Corporate media may not have all the same goals as MAGA Republicans, but they share the same strategy: Fear works.

Appeals to fear have an advantage over other kinds of messages in that they stimulate the deeper parts of our brains, those associated with fight-or-flight responses. Fear-based messages tend to circumvent our higher reasoning faculties and demand our attention, because evolution has taught our species to react strongly and quickly to things that are dangerous.

It’s simply a fantasy (advanced repeatedly by Republicans) that Harris was running on identity politics, or as a radical progressive.

This innate human tendency has long been noted by the media industry (Psychology Today, 12/27/21), resulting in the old press adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Politicians, too, are aware of this brain hack (Conversation, 1/11/19)—and no one relies on evoking fear more than once-and-future President Donald Trump (New York Times, 10/1/24).

This is why coverage of issues in this election season have dovetailed so well with the Trump campaign’s lines of attack against the Biden/Harris administration—even in outlets that are editorially opposed, at least ostensibly, to Trumpism.

Scary Issues

Take immigration, a topic that could easily be covered as a human interest story, with profiles of people struggling to reach a better life against stark challenges. Instead, corporate media tend to report on it as a “border crisis,” with a “flood” of often-faceless migrants whose very existence is treated as a threat (FAIR.org, 5/24/21).

This is the news business deciding that fear attracts and holds an audience better than empathy does. And that business model would be undermined by reporting that consistently acknowledged that the percentage of U.S. residents who are undocumented workers rose only slightly under the Biden administration, from 3.2% in 2019 to 3.3% in 2022 (the latest year available)—and is down from a peak of 4.0% in 2007 (Pew, 7/22/24; FAIR.org, 10/16/24).

With refugees treated as a scourge in centrist and right-wing media alike, is it any wonder that Trump can harvest votes by promising to do something about this menace? Eleven percent of respondents in NBC‘s exit poll said that immigration was the single issue that mattered most in casting their vote; 90% of the voters in that group voted for Trump.

Crime is another fear-based issue that Trump hammered on in his stump speech. “Have you seen what’s been happening?” he said of Washington, D.C. (Washington Post, 3/11/24). “Have you seen people being murdered? They come from South Carolina to go for a nice visit and they end up being murdered, shot, mugged, beat up.”

Trump could make such hyperbolic claims sound credible because corporate media had paved the way with alarmist coverage of crime (FAIR.org, 11/10/22). It was rare to see a report that acknowledged, as an infographic in The New York Times (7/24/24) did, that crime has dropped considerably from 2020 to 2024, when it hit a four-decade low (FAIR.org, 7/26/24).

‘Classic Fear Campaign’

Trans people, improbably enough, are another favorite subject of fear stories for media and MAGA alike. “Republicans spent nearly $215 million on network TV ads vilifying transgender people this election cycle,” Truthout (11/5/04) reported, with Trump spending “more money on anti-trans ads than on ads concerning housing, immigration, and the economy combined.”

Journalist Erin Reed (PBS “NewsHour,” 11/2/24) described this as “a classic fear campaign”:

The purpose of a fear campaign is to distract you from issues that you normally care about by making you so afraid of a group of people, of somebody like me, for instance, that you’re willing to throw everything else away because you’re scared.

Transphobia has been a major theme in right-wing media, but has been a prominent feature of centrist news coverage as well, particularly in The New York Times (FAIR.org, 5/11/23). Rather than reporting centered on trans people, which could have humanized a marginalized demographic that’s unfamiliar to many readers, the Times chose instead to present trans youth in particular as a threat—focusing on “whether trans people are receiving too many rights, and accessing too much medical care, too quickly,” as FAIR noted.

‘Alienating Voters’ With ‘Progressive Agenda’

But rather than examining their own role in promoting the irrational fears that were the lifeblood of the successful Trump campaign, corporate media focused on their perennial electoral scapegoat: the left (FAIR.org, 11/5/21). The New York Times editorial board (11/6/24) quickly diagnosed the Democrats’ problem (aside from sticking with President Joe Biden too long):

The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election... It took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party. And Democrats have struggled for three elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with Americans from both parties who have lost faith in the system—which pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure, even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious faults. If the Democrats are to effectively oppose Mr. Trump, it must be not just through resisting his worst impulses but also by offering a vision of what they would do to improve the lives of all Americans and respond to anxieties that people have about the direction of the country and how they would change it.

It’s a mind-boggling contortion of logic. The Times doesn’t say which aspects of Democrats’ “progressive agenda” were so alienating to people. But the media all agreed—based largely on exit polls—that Republicans won because of the economy and immigration. The “persuasive message” and “vision… to improve the lives of all Americans” that Democrats failed to offer was pretty clearly an economic one. Which is exactly what progressives in the party have been pushing for the last decade: Medicare for All, a wealth tax, a living minimum wage, etc. In other words, if the Democrats had adopted a progressive agenda, it likely would have been their best shot at offering that vision to improve people’s lives.

More likely, the paper was referring to “identity politics,” which has been a media scapegoat for years—indeed, pundits roundly blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump on identity politics (or “political correctness”) (FAIR.org, 11/20/16). Then, as now, it was an accusation without evidence.

‘Democratic Self-Sabotage’

At The Washington Post, columnist Matt Bai‘s answer (11/6/24) to “Where Did Kamala Harris’ Campaign Go Wrong?” was, in part, that “Democrats have dug themselves into a hole on cultural issues and identity politics,” naming Trump’s transphobic ads as evidence of that. (In a Post roundup of columnist opinions, Bai declared that Harris “couldn’t outrun her party’s focus on trans rights and fighting other forms of oppression.”)

At the same time, Bai acknowledged that he does “think of Trump as being equally consumed with identity—just a different kind.” Fortunately for Republicans, Bai and his fellow journalists never take their kind of identity politics as worth highlighting (FAIR.org, 9/18/24).

George Will (10/6/24), a Never Trumper at The Washington Post, chalked up Harris’s loss largely to “the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president.”

Bret Stephens (10/6/24), one of The New York Times‘ set of Never Trumpers, likewise pointed a finger at Democrats’ supposed tilt toward progressives and “identity.” Much like other pundits, Stephens argued that “the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity.”

Of the Harris campaigns’ “tactical missteps,” Stephens’ first complaint was “her choice of a progressive running mate”—Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. He also accused the party of a “dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes.” Here he mentioned trans kids’ rights, DEI seminars, and “new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive,” none of which Harris vocally embraced.

But underlying all of these arguments is a giant fundamental problem: It’s simply a fantasy (advanced repeatedly by Republicans) that Harris was running on identity politics, or as a radical progressive. News articles (e.g., Slate, 9/5/24; Forbes, 11/5/24) regularly acknowledged that Harris, in contrast to Hillary Clinton, for instance, shied away from centering her gender or ethnic background, or appealing to identity in her campaign.

‘Wary and Alienated’

The Times‘ own reporting made Harris’s distancing from progressive politics perfectly clear not two weeks ago, in an article (10/24/24) headlined, “As Harris Courts Republicans, the Left Grows Wary and Alienated.” In a rare example of the Times centering a left perspective in a political article, reporters Nicholas Nehamas and Erica L. Green wrote:

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. 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.

She has centered her economic platform on middle-class issues like small businesses and entrepreneurship rather than raising the minimum wage, a deeply held goal of many Democrats that polls well across the board. She has taken a harder-line stance on the border than has any member of her party in a generation and has talked more prominently about owning a Glock than about combating climate change. She has not broken from President Biden on the war Israel is waging in Gaza.

Kamala Harris did not run as a progressive, either in terms of economic policy or identity politics. But to a corporate media that largely complemented, rather than countered, Trump’s fear-based narratives on immigrants, trans people, and crime, blaming the left is infinitely more appealing than recognizing their own culpability.

I guess I’d call the Trump victory an “expected” shock.

In the deepest core of my being, I was unhappy with virtually everything about the election: unhappy with the Kamala Harris campaign and her unrelenting support of Israeli genocide, unhappy with the Democratic Party and its contempt for progressive voters’ values even as the party remained certain it owned their votes. But at a more superficial level. I pretty much thought Harris would win, just because Donald Trump was way-y-y too crazy (”they’re eating the pets!”) to actually be able to reclaim the presidency.

But Trump did it—not simply capturing the “battleground” states and gaining an Electoral College win, as he did in 2016, but apparently winning the overall popular vote. As of Wednesday morning, as I sit here in my expected shock, I see that Trump is ahead of Harris by some 5 million votes, with counting still underway in some states. And, by the way, the Republicans also reclaimed control of the Senate.

There’s an enormous American voting bloc that’s being left out of the country’s pseudo-democratic, two-party electoral system.

The Dems managed to lose to a dancing goofball and outright racist. They lost to the guy whose own former aides have called a loser, a liar, and, yikes, a fascist. How did they manage to do that?

