds have changed in America, do the work, spread the word, and let America know what they stand for. If they do, it could be a new day for this country.

How a Newspaper Revolution Sparked Protesters and Influencers, Disinformation and the Civil War  

BEFORE 'WOKE' THERE WERE THE 'WIDE AWAKE' OPPOSITION TO THE 'KNOW NOTHINGS'

Jon Grinspan

  October 10, 2024
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An image from Harper’s Weekly depicts the ‘Grand procession of Wide-Awakes at New York on the evening of October 3, 1860.’ Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

There’s one question I get every time I give a talk. I’m a curator of political history at the Smithsonian Institution, and when I discuss the deep history of political division in our country, someone in the audience always asserts that we can’t possibly compare past divisions to the present, because our media landscape is doing unprecedented harm, unlike anything seen in the past.

I’m always struck by people’s belief in a placid media landscape in the past, a time of calm before the internet blew everything up.

In fact, the most divided period in the history of U.S. democracy – the mid-1800s – coincided with a sudden boom in new communications technologies, confrontational political influencers, widespread disinformation and nasty fights over free speech. This media landscape helped bring the Civil War.

The point is not that 21st century media is like the 19th century’s, but that the past was hardly full of the upstanding, rational, nonpartisan journalists many like to believe it was.

And at this era’s center, in the campaign that actually led to the war, was a huge, strange, forgotten movement – the Wide Awakes – born from this media landscape and fought out in the newspapers, polling places and, ultimately, battlefields of the nation.

A Wide Awake membership form from 1860, printed in New York and showing crowds and troops before the U.S. Capitol. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

From snark to high-minded abolitionism

Newspapers had been around for centuries, but as American rates of literacy rose, millions of ordinary citizens became daily news junkies.

The number of papers jumped from a few publications in 1800 to 4,000 brawling rags by 1860, printing hundreds of millions of pages each year. They ranged from the snarky, immensely popular New York Herald and the blood-drenched true crime reports in the National Police Gazette to the high-minded abolitionism of The Liberator.

A clipping from an article in the Worcester Daily Spy in Massachusetts, Nov. 5, 1860, reprinted from a New York newspaper, about the work of the Wide Awakes. Boston Public Library Collection

Nearly everyone devoured them – from wealthy elites to schoolgirls to enslaved people technically banned from reading. Newspapers published scandals and rumors, riling mobs and sparking frequent attacks on editors – often by other editors.

Well into the 20th century, communities were still pulling newspaper presses out of local rivers, hurled there by angry mobs.

Ninety-five percent of newspapers had explicit political affiliations. Many were bankrolled by the parties directly. There was no concept of journalistic independence and nonpartisanship until the turn of the 20th century.

These partisan presses, not the government, even printed the election ballots. Readers voted by cutting ballots from their pages and bringing them to the polls. Imagine if TikTok influencers or podcasters were responsible for administering elections.

The telegraph may seem old-timey today, but after its introduction in the 1840s, Americans could disseminate breaking news across huge territories along electrical wires. It allowed people to argue the issues nationwide – before the internet, television or radio.

Digesting slavery’s evils daily

Americans became a people by arguing politics in the press.

When politics was local, the major parties had avoided discussing slavery, taking what Abraham Lincoln mocked as a “don’t care” attitude. But now that Maine could debate with Texas, the topic shot to the forefront. By the 1850s, Northerners digested its evils daily.

The National Era – an abolitionist press in Washington – first printed Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hair-raising “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by far the most influential antislavery novel in history.

Meanwhile, the radical pro-slavery magazine “De Bow’s Review” spread a maximalist vision of expanding slavery far and wide. Americans living thousands of miles from each other could argue the issue, and the only gatekeepers were editors who profited from spreading often legitimate outrage.

It’s fitting, then, that the Northern pushback to expanding slavery came from the 19th century equivalent of “very online” young newspaper readers. Early in the 1860 election, a core of young clerks in Connecticut formed a club to help campaign for the antislavery Republican Party. They happened to live in the state with the highest literacy rates and huge newspaper circulations. So when a local editor wrote that the Republicans seemed “Wide Awake” in the campaign, the boys named their club “the Wide Awakes.”

Adding militaristic uniforms, torch-lit midnight rallies and an open eye as their all-seeing symbol, a new movement was born, which I chronicle in my recent book, “Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War.” Often, their chief issue was not the knotty specifics of what to do about slavery, but the fight for a “Free Press” – unsuppressed by supporters of slavery, South or North.

The Wide Awakes exploded across the national newspaper network. Within months of their founding, young Republicans were forming clubs from Connecticut to California.

An article about the Wide Awakes from the Cleveland Morning Leader of Nov. 6, 1860. Library of Congress.

Most learned how to organize their companies through the papers. They built a reciprocal relationship with America’s press: cheering friendly newspaper offices and harassing pro-slavery Democratic papers’ headquarters. Friendly editors returned the favor, marching with the Wide Awakes and pushing their readers to form more clubs, like the Indiana newspaperman who nudged: “Cannot such an organization be gotten up in this town?”

None of this could be admired as independent journalism, but it sure spread a movement. It only took a few months to turn the Wide Awakes into one of the largest partisan movements America had ever seen, believed to have 500,000 members – proportionally the equivalent of 5 million today.