My sense is this: Trump’s appeal to his base was anything but superficial. It may have been a bunch of lies—that he’s a friend of the working class, for instance, even though he’s a pseudo-billionaire under the control of corporate elites—but he spoke to their deepest values. “He promised to close the border, ‘help our country heal,’ and ‘fix everything,’” The New York Times noted.

He continually talked about the enemies he would protect America from—everyone from immigrant murderers and lunatics to liberal billionaires. A good, solid sense of the enemy creates community! And Trump was the community’s spiritual icon: its symbolic soul, the absolute counter to politics-as-usual. He was able to present himself as the protector of everything the MAGA base valued, from fetuses to assault rifles. And he did so while riding in a golf cart. No small feat!

So how did Kamala Harris and the Democrats manage to lose? From my point of view, the reason is glaringly obvious: They failed to stand for much of anything, at least beyond “Trump’s an idiot.” They campaigned as the lesser evil! Vote for us. We’re not nearly as bad as Trump.

The most striking example of this, it seems to me, was Harris’ refusal, or inability, to disconnect herself from the Biden administration’s unwavering commitment to arming Israel. While “too many Palestinians have died,” Israel has “a right to defend itself.” Palestinians—even Palestinian children—were abstractions. So much so that the Dems wouldn’t even allow a Palestinian to speak at the Democratic National Convention. What values were they running on? They were committed to centrist blather. They were committed to their lesser-evilism.

Yet, ironically, the Democrats didn’t even have the endorsement of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who congratulated Trump when his victory was declared, telling him: “Your historic return to the White House offers a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America.”

Not even Netanyahu could tolerate the lesser-evil Democratic centrism.

What if, instead of courting Liz and Dick Cheney and the anti-Trump Republicans (thus utterly diminishing the possibility that they were running on real values), the Harris campaign had reached in the other direction and courted Green-leaning voters, rather than simply dismissing Jill Stein as a spoiler and, beyond that, completely ignoring what she stood for.

What if? What if?

There’s an enormous American voting bloc that’s being left out of the country’s pseudo-democratic, two-party electoral system. Trump’s base can hear their values and fears trumpeted (so to speak) with loud bluster. But progressives allegedly remain on the margins, banned from having actual political traction, at least on the issues of the present moment.

For example, Nick Tilsen, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and president of the NDN Collective, commented, in an interview with Democracy Now on November 5, while the vote count was still in progress, on a recent apology President Joe Biden made to Native Americans about government-run boarding schools from an earlier era, which sought to eradicate Indigenous culture. Yeah, sorry about that. Yet in the present moment, Biden and the U.S. are complicit in the eradication of Palestinian culture. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about that.

So here we are, stuck with Trump’s second term. God knows what this will amount to. Maybe we won’t ever have to (or be allowed to) vote again.

The work ahead of us is enormous. Not only must we prepare to stand up to the Trump agenda and the looming possibility of some form of fascism. We also have to reclaim the Democratic Party and start transforming its values.

It took only hours after a majority of Americans chose to return Donald Trump as a strongman-style president for the first billionaire supplicant to come forward on bended knee. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the third-richest person on the planet, had already made his intentions clear in the waning days of the 2024 campaign when the influential newspaper he owns, The Washington Post, spiked a long-planned endorsement of rival Kamala Harris at his instruction.

In a rare tweet Wednesday, Bezos—beneficiary of massive federal contracts—laid it on thick. “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Bezos posted on X, which is owned by the richest person on the planet, Elon Musk. “No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”

It almost goes without saying that Bezos said nothing Wednesday about the fact that, as owner of the Post, he is also the keeper of a remarkable legacy of watchdog journalism, which defied the White House in 1971 in publishing the secret Pentagon Papers and then produced the investigative reporting that helped bring down Richard Nixon in Watergate. There was no Bezos pep talk to his journalists that such heroism for democracy would be acted out now. Less than 48 hours after Trump’s election as the 47th president, this kind of silence has been deafening.

From the obsequious Bezos to the end of resistance from everyday folk, we are seeing the once unthinkable: the start of American autocracy.

Although it feels almost normal to flip on CNN and watch talking heads speculate on whom the president-elect is picking for his cabinet, there is nothing normal about the Trump transition, even with a president who’s been elected before. So much has changed since the tumultuous autumn of 2016. This time, America is rolling out a red carpet for a king—one who will, in the ultimate irony, preside over the 250th anniversary of that time when we overthrew a monarchy.

I know that sounds like hyperbole, or what The 51% calls “Trump derangement syndrome.” But the nation already on Wednesday received its first major bit of news—and there are going to be many, many more to come—making it clear that Trump is returning to the White House with stunning absolute powers that none of his 44 predecessors (Grover Cleveland, and now Trump, twice) either possessed or were willing to exercise over the American people.

It came in the form of a revelation from the U.S. Justice Department that special counsel Jack Smith—who aggressively, if too belatedly, brought federal indictments against Trump for the 2020 efforts to overturn the last presidential election that culminated in the January 6, 2021 insurrection, and for Trump taking highly classified documents—is planning steps that would have the likely impact of ending his cases before Trump takes the oath of office.

Multiple news outlets quoted sources within the Justice Department that Smith is now is active talks about how to “wind down” the two cases against Trump—with the one about classified documents already on life support after a zealously pro-Trump, Trump-appointed lower court judge dismissed the charges for now—before he becomes president again on January 20. It’s not yet clear whether Smith is planning to permanently dismiss the charges or—more likely—put them on some type of hold that would nonetheless make justice nearly impossible, since Trump would be 82 if he leaves office as scheduled in 2029, and there would be questions about the statute of limitations.

Such maneuvers would be in line with the controversial and legally debated Justice Department decision from the Nixon era that sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted, which already gave any POTUS a unique standing above the law. But remember that Trump was on track to stand trial in the January 6 case this year, if not for the U.S. Supreme Court’s stunning 6-3 ruling earlier this year giving presidents sweeping legal immunity for broadly defined “official acts.”

When Smith does appear before U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan to end the case, it will be a triple exclamation point on how a once revolutionary nation turned a president into a king.

Some legal experts are arguing that Smith is playing the horrendous hand that he’s been dealt here, perhaps scrambling to issue an in-depth report about Trump’s alleged wrongdoing before the new president’s MAGA appointees can fire him. I get that, but my nonlawyer gut tells me that Smith should make Trump and his lackeys dismiss the case themselves, as one more reminder that Trump is trashing every last democratic norm we have.

But how 2017-ish of me to even think that. The decision has already been made in all our former watchdog institutions to obey the new authoritarianism in advance. You can hear it in the quiet of an unseasonably warm November breeze.

The dogs of 2016 and 2017 are not barking. There are no people in the streets chanting, “We! Reject! The president-elect!” or carrying “Not My President” signs like eight years ago. Kids aren’t walking out of high school, and college presidents—reflecting the catastrophic erosions of free speech in America that go well beyond Trumpism—are not issuing statements.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote Thursday about the Russian lifestyle of “internal emigration”—turning away from politics to emphasize family or books or gardening or anything else besides the seeming hopelessness of opposing autocracy.

This is exactly what I’m hearing from so many friends and even family here in Greater Philadelphia and on social media. People are leaving Musk’s X in droves, partly to protest the billionaire, but mostly to disengage from politics, at least for now. One boomer woman who threw herself into the so-called Trump Resistance in 2016 wrote me Thursday to say she is done. Protesting Trump, she wrote, “was an utter failure. I’m tired, demoralized, and bitter.”

I don’t blame her, nor would I think of criticizing the many people emphasizing their own mental health over politics at a moment when it’s not even clear what to do next. We are seeing in real time how autocracy happens, by creating hopelessness and despair among the mass of people who once might have fought back. From the obsequious Bezos to the end of resistance from everyday folk, we are seeing the once unthinkable: the start of American autocracy.

I was fortunate Thursday morning to connect with one of the nation’s top experts on authoritarian regimes, the Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, whose words—especially, “do not obey in advance”—from his essential On Tyranny are frequently quoted here. I wanted to ask him the question on so many people’s minds since Tuesday: What has history taught us about how to live now?

Snyder told me the most important thing for the moment is to avoid isolation and be around other people. “They want you to be alone,” the historian said of autocratic governments because isolation feeds the sense of powerlessness that allows the regime to do its dirty work unimpeded. “Nobody is going to fix this alone,” Snyder said. “That’s not how this works.”

Second, he suggested: “This is a good time to figure out what you’re good at. Define some little human-sized zone, whether it’s your library or your garden or your trade union. Take something positive that you know and do it.” He also noted that the political feeling of despair in opposing Trump and his MAGA movement doesn’t mean you can’t work for change on the state and local level, where one can still hash out issues with forward-minded politicians.

Snyder then suggested, with a laugh, what he called “a dumb little idea”—except that it wasn’t.

“Take a moment and write down a letter about the things you care about, that you’re willing to take a stand about. Write that down, put it in an envelope, and take it out of your desk as we’re going through these things”—like when Trump takes office in January, or early in his term.

Those of us who opposed Trump, and who were devastated to learn how many of our fellow citizens want to live under his strongman rule, need time to mourn this week’s news. But it’s well worth listening to Snyder’s words about not just living under tyranny, but someday soon finding reasonable ways to confront it. We are going to need each other, whether it’s in the streets or just at the dog park. And you—we—are not alone.

Nearly a month before the November 5 elections, I anticipated that Donald Trump would win and wrote about it in a couple of articles. My “prediction” created some controversy, especially since the polls showed Harris and Trump in a dead heat. Not surprisingly, people have been asking me the last few days how I came out with a call that, to some, had at the time no empirical basis and, to others, was an assault on their political sensibilities.

It’s not really rocket science. Inflation was just running rampant, with over 20 percent cumulative inflation in four years. I went almost every spring to teach in New York for six weeks, and I was shocked to see how high prices had risen since the year before. One could gauge the popular mood in forays to the supermarket, where the joy had gone out of the great American pastime of shopping, and people trudged along the aisles with a grimace on their faces as they stared at food prices that seemed to be escalating weekly.

When one turned on the television, one was assailed with images of migrants coming in droves over the border with Mexico, with border patrol agents shaking their heads. Middle-class people in the Northeast were waking up in shock to find migrants suddenly in their midst, deposited there courtesy of border-state governors who went on televised harangues justifying their acts by saying they wanted to give “blue state people” a taste of of “uncontrolled migration” brought about by Democratic Party policies.

Opportunity and crisis are twins. You can’t get to the new world without overcoming monsters…and there is no guarantee of victory.

Then, especially since October 2023, there were very real fears about the United States being sucked into the expanding war in the Middle East, that the Biden administration had lost control of its Middle East policy to Israel, and that this was triggering domestic unrest that was brought to living rooms nightly by images of campus confrontations and massive arrests. Then in the last few weeks before the vote, with Israel bombing Lebanon and carrying out strategic assassinations in Iran and elsewhere, then bombing Iran itself, there was widespread alarm that Tel Aviv was intent on dragging the United States into active combat and the Biden administration was helplessly looking on.

The overall sense you got talking to ordinary people in the spring was one of loss of control–that the Biden administration had lost control of the economy, of the border, and foreign and defense policy. This sense of no reliable hand at the helm of the ship of state could only deepen in the summer and fall, with Biden’s horrible debate performance and his replacement as presidential candidate by Harris. By early October, it was clear to me that Trump would win not so much because he had a more attractive vision for the future, but because he was able to capitalize on people’s fears about the economy, the border, and war and turn that unease into an active negative force against the Democrats. The 2024 election was largely a vote against Democratic ineptitude, just as the 2020 election was a vote against the chaos of Trump’s first presidency.

The bad news is that the far-right MAGA folks will try to translate this protest vote into an ultra-right program of governance that, if they succeed, will make American-style liberal democracy a thing of the past.

If one agrees with this undoubtedly impressionistic analysis, then two things follow. First, the electoral outcome was determined mainly by a popular reaction to conjunctural factors—inflation, border chaos, and the threat of war. Second, this was not a vote for fascism or authoritarianism, contrary to the panicked reactions of some liberal pundits–though of course, there was a far-right component in the Trump vote.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the far-right MAGA folks will try to translate this protest vote into an ultra-right program of governance that, if they succeed, will make American-style liberal democracy a thing of the past. Fortunately, the people of the United States, flawed though their democracy may be, have a democratic common sense. But that common sense needs good progressive leadership to be brought to the fore and converted into a vigorous political force. And, in this connection, there is another piece of good news: the discredited generation of Democratic Party leaders–the Clintons, Obama, Pelosi, Biden, Harris–with their advocacy of neoliberal policies coupled with promotion of liberal empire, will finally be jettisoned and the decks cleared for the emergence of a new generation of young progressive leaders unfettered by past ideological and policy paradigms.

The great Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci had a characterization of the early twentieth century that is also apt for our times: “The old world is dying, and the new is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Opportunity and crisis are twins. You can’t get to the new world without overcoming monsters…and there is no guarantee of victory.

But perfect I am not, and while I anticipated a Trump victory, I did not foresee just how bloody sweeping it would be.

A post from the writer Rebecca Solnit has been going around a number of the group chats I’m in. She writes, “They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I.”

I’ll admit, I felt a lot like giving up the last 48 hours. Part of me expected the results of Tuesday’s election, but they still hit like a body blow. Watching the incredible surge of volunteers over the past few days, including thousands of climate activists who headed out to battleground states to help get out the vote, had left me feeling hopeful heading into the election.

But it wasn’t to be. Running on a message of hate and division, and backed by fossil fuel billionaires and the world’s richest man, Donald Trump won the election in a relative landslide, improving on both his 2016 and 2020 numbers, while making strong inroads with young people, Latinos, and other members of what we’d come to understand as the traditional Democratic base.

So where do we go from here? What’s next for the climate fight?

Lessons From the Election

First, I think it’s worth trying to draw some lessons from the election. The dust is still settling, and there was so much at play in this chaotic process that it’s impossible to point the finger and say that’s the reason that Trump won and Vice President Kamala Harris lost, but I think there are still a few observations we can make about how the race played out.

The biggest one is about the economy. For the past four years, Americans have been struggling with the high cost of everything from groceries to gas prices. Common Dreams readers know the role that corporations played in driving up costs, from Big Oil taking advantage of the war in Ukraine to constrict supply and jack up the price at the pump, to chain grocers like Kroger intentionally keeping prices high to pad their CEO’s pockets. But that message never really got to the majority of Americans. Democrats were skittish about calling out corporate power, and some late in the game messages about “taking on price gouging” rang hollow as a result.

If they want to win elections going forward, Democrats are going to have to do a much better job of calling out corporate power, including Big Oil, and showing the spine necessary to take them on.

I saw this play out first hand. When gas prices first went up in 2021, we sprang into action and launched the Stop The Oil Profiteering campaign to try and push the White House and Democrats to pass a windfall profits tax. We made some headway with progressive members, and the House eventually passed an anti-price gouging bill, but Democratic leadership never really embraced the message. They were more interested in “claiming credit” for when gas prices went down a bit, not realizing that in doing so, they ended up owning the issue. Instead of clearly saying, “These corporations caused the problem,” they ended up with a muddled message about Russian President Vladimir Putin, supply and demand, and global markets.

In that context, it was easy for Trump to just repeat, “Biden is to blame,” on everything from gas to groceries to the lack of affordable housing. He didn’t need a plan to solve the problem, he just needed to show that he was as angry as you were, and that he knew who to fight. If they want to win elections going forward, Democrats are going to have to do a much better job of calling out corporate power, including Big Oil, and showing the spine necessary to take them on.

Second, I think Harris’ run to the center didn’t help her win over the voters she needed for the election. You can see this on any host of policy issues (with her failure to speak more clearly about the genocide in Gaza at the top of the list), but let’s focus on climate and energy. The Harris campaign was clearly nervous that any talk about energy issues would backfire by reminding some Pennsylvania voters that she’d opposed fracking in the past. But this supposed fracking backlash was always more of a media fabrication: Polling from Climate Power showed that when asked about issues that made them less likely to support Vice President Harris, only 3% of likely voters listed fracking—it just wasn’t on people’s radar screens.

Our job is to fight back, while doing everything we can to keep building a clean energy economy that works for all.

On the flip side, huge majorities of both Harris’ base and independent voters support the buildout of more clean energy, something Trump clearly opposes and will work to undermine. There are clean energy jobs at stake in every battleground state and across the country, but the Harris campaign never effectively weaponized the issue and made Trump’s crazy theories about wind turbines and solar panels a liability. Yes, a lot of environmental groups tried to drive this message, but we needed it from the top down and Harris never fully delivered.

The same dynamic played out with Hurricane Helene and Milton. In the days after Helene hit, I remember going through VP Harris’ various social media feeds and being shocked to see that there was hardly any mention of climate change. When I reached out to folks on the campaign, they said that she was focused on pushing back on disinformation about FEMA and supporting recovery efforts, which is important and admirable, but wasn’t really an answer. Again, I imagine that the campaign felt like calling the storms “climate disasters” was somehow too edgy and might turn off some voters. What that left them with was a professorial response—“this problem is very serious”—rather than a powerful, emotional, resonant message. In that vacuum, fake news about $750 checks and Biden intentionally withholding aid landed. They weren’t “true,” but they felt intense and shocking in a way that people were hungry for.

Did any of this prove decisive in the election? Maybe not. Again, there were so many factors at play and the Harris campaign did a lot of things right. But going forward, helping people understand who is really to blame for their economic hardships, and learning how to harness climate disasters and other disruptive events, are going to be crucial for pushing back on Trump and Big Oil’s agenda.