‘From Maine to Oregon let the earth shake’

The same newspaper network spread fear as well. Readers in much of the South saw the clubs as a partisan paramilitary organization. Wild accounts shared accidental misinformation and deliberate disinformation, pushing the false notion that the Wide Awakes were preparing for a war, not an election.

The presence of a few hundred African American Wide Awakes in Boston morphed into claims in Mississippi that “the Wide Awakes are composed mainly of Negroes,” who were plotting a race war. A dispersed, partisan media exaggerated such falsehoods like a national game of telephone.

By the time Lincoln won election in November 1860, hysterical editors predicted a Wide Awake attack on the South. Secessionist newspapers used fears of Wide Awakes to help push states out of the Union. The Weekly Mississippian reported “WIDE-AWAKE INVASION ANTICIPATED,” the very day that state seceded.

Meanwhile, Wide Awake editors began to push back against the widening secession conspiracy. German newspapermen in St. Louis helped arm Wide Awake clubs for combat.

In Pennsylvania, the editor James Sanks Brisbin ordered Republicans to “organize yourselves into military companies. … Take muskets in your hands, and from Maine to Oregon let the earth shake to the tread of three millions of armed Wide-Awakes.”

What began in ink was spiraling into lead and steel. It took 16 years to develop from the introduction of the telegraph to the Civil War. Undoubtedly, the fight over slavery caused that conflict, but the newspapers fed it, amplified it, exaggerated it.

Mid-19th century Americans lived with an odd combination: an unprecedented ability to spread information, but also a siloed and partisan system of interpreting it. It helped the nation finally reckon with the crimes of slavery, but also spread bad faith, irrational panic and outright lies.

This history can add a needed perspective to today’s political conflicts, so often magnified by social media. In both eras, new technologies supercharged existing political tensions.

Yet we can see from this heated history that political media is less like an unstoppable, unreformable force that will consume democracy, and more like another in a succession of breathtaking, catastrophic, wild new landscapes that must be tamed.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jon Grinspan is Political History Curator at the Smithsonian Institution

OPINION: Ukrainian Americans Face Critical Choice in November Presidential Election

US foreign policy toward Ukraine lies in the balance as Americans prepare to go to the polls.

By Michael Buryk
September 29, 2024

Kyiv Post.

US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris (R) and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky speak to the press before a private meeting, in the Vice President's ceremonial office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus on September 26, 2024 in Washington, DC. 

Drew ANGERER / AFP


The recent visit of President Volodymyr Zelensky to the US was in stark contrast to previous trips when he was hailed as a hero in the US Congress. Almost three years into Russia’s full-scaleinvasion of Ukraine, the relative unanimity of Republicans and Democrats on the question of aid for Ukraine in 2022 has melted away into sharp attacks by Republican leaders.

This week, House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that Zelensky’s visit to a munitions plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania,was a political move favoring the Democrats. And Mr. Johnson proposed that Ambassador of Ukraine to the US Oksana Makarova should be fired for arranging this visit.

Meanwhile, Presidential candidate Donald Trump and his Vice-Presidential running mate JD Vance have offered their own plan to end the war that includes Ukraine giving up their territories currently occupied by Russia and taking a pledge not to join NATO.

What has happened to the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan? When I headed up the Republican Heritage Groups Federation of the State of New Jersey in the later 1970s, the Republican Party openly supported the “Captive Nations” that were shackled to the Soviet Union. Now in the 21st century when Ukraine has chosen to be an integral part of the West, the Republican Party has been hijacked by a bunch of Know Nothings who believe it is not in America’s best interest to help any country outside the US.

In Savannah, Georgia, on Sept. 24, Mr. Trump praised Russia’s military record in past conflicts and suggested that Ukraine should have made concessions to prevent the February 2022 invasion. He implied that there would have been no Russian invasion of Ukraine if he had been president at the time. He insists that the US needs to “get out” of any involvement in this conflict but has offered no specific details on how to resolve it.

Ukrainian American voters are by their nature very conservative. For many years, Republican candidates had a strong appeal for them. But now they must realize that the Republican Party today does not respect their interests in Ukraine. Ukrainians are fighting for their very existence as a nation. Russia is taking every opportunity to destroy innocent people, homes, hospitals and infrastructure as well as cultural sites and institutions to obliterate any memory of Ukraine as an independent nation.

The foreign policy toward Ukraine of the Administration of US President Joe Biden has not been without its flaws. It took far too long to arm Ukraine, and major delays continue in the military supply chain. And the use of US long-range missiles to strike deeper inside Russia is still restricted. While the EU has undertaken a major role in helping Ukraine in its military struggle with Russia, the US is still its important global partner.

Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris in her recent meeting with President Zelensky at the White House said that if she becomes president she would “ensure Ukraine prevails in this war.” Ms. Harris suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin “could end the war tomorrow.” And she said that anyone who would have Ukraine trade territory for peace (like Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance) supported “proposals of surrender.”

The choice for Ukrainian Americans in the November Presidential election is clear. Today’s Republican Party offers no hope for Ukraine to win in its struggle against an imperialist Russia.

Appeasement and concessions will be the fate of Ukraine if Republicans win in the November presidential election. Make no mistake about it. This is a struggle for Ukraine’s ultimate survival as an independent nation.

Mike Buryk had a 40-year career in advertising and publishing. Today, he is a writer, speaker and podcaster on topics related to Ukraine. His articles and twice monthly podcast appear in The Ukrainian Weekly newspaper published in the US. He is a former member of the Republican Party in the US.

The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.