The Fight Ahead

Which brings us to the fight ahead. We don’t know exactly what Trump is going to do on climate and fossil fuels, but if Project 2025 and his campaign rhetoric is any indication, it’s going to be a nightmare. We can expect the Trump administration to not only take a bulldozer to environmental laws and regulations, but do everything they can to weaponize other parts of the government, like the Interior and Department of Energy, to promote fossil fuel development.

Our job is to fight back, while doing everything we can to keep building a clean energy economy that works for all.

First and foremost, that means standing in solidarity with our frontline allies. We know that Black, brown, and Indigenous people are at the forefront of fossil fuel expansion and bear the brunt of pollution and toxic chemicals. We need to push donors to invest more with grassroots groups in these communities and do what we can as activists to support their fights. As our frontline, and especially our Indigenous allies will remind us, they’ve been fighting under an oppressive system of white supremacy all their lives. While the struggle may be more intense over the coming years, it isn’t new, and we’ve got tools and tactics to fight back.

We can ensure that Trump faces massive resistance if he attempts to roll back clean energy programs that are creating jobs and saving consumers money, especially in Republican districts and states that have received the majority of benefits from the IRA.

Second, we need to do everything we can to slow new fossil fuel development. Try as he might, Trump can’t build new fossil fuel projects unilaterally. Remember his campaign promise to build the Keystone XL pipeline? It never happened. We need to do everything we can to stop new projects in their tracks, from going after project financing, to filing lawsuits, to organizing grassroots campaigns that can stop projects on the ground. And remember, this isn’t just a fight for progressives or liberals: Many of these projects go through deeply conservative areas, and there are lots of folks in Trump’s base who may change their opinion on the merits of “drill, baby, drill” when it shows up in their backyard. As Rebecca Solnit reminds us, “the fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.” We may not be able to stop every handout to the fossil fuel industry, but saving even one community from a destructive project is worth the fight. Every pipeline, every fossil fuel export terminal, and every fracking well we can stop matters.

Third, we need our cities, states, and federal allies to play offense. We don’t need to give the fossil fuel industry carte blanche to pursue their planet wrecking agenda. Now is the time to double down on building public support for the lawsuits and investigations that could ultimately hold Big Oil accountable for climate deception. Over 30 cities, states, municipalities, and tribal governments are already suing Big Oil, and I think we’ll see dozens more in the years to come. We can also push more states to follow Vermont’s lead and pass Climate Superfund bills that will force oil and gas companies to pay for climate damages—the biggest one currently on deck is in New York, where pressure is ratcheting up on Gov. Kathy Hochul to act. As fossil fuel CEOs tighten their grip on D.C., we can still get after them from every other corner of the country.

Fourth, let’s make the clean energy buildout unstoppable. The Biden Administration should be doing everything it can to get any remaining funds from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) out the door before they leave office. In the meantime, we need to start preparing to defend the clean energy programs and projects in our cities, states, and communities. We can ensure that Trump faces massive resistance if he attempts to roll back clean energy programs that are creating jobs and saving consumers money, especially in Republican districts and states that have received the majority of benefits from the IRA. But defense won’t be enough: We also need to create a movement of people all across the country who continue to accelerate the deployment of clean energy. Progress will be decentralized, but it doesn’t need to be derailed—especially if we all get to work.

Fifth, we need to tell a better story about climate and clean energy that connects with everyday people’s lives. There are so many good examples across the movement of groups making these connections: Environmental justice groups are connecting pollution directly to individual health; local clean energy groups are showing people how going solar will reduce electricity bills; mutual aid networks are effectively responding to extreme weather events and helping people connect the dots to climate and fossil fuels. It’s time to double down on all that work and more, while making sure that these narratives are echoed by our political leaders. As I said above, Democrats haven’t done a good job blaming Big Oil for things like inflation and high gas prices—that needs to change if they want to win elections in the future.

Finally, we need the Biden administration to do everything it can on climate before Trump takes office. Get all the money from the IRA out the door. Conclude the Department of Energy’s studies on the impacts of Liquified Natural Gas exports and show they aren’t in the public’s interest. Reject major new export facilities like the CP2 carbon megabomb in Louisiana. Ban drilling on public lands and waters. Set aside new protected areas. Yes, Trump will be able to claw back some of these actions, but in some cases, doing so will require years of legal challenges. I’d rather we keep them busy trying to undo progress than actively doing damage.

It is completely understandable to feel demoralized right now. Take time to let this sink in. Take time to grieve. Support your friends and family to do the same. But remember, as Joan Baez said, “Action is the antidote to despair.” I’ve already felt the small flame of hope inside of me begin to burn brighter as I’ve gotten to plot with friends and colleagues about the fight ahead. The road won’t be easy, but it’s one we’ll walk together. Onwards.

Not that many people know that The Wizard of Oz, one of America’s most-loved films, is based on the arcane economic world of monetary policy. L Frank Baum’s novel is a disguised critique of the folly of the Gold Standard written in the wake of the 1896 election, at a time when America was deeply divided socially and geographically, when enormous power was wielded by a billionaire class, the so-called Robber Barons.

The election centred on whether America should swap the straitjacket of a gold-backed dollar for the looser cardigan of a silver-backed dollar. As gold is less plentiful and more expensive than silver, opting for a silver-backed currency would cause a devaluation that would inject more dollars into the economy, helping the poor.

The yellow bricks of the Yellow Brick Road, represent the gold bars which paved the way to the Emerald City, the city of green – or greenback, the colloquial term for the dollar. Dorothy represents the wholesome daughter of middle America, literally Kansas. The Scarecrow is the put-upon Midwestern farmer American and the Tin Man is the industrial worker.

Politically, the Democrats, in an alliance with a new party called the Popular Party, representing workers, farmers and the lower middle class, wanted a dollar backed by silver, meaning there would be more dollars around. In contrast, the Republicans represented industrialists, Wall Street and the wealthy, the kind of people who wanted to preserve their dollar wealth and maintain the Gold Standard.

With so much at stake and the country so explicitly divided along class lines, the rich opened their wallets and, for the first time, America’s election was truly swung by money. The Republicans won because they raised more cash.

William McKinley, the victorious Republican candidate, received contributions worth more than $16 million (about $600 million in today’s money). McKinley’s chief fundraiser, Mark Hanna, raised more than $6 million by courting corporations with the promise of a big-business-friendly agenda. Hanna is famously quoted as saying: “There are two things that are important in politics: the first is money and I can’t remember the second one”.

And who do you think the Wizard of Oz represented? Why, Mark Hanna the financier, hiding behind the slogans and conspiring against the ordinary American, embodied by the innocent Dorothy.

Whoever pays the money expects favors. Money buys policy. That is and always has been the deal.

The American political scene was set over a century ago. Money matters in American politics, and that adage of the Republicans being for sale while the Democrats are only for rent is no longer strictly accurate.

Today’s Democrats aren’t above a mutually beneficial deal and are in the pockets of big business as much as their opponents. The problem with big money and unrestrained capitalism in politics is so obvious that it doesn’t need to be pointed out, but suffice to say that it is inimical with a properly functioning democracy.

At its core, the promise of democracy is “one man one vote”; but the attraction of capitalism is “one man many votes,” meaning the rich guys get the best things and lots of them, while the poor guy loses out.

Capitalism and democracy are in a constant state of friction. The excesses of capitalism need to be tempered by the equalising nature of democracy; however, too much democracy and redistribution limit the “animal spirits” of capitalism upon which prosperity rests.

Modern western societies are a tug of war between these two alternating ideas where a balance is sought between both; sometimes it’s called social democracy, Christian democracy or centrism but it amounts to the same, a truce.

Unfortunately, the conditions of the truce are influenced by money, which is why big money in elections is problematic. As is the case in any indecent proposal, whoever pays the money expects favors. Money buys policy. That is and always has been the deal. American politics has become the fiefdom of billionaires, the effect of which can only be imagined.

We’ve all seen Elon Musk jumping around Trump’s rally with the physical co-ordination of a homeschooled kid who’s never seen a PE class, but Musk isn’t the only billionaire with a stake in the game. The two US presidential candidates had raised more than $3.8 billion by mid-October. A Financial Times analysis of campaign finance filings found that billionaires have donated at least $695 million, or about 18 per cent of the total. Trump is particularly dependent on US elites, with about a third of his money coming from billionaires compared with about 6 per cent of the funds raised by Harris.

Trump’s finance base is rich but narrow while Harris’s is more broadly based. From January 2023 to mid-October 2024, Joe Biden and Harris outraised Trump ($2.2 billion to Trump’s $1.7 billion). But the rich guys have placed their bets; at least 144 people on the list of 800 US billionaires compiled by Forbes have donated to either candidate.

Billionaires leaning toward Harris may seem incongruous as she often criticizes Trump for being too close to the plutocrats, but there are practical reasons why the ultra-wealthy may favor Harris.

As was the case in 1896, if you are rich you want stability – after all, you are doing well from the status quo. A letter signed by more than a dozen billionaires last month endorsing Harris explained their belief that she will “continue to advance fair and predictable policies that support the rule of law, stability, and a sound business environment”. In contrast, although he might cut their tax bills, Trump represents chaos and commotion, which is never good for business.

No matter whether the money comes from the liberal center or the tear-it-all-down libertarian right, it comes with a price, a sort of pay-to-play cover charge. If you want influence in America you pay for it.

In Europe, strict limits on campaign contributions help curb plutocratic influence. For example, the $1.6 billion Joe Biden spent to win the 2020 presidential election is 70 times more than the sum Emmanuel Macron spent on his 2022 win – despite the fact that the US population is just five times larger than that of France. The total spend across all 12 candidates in the French presidential race was just over €83 million. Germany – a country with more billionaires per head than America – enforces strict donation limits and transparency rules, with caps of €50,000 per donor, reducing the risk of policies favoring an elite few.

No matter whether the money comes from the liberal center or the tear-it-all-down libertarian right, it comes with a price, a sort of pay-to-play cover charge. If you want influence in America you pay for it.

Irish elections are subject to strict spending limits. Candidates running for the Dáil can only spend up to a maximum of €38,900 in a three-seat constituency, €48,600 in a four-seater and €58,350 in a five-seater. These numbers are paltry in the context of US elections, where there are no spending limits. In Ireland, donations from individuals or companies to a party are capped at €2,500 per year, while donations to individual candidates are limited to €1,000 per year.

After the alfresco political bribery of the Charlie Haughey and tribunal years, things are more above board and the days of rich guys buying elections in return for explicit special treatment are long gone. By way of contrast, the clear conflict between capitalism and democracy in America is there for all to see. As they say, the US is “the best democracy money can buy”, and the die was cast in 1896 with the election of William McKinley.

In those final days of the 19th century, with their man in the White House and tariffs erected to protect their businesses, America’s billionaire plutocrats must have felt unassailable. But following McKinley’s assassination by an anarchist in 1901, power moved to his vice-president, Teddy Roosevelt, who would turn on the very plutocrats who had financed his campaigns. Sensing that America yearned for equality after years of division and a decade of rich men lording it over the working man, Roosevelt brought the billionaires to heel, regulating them, taxing them and breaking up their monopolies.

A decade after buying the election, the billionaire class was on the skids, accused by Republican president Roosevelt of “predatory capitalism.” Fortunes turned dramatically. Political power slipped away from the plutocrats just when they thought victory was theirs.

Can history repeat itself? I wouldn’t bet against it.

In the wake of Tuesday’s elections, many Americans are grieving about the fate of our country and the world. We need to take time to deal with those feelings, surround ourselves with people we love, and do things that bring us joy—music, cooking, sports, hiking, travel, whatever. We can accept the reality that Trump and the Republicans won the election, and try to understand why, but we need to eventually translate our anger into action—what organizer Ernie Cortes calls "cold anger" that is strategic.

There will be lots of post-election diagnoses and many reports about what went wrong (and, in a few cases, right) around polling, framing issues, media coverage, voter outreach, registration and turnout, voter suppression, voter preferences and turnout of specific groups (women, youth, African Americans, Latinos, union members, suburbanites) that weakened the Democratic coalition.

Journalism is often called the first draft of history. We don’t yet have all the facts about the election—for president, Senate, House, governor races, state legislatures, mayors and city councils, and ballot measures. But we have enough information to examine some of the most important aspects of what happened and why, and to use that information to develop strategies for moving forward, including ways to resist Trump’s efforts to undermine democracy, divide the country, increase human suffering, and build a white supremacist movement with him at the top.

There is a lot to take in.

1. The country is almost evenly divided when it comes to party preference. Trump did not win a landslide like FDR in 1936, Johnson in 1964, Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1980, or Obama in 2008. As of Friday morning, Trump has 50.7% of the popular vote compared to 47.7% for Harris. Because millions of California votes haven’t been counted yet, we don’t know if he won the popular vote, because Harris is winning over 57% of California votes. But either way, it will be close, similar to Kennedy’s win over Nixon in 1960 and Gore narrowly winning the popular vote over Bush in 2000 (but losing the Electoral College thanks to the Supreme Court halting the ballot count in Florida). Even so, public opinion polls show that Americans are NOT divided on most key issues. For example, a vast majority think there's too much wealth and income inequality, that rich people and big corporations should pay more in taxes, that the government should do more to protect the environment and consumers, that labor unions are a good thing, that undocumented immigrants deserve a path toward citizenship, that the government should help limit drug prices, that all Americans are entitled to health insurance, that the federal minimum wage should be at least $15 an hour, that same-sex marriage should be legal, that police should not engage in racial profiling, and so on. But public opinion doesn't get translated into policy without politics, and elections are about politics—mobilizing people to vote around issues they care about.

2. Overall voter turnout was significantly lower in this election compared with four years ago. In 2020, 66.4% of eligible voters actually voted. This year, 62.2% of eligible voters cast ballots. Both, however, are considerably higher than the turnout rates in 2008 (61.6%), 2012 (58.6%), and 2016 (60.1%). This is according to the University of Florida Election Lab, which keeps tabs on this.

3. Based on the most recent reports (as of November 7), it appears that the Democrats' turnout efforts were particularly inadequate. In 2020, Trump got 74.2 million votes. This year he is likely to get slightly fewer votes. In 2020, Biden got 81.2 million votes. This year, Harris is likely to get roughly 72 million votes, which is about 9 million fewer votes. That means that lots of people who voted for Biden in 2020 didn't even bother to vote this year. This year’s vote totals may change as more states report the results, but the trend is clear. Both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates got fewer votes this year than four years ago, but the Democratic candidate (Harris) got FAR fewer votes. Some version of this occurred in almost every state.

4. There are many hard truths we have to face if we're to move our country in a better direction. Trump is a fascist, but most Americans are not fascists. Even so, more than half of those who voted, voted for a fascist, mostly over their concerns over the economy, and next most important over immigration. There's no doubt that Trump has an emotional hold on a large number of Americans, who either forgive him for his personal flaws (liar, rapist, felon, grifter, corrupt businessman, etc) or don't think they are actually flaws. Many Americans who are angry about the state of the country or their own circumstances revel in a candidate who focuses on his grievances and promises to solve their problems, even if his often vague policy ideas will make their lives worse. Trump is a unique figure in the history of American politics—a demagogue, the leader of a personality cult, and pathological liar. So it is hard to evaluate this election and compare it with other elections, because doing so tends to normalize what should be causes for outrage. Even so, we can analyze this election to understand how Trump won the White House, and how the Republicans took back the Senate. We don't yet know whether the Republicans will hold onto their House majority.

5. Post-election polls show that the most important issue, by far, was the economy and prices. In the AP post-election survey, 37% of voters thought the economy was "excellent" (7%) or "good" (30%), while 64% of voters thought that the economy was "not so well" (40%) or "poor" (24%). By a margin of 50% to 41%, more Americans think Trump—who inherited his father’s real estate empire and lost billions in bad investments and bankrupt businesses—would be better than Harris at handling the economy. This despite the fact the American economy is currently the best in the world and is improving, that wages are going up faster than prices, and that unemployment is at a record low. Many polls show that most Americans don't give Biden credit for the improving economy. In fact, many blame him for what they perceive as a "bad" economy. Trump kept repeating that the economy is terrible and media let him get away with his lies, as Steve Greenhouse reported for The Guardian. Thirty-nine percent of voters ranked the economy as the most important issue. Among those who said that this was their biggest concern, a large margin (60%) voted for Trump, according to an AP survey. This anomaly showed up in Missouri, where about 58.5% of voters voted for Trump while, at the same time, 58% voted for Proposition A, which will hike the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour and guarantee paid sick leave. Trump is against raising the federal minimum wage and against paid sick leave, while Harris is for both of them. But obviously many Missourians voted for Trump AND Proposition A.

6. Immigration ranked #2 as a top concern. One-fifth (20%) of voters said that immigration was the most important issue in the election. 88% of those voters voted for Trump. Trump's racist stereotyping and scapegoating of immigrants was effective. This was his most fascist demagogic issue and it worked. It appears that Trump paid no political price for his lies about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, his lies about immigrants involved in higher crime rates than other Americans, or other lies he used to demonize immigrants. Nor did he pay a price for his failure, in his first term, to build a border wall and get Mexico to pay for it.

7. Abortion ranked #3. Eleven percent of voters said it was the most important issue. Eight-five percent of them voted for Harris. Many people (including me) predicted that abortion would play a major role in getting women to vote and to vote for Harris and other Democrats in light of the Dobbs decision, made possible by Trump's appointments to the Supreme Court and his opposition to abortion. We still don't have all the facts, but it appears that this didn't happen. CNN exit polls found that Harris won female voters’ support by eight points — 53% to 45%. But in 2020, Biden won their women’s support by 15 percentage points, 57% to 42%. A majority (53%) of white women, who accounted for 37% of all voters, voted for Trump. According to the CNN polls, Harris won 92% percent of Black women’s votes, up from Biden’s 90.5%. Although Harris won 61% of Latina women’s votes, this margin was much lower than Biden’s 69% in 2020. Together, Black and Latina women accounted for only 13% of all voters. Quite a few Americans voted for Trump AND voted for state ballot measures in favor of abortion.

8. Why did most of the polls underestimate Trump's support? It has to do to with the so-called "Bradley effect," named for Tom Bradley, Los Angeles’ first African American mayor. In 1982 he lost his campaign for California governor despite having a lead in the polls going into the election. Some voters clearly told pollsters that they were going to vote for Bradley because they didn't want to sound racist. This year, some people who intended to vote for Trump lied to pollsters. They know he's a despicable person and didn't want to say out loud that they were going to vote for him. So they lied. That at least partly explains why most polls underestimated Trump's margins.

9. Harris had three major disadvantages. First, Biden waited too long to drop out and it handicapped Harris. She had 100 days to introduce herself (and her running mate) to the voters. She raised more money than Trump, and there was a groundswell of enthusiasm at the start, but she had too little time to campaign. Second, she was tethered to Biden, who, despite huge successes (especially on the economy) against impossible odds, was extremely unpopular. She didn’t have a good answer to how she would be different from Biden. Third, she’s a Black woman. Since the 1960s, more and more white voters have voted for Black and Hispanic candidates and more male voters have voted for female candidates. As a result, the number of Black, brown, and female elected officials has increased dramatically. That's all good. But we can't discount the reality that Harris' race and gender may have hurt her with quite a few voters. Black and women voters didn't support her at the levels that her campaign expected, and there are still many Americans who won't vote for a Black candidate, or a female candidate, much less at Black female candidate.

10. The Democrats approach to voter outreach and turnout didn’t work. Democrats can’t just helicopter paid organizers and unpaid volunteers into battleground areas a few months before each election. My wife and I canvassed for Democrat George Whitesides in a key battleground House race in northern LA County (Palmdale/Lancaster/Santa Carita), against a Republican incumbent, Mike Garcia. The Whiteside campaign recruited hundreds of volunteers like us. But most of the Whitesides canvassers over those last few weekends were NOT from that district, because there was very little Democratic infrastructure there. We door-knocked homes and apartments of registered Democrats who were low-propensity voters—who had only voted in one or two of the least five election cycles. Most weren't at home or refused to come to the door. We were not their friends, neighbors, or coworkers. We were strangers. Others told me of their similar experiences around the country. For certain we increased turnout to some extent, but that organizing model is inadequate and not a recipe for Democratic success. The result of this strategy results in very uneven outcomes. Turnout in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) was 74%, but only 60% in Philadelphia, according to Mike Elk's Payday Report. If turnout in Philadelphia had been closer to the level in Pittsburgh, Harris would have won Pennsylvania. Democrats and their allies have to build permanent, ongoing social and political organizations in-between elections, that garner trust, mobilize people around issues, and build local leadership. Groups like the Movement Voter Project do this, but they are woefully underfunded, as Jodi Jacobson noted in her article in The Nation, “Grassroots Groups Know How to Win This Campaign – Do They Have What They Need to Pull It Off?”

11. The turnout problem has much to do with the decline of the labor movement over the past 40 years—from 30% of all workers in the early 1970s, to 20% in the 1990s, to 10% today. Biden was the most pro-union president in history. Not a single union endorsed Trump. Union members voted for Harris-Walz by a margin of 57%-39%, according to the AP. That's not bad, but not good enough. Typically, turnout by union members is higher than average turnout. If union membership today was 20% of all workers - 28.8 million members instead of 14.4 million members—and 57% of them voted for Harris—she would have won the White House. Unions used to be the key turnout machine for Democrats. A stronger labor movement would have recruited more members to volunteer, had more money to invest in Democratic campaigns, put more resources into educating their members about why to vote for the pro-worker candidate, even those members who might be gun owners or evangelical Christians. Historian Michael Kazin discusses this in his article “The Decline of Union Hall Politics” in the current issue of Dissent magazine.

12. America's corporate ruling class and its Republican allies spent the past half-century trying to weaken and even destroy the labor movement, and almost succeeded. They did this in part by weakening labor laws and enforcement, in part by engaging in expensive union-busting. It turns out that unions have made a modest comeback in the past few years, but they can't win many workplace victories under current labor laws, which are biased toward corporations, allowing them to engage in illegal union-busting without paying serious penalties. Public opinion is solidly in support of unions. At least 70% of Americans support unions, the highest figure since the mid-1960s, when the Gallup Poll began asking that question. But public opinion doesn't win union elections. Fair labor laws and good organizing do. The Democrats should have enacted labor law reform (then called the Employee Free Choice Act, now called the Protect the Right to Organize Act) when they had the chance under Obama, but they didn't. They are paying for that now. That should be a priority if Democrats ever get a trifecta – the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.

13. Other key organizations within the Democratic coalition—Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups groups, civil rights groups, immigrant rights groups, community organizing groups, LGBTQ groups—don't have the resources or infrastructure that the labor movement does. If they all worked together to invest in year-round organizing and voter mobilization, that would be better, but the liberal/progressive coalition is still organizationally fragmented.

14. Some people are surprised at Trump's victory because the media kept saying that his campaign operation was in disarray and didn't have a real ground game. But Trump DID have a ground game. It's called the white evangelical Christian movement. Those churches and their social networks mobilized their members for Trump and other Republicans. In 2016 and 2020 they accounted for almost half (45%) of Trump's total vote. According to CNN exit polls, this year white evangelical Christians accounted for 22% of all voters and gave Trump 82% of their votes. That translates into roughly 45% of his total votes, the same as before. It is likely that a significant factor in Trump's increase among Latinos this year was among Hispanic evangelicals and Hispanic-traditional Catholics.

15. The spoilers don't explain the loss. Many of us feared that in an extremely tight presidential election that would be determined by a small number of votes in seven battleground states, the presence of Jill Stein and Cornel West on the ballot could take enough "protest" votes away from Harris to hand Trump a victory. Third party “spoilers” have changed the outcome of presidential elections in the past. In 2000, for example, Ralph Nader diverted enough votes away from Democrat Al Gore to swing the election to George W. Bush. But that didn't happen this year. Trump's margin of victory in each of the seven battleground states was larger than the combined votes for Stein and West.

16. The same is likely true about Arab American voters. In the Arab-majority suburb of Dearborn, Michigan, Harris lost the city to Trump by more than 2,600 votes. Biden beat Trump by more than 17,400 votes in Dearborn. That's more than a 20,000-vote swing that contributed to Trump's triumph in Michigan. Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib received over 9,600 more votes in Dearborn than Harris. Rep. Elissa Slotkin—a Jew and a supporter of Israel—not only won her race for the Michigan Senate seat but also won the most votes in in Dearborn. She won 41.1% of Dearborn votes compared to 39% for her Republican opponents, but lost some votes to the Green Party candidate, who received 14.8% of the Dearborn vote. Trump beat Harris in Michigan by a slim margin of 79,303 votes—49.87% (2,809,720 votes) to 48% (2,728,417). The Arab American vote wasn't enough, on its own, to swing the Michigan electoral votes his way, but it contributed to his victory. More important was the low turnout by Black voters and the shift of some Black voters toward Trump. The same is likely true in Pennsylvania, which has a relatively large Arab American population, but where other factors were more important in Trump's victory.

17. Overall, it appears that foreign policy—including US support for Ukraine and Israel—was not a major factor in this election. Only about four percent of voters ranked foreign policy as a top concern. Even most leftist/progressive voters who declared themselves to be "uncommitted" probably voted for Harris anyway, knowing that things would be much worse for Palestinians, or the prospects for peace in the Middle East, if Trump won the election. Similarly, it doesn't look like Harris lost many votes among young people and liberals upset with her stance on Israel and Palestine. But because Harris got fewer votes than Biden did in 2020, we don't yet know which Biden voters didn't bother to vote this year and whether the Israel/Palestine issue prompted a significant number of people not to cast ballots for Harris or not to vote at all.

18. In many ways, the legacy of the COVID pandemic was a factor in this election. It brought the economy to a standstill, first under Trump, then under Biden. Biden's policies helped bring the economy back, but that's not how most voters see it. Instead, they have short memories and somehow blame Biden for higher prices for gas, food, rent, and other necessities. They forget the devastation that Trump's mishandling of the pandemic caused, including many unnecessary deaths due to his lies about vaccines and his administration's failure to quickly address the public health crisis. In early March 2020, weekly claims for unemployment insurance was about 207,000. Two weeks later, it was ten times that figure. By April, claims reached a high of 6,137,000. Having lost their jobs or working few hours, many Americans could not pay their mortgage or the rent. Biden expanded resources for testing and vaccines, but Trump and his MAGA movement opposed masks and even vaccines, so that, ironically, COVID deaths were higher in Republican areas. Through August 2024, the U.S. had 103 million confirmed cases of COVID and 1.2 million deaths. COVID also had a profound impact on increasing social isolation, with people becoming less connected to family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. That certainly had an impact on voter turnout.

19. What can we expect from a Trump administration? Here are some parts of his agenda that will likely be top priorities:

(a) He will hire more loyalists to run the White House and the agencies, to avoid what happened in his first term, where top aides and cabinet heads, as well as military leaders and his own chief-of-staff, thwarted Trump proposals they knew were illegal or political unwise. Among the new Trump inner circle will be fellow fascist Elon Musk and anti-science whacko Robert F. Kennedy Jr. If the latter is put in charge of health care initiatives, including NIH and/or FDA, watch out!

(b) He will try to persuade Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas (76 years old) and Samuel Alito (75) to retire so he can appoint younger reactionaries to the Supreme Court.

(c) He will fill other federal judgeships with similar reactionaries drawn from a list put together by the right-wing Federalist Society. This only requires Senate approval.

(d) He will begin to deport immigrants, although it is unlikely he can deport all 12 million undocumented immigrants. If he tries, he'll get pushback from major employers who depend on them. Trump's deportation efforts will sow enormous chaos and racism, and could result in violence and certainly violations of basic civil liberties.

(e) If the Republicans retain control of the House, which appears likely, he will weaken federal labor laws and eviscerate the NLRB to stall or reverse the modest but impressive victories by organized labor made during the Biden years.

(f) He will cut Medicaid, food stamps, and housing vouchers.

(g) He will weaken Obamacare to return to allowing insurance companies to deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions.

(h) He will weaken regulations that protect workers, consumers, and community residents from dangerous health, safety, and environmental practices by business. This means cutting budgets and regulations for EPA, FDA, OSHA, NLRB, FTC, CFPB, HUD, and other regulatory agencies.

(i) He will enact even more regressive tax policies by reducing taxes for the super-rich and big business.

(j) He will impose tariffs on imports that will be, in effect, a tax that will cost the typical consumer at least several thousand dollars a year.

(k) He will cut Pell grants and other financial aid for college and cancel all policies to reduce student debt, most of which is born by working class Americans who attended four year public colleges and universities.

(l) He will reduce funds for public transit and investments in green jobs and green industries, cancelling key provisions of one of Biden’s key legislative accomplishments.

(m) He will allow drug companies to dramatically raise prices for prescription medicine, including for drugs like insulin, reversing another Biden achievement.

(n) He will weaken federal laws that ban employment, housing and other forms of discrimination on the basis of race and gender

(o) He will encourage the Supreme Court to allow states to outlaw same-sex marriage

(p) He will preempt states and cities from raising the minimum wage above the federal level ($7.25 since 2009), and may try to preempt them from adopting rent control laws.

(q) He will support a bill to outlaw abortion, even though during the campaign he said it should be left to the states

(r) He will pardon all those who were convicted for the January 6 insurrection.

(s) He will end U.S. aid to Ukraine, guaranteeing Putin a victory.

(t) He will visit Israel to show support for Netanyahu, cut off U.S. funds for the UN relief agency providing aid in Gaza, and encourage the Israeli prime minister to expand Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

(u) He will continue to use the White House as a subsidiary of the Trump family business empire, making profits from people who want favors and who will stay in Trump hotels and resorts and invest in business projects sponsored by his children.

(v) He will continue to rant and rave like a deranged lunatic, encouraging hate groups like the Proud Boys to engage in violence against immigrants, transgender folks, Blacks, Jews, and others.

(w) He will engage in all kinds of acts to diminish our democracy and basic rights regarding free speech, assembly, dissent, unions, surveillance, academic freedom, immigration and deportation, separation of church and state, and others. Rick Perlstein painted a scary scenario about this subject in an article for American Prospect, entitled "What Will You Do?"

20. If the Republicans control the House (as it appears they will as of Friday), Trump will have no guardrails. His policies will cause a great deal of harm and suffering in the first two years of his administration. If so, that will give the Democrats a chance to win a majority of the House in the 2026 mid-terms, checkmating Trump's ability to carry out much his agenda in the third and fourth years of his term.

21. But even without a Republican House, Trump can do a great deal of damage through executive fiat and with a friendly Senate, who will approve his appointments to the Cabinet, regulatory agencies, and the courts. It will be extremely hard for the Democrats to take back the Senate in 2026. The Senate map seems to give Republicans the advantage. The “out” party usually picks up seats in the midterm elections, but the Democrats have a long climb to get to 51 Senate seats in 2026. If am correct, then Trump will have four years of a Republican Senate.

Current Senate

• 51 D (includes independents Sinema, Manchin, Sanders, King)
• 49 R

Republicans flipped at least four Senate seats

No Democrat flipped a Republican Senate seat. But Republicans flipped four Senate seats. GOP challengers defeated incumbents Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, and Jon Tester in Nevada. A Republican won the open Senate seat in West Virginia, where Joe Manchin—a Democrat who turned independent—didn’t run for re-election.

Republicans could still flip one more Senate seats, but it is too close to call

The Republicans were unable to flip Democratic-held Senate seats in Wisconsin and Michigan. Both Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin) and Elissa Slotkin (Michigan) narrowly won their races for the Senate, outperforming Harris. That leaves one hotly-contested Senate race that is still too close to call. As of Friday, with 96% of the votes counted, incumbent Democrat Jacky Rosen was ahead of her Republican opponent 47.8% to 46.5%.

The Next Senate

Assuming Rosen holds onto her Nevada Senate seat, the Republicans will have a 53-47 majority starting in January. Going into the 2026 mid-term elections, Democrats will have to hold onto all 47 current seats, and flip four Republican-held seats, to regain a Senate majority. This will be a difficult task, given the number of vulnerable Republicans and Democrats who are up for re-election in 2026.

2026 Senate Elections

Vulnerable Republicans (% of votes in previous race)

• Thom Tillis - NC (48.7%)
• Joni Ernst – Iowa (51.8%)
• Susan Collins – Maine (51%)
• John Cornyn - Texas (53.5%) [although Cruz’s win over Colin Allred with 53.2% of the vote makes a Cornyn win seem highly likely)

Vulnerable Democrats (% of votes in previous race)

• Jon Ossoff – GA (50.6%)
• Tina Smith – Minnesota (48.7%)
• John Hickenlooper – Colorado (53.5%)
• Gary Peters – Michigan (49.9%)
• Ben Ray Lujan – New Mexico (51.7%)

22. There’s lots to discuss about what Democrats, liberals and progressives, should be doing during Trump’s presidency. Massive civil disobedience and protest? General strikes in major cities? Investing in and strengthening an infrastructure of local/state issue-oriented groups to strengthen and expand the organizing base in-between elections? Focus on building movements and winning elections in cities and state legislatures? Lots of lawsuits to stop Trump from pursuing his agenda?

23. We won’t know for four years if this was a realignment election – the beginning of a dramatic change in America’s political direction. Was this a significant shift in Americans’ partisan loyalties or a tribute to Trump’s unique appeal? It is unlikely that any other Republican can pull off what Trump did. Certainly vice-president-elect JD Vance lacks Trump’s charisma. If the Democrats nominate good candidates for president and vice president in 2028, he or she can probably defeat Vance, who will be the presumptive GOP nominee. (It is also possible that Vance could become president earlier if Trump gets seriously ill, enfeebled, or dies before the end of his term). But there will be a lot of damage over the next four years that could make it harder to have a fair election.

24. There are many structural aspects of our political system that tilt the playing field toward big business, the wealthy, conservatives, and Republicans. These include the Electoral College; gerrymandering House seats (with SCOTUS approval); the small-state bias in the Senate; the federalist system (that allows each state to decide who can vote, how, when, and where people register and vote) that reduces turnout, especially among the poor; "balanced," "he said/she said" and "horse race" journalism that gave Trump a platform to spew lies (especially about the economy) and hate, normalized him, and didn't clearly inform Americans about what a Trump presidency would mean for their daily lives; Citizens United and our campaign finance rules that give corporations and the rich undue influence; and our judicial system, which let Trump off the hook with delays instead of convictions and prison. These are serious obstacles. Whether (and when) these can be reformed is a big question. But they should not get in the way of the more immediate need to build a stronger movement for economic and social justice.

25. In the midst of this awful election, there was some GOOD NEWS, including progressive candidates and ballot measures winning against the odds. Among them are Rep. Ruben Gallego’s Senate victory in Arizona and progressive tenant lawyer Ysabel Jurado’s election to the LA City Council. There's plenty of other silver linings from Tuesday's elections, but I'll leave that analysis for another time.

Tuesday’s election results were dire, but now is not the time for progressives to retreat. American society will be best served by a progressive movement that plays strong defense and offense.

Progressives must continue to be vigilant in defending democracy, the rule of law, and the constitutional republic. In order to be most effective on these matters, we should maintain our recent alliance with liberals and conservatives of conscience. On every other matter, we should speak as the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party, the group whose platform is supported by the vast majority of Democrats.

We must lead in protecting the environment and vulnerable communities, both at home and abroad.

Solidarity with organized labor will be a priority during Trump 2.0. Unions will face a hostile National Labor Relations Board. Vigilance will be required to preserve labor’s recent gains. When there’s a strike or an organizing drive, progressives must have a presence on the picket line, calling Trump’s bluff and exposing his contempt for labor.

Only progressives advocate for time-tested policies and programs that will build the prosperous middle class society that the majority of the country so clearly wants.

The Republican Party is winning elections by attracting the working class away from a Democratic Party dominated by its neoliberal moderate faction. However, the GOP is mainly gaining working class support because Trump gives expression to shared grievances, not because the GOP is proposing policies that will help working people economically.

Only progressives advocate for time-tested policies and programs that will build the prosperous middle class society that the majority of the country so clearly wants. It is incumbent upon progressives to make the case to our fellow Democrats and to the general public that progressive economics should define the Democratic Party agenda going forward.

There should be no equivocation in our messaging, just three simple points:

1. The economic program of moderate Democrats and Republicans (aka neoliberalism) destroyed the American middle class;

2. Trump’s economics have failed to re-build it; and

3. Progressive economic policy created the wealthiest middle class in the history of the world in the years after World War II. It’s time to give progressive economics a try in the 21st century.

So, expect PDA and progressives to respond to Tuesday’s results by being very active and promoting our positions. Indeed, the Democratic Party is clearly in crisis following the election, we need to step up and make the case—for the benefit of the party and, more importantly, the people, the country, and the planet—that progressive policies should define the party going forward.

However, we also need to show humility and do some soul searching. Too often, the left dismisses all criticism out of hand. This must change. We need to accept that conservatives and moderates have effectively misrepresented progressives as extremists, and take action to change this perception. We must re-establish that we are an inclusive political movement that respects everyone’s voice and is fully committed to maximizing freedom and liberty for all Americans.

Progressives are ready to stand up at this challenging moment in our history, confident that our policy agenda suits the needs of 21st century America and provides a pathway out of America’s interminable political crisis.

* * *

On Wednesday, Bernie Sanders shared his thoughts on the results of the election. As usual, he was right on point. Bernie condemned the influence of big money in the Democratic Party, and the party's failure to fight for the working class.

We must step up now and take initiative to bring the Democratic Party into line with Sanders' vision

I also happened to stumble upon James Carville's reflections. Carville correctly diagnoses the leadership void in the Democratic Party and calls for immediate action. Not surprisingly, however, Carville does not suggest a role for progressives in leading the Party forward.

Put the two together, and the course of action for progressives is clear. We cannot hesitate or we will miss our opportunity. Rather, we must step up now and take initiative to bring the Democratic Party into line with Sanders' vision—one which matches the politics of the party's base and has majority support among the general population.

After the 2016 election, Keith Ellison, a great progressive, challenged the Democratic Party leadership and almost won. However, control of the party apparatus remained in the hands of the moderate faction. Fast forward eight years to the present, and that leadership has taken us to the exact same point of failure as in 2016: Donald Trump is president-elect, the Senate and likely the House will be under GOP control.

You have to be willfully ignorant not to understand what this is telling us.

Progressives must challenge for the leadership of the Democratic Party—and we must win.

It’s official. Neoliberal fascism has become mainstream in the United States. This is the only rational conclusion that one can draw from Trump’s decisive victory in the 2024 election. Indeed, Trump’s historic victory (which includes leading the GOP to a much larger-than-expected Senate majority and potentially in control of the House) has changed the nature of the Republican Party and shifted the center of gravity in U.S. politics in such earth-shattering fashion that it has led to the actual collapse of the Democratic Party.

Neoliberal fascism is now the dominant politico-ideological orientation in the United States and its dire consequences will undoubtedly be felt for years to come both inside the country and across the world. In this context, the formation of a united front against fascism is more important and urgent than ever before.

Under the leadership of Donald Trump, a political movement has been born that encompasses different major coalitions (working-class voters, women [whose share of support for Trump, ironically enough, went up by 2 percentage points from the last election], Christian fundamentalists, minorities [Black, Hispanic, Asian voters] and youth [though largely white and conservative], and the ultra-wealthy) all of whom have been drawn to the “America First” slogan.

As such, the followers of Trump’s movement are apparently enthused by the idea of witnessing the radical restructuring of the federal government (the shrinking of government agencies accompanied by the expansion of the powers of the presidency) and retribution for the great leader’s political enemies; they are apparently in favor of rolling back civil and human rights and in approval of “law and order” politics which includes, among other things, militarizing the police and carrying out a militarist plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and banning sanctuary cities; they are apparently in support of a political agenda that targets climate change and curtails measures that protect the environment; and they are apparently in approval of massive tariffs on all imports as a tool of economic competition and tax cuts to benefit the rich.

The GOP is now Trump’s party, and it is fascistic. It was a fallacy all along on the part of many Democrats to think that MAGA Republicans were a minority within the GOP. Kamala Harris exhibited anything but political savviness by going after wavering Republicans, flip flopping on key issues, and ignoring the needs of working-class people. Thus, as Bernie Sanders aptly put 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.”

The Democrats should have learned from the mistakes of Social Democratic parties in Europe, which abandoned working class people and subsequently opened the door to authoritarian populist leaders who promised voters fed up with neoliberal policies a return to a “golden age” of economic independence, national identity and traditional social values. But they didn't because Democrats have become the party of Wall Street and jet-setting celebrities.

The question now facing progressive and radical forces in the US is what to do next. Questions over political identity, vision and strategy ought to dominate public discussions in the weeks and months ahead. A united front against Trump must be formed in order to curtail the scope of his neoliberal fascist plans. As things stand, there are virtually no checks on Trump in his second term. And he cones into office armed with a Supreme Court ruling that grants the president immunity from prosecution for criminal acts committed while in office.

Dark times lie ahead. Many of those who voted for Trump will come to regret their choice, but that’s of little consolation now to the rest of society. Now it’s up to the rest of us to become more involved ever more passionately in pedagogical projects and political struggles that would build walls of resistance against a fascist takeover in the US. The fascist threat is real, and the Democratic Party bears much responsibility for democracy’s imminent demise.

The country needs a new vision and new politics. A powerful popular mass political response is urgently needed. It can happen. It must happen. The time to get organized in a much more serious and effective way is now.

As the world absorbs the shockwave of Donald Trump’s win in the US presidential election, the playbook for his second term, designed by a handful of right-wing extremists, is already underway in Argentina.

Project 2025 is set out in a nearly 900-page ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,’ produced by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing U.S. think tank, as a ready reckoner for the incoming Trump administration. It details authoritarian tactics that exist in various parts of the world, from attacking public education to dismantling policies to tackle climate change to restricting the rights of women, LGBTIQ+ people, migrants, workers and Black people. But if there is one country already trying some of Project 2025’s most extreme policies to weaken the state and render the enjoyment of rights obsolete, it is Argentina.

“If you have any doubts about how Project 2025 would be implemented, you have to look at what has happened in the last year in Argentina,” human rights lawyer Paula Ávila-Guillén, told me in a thought-provoking interview. She is the executive director of the Women's Equality Center (WEC) which works on communication strategies on reproductive health and justice in Latin America.

I knew what was happening in my country Argentina. A 30% cut in state spending and an eleven percentage point increase in poverty in less than a year don’t go unnoticed – even if you don't live there. Nor do the struggles that family and friends go through in a society already used to economic crashes. Still, Ávila-Guillén’s provocation prompted me to delve into the way Project 2025 is being carried out back home.

When Milei took office, he warned the Argentine people that their economic plight might briefly worsen under his harsh measures. This is exactly what millions are now suffering: more poverty and recession.

Project 2025 has been spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, but includes an advisory board with more than one hundred other Christian right and far right groups and dozens of former Trump officials.

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration,” the Heritage Foundation says on its website to introduce Project 2025.

In the months leading up to election day, as Project 2025’s authoritarian goals were increasingly documented by the press, hate watch groups and trade unions, Trump tried to distance himself from it.

Javier Milei, president of Argentina since December last year and an emerging figurehead of the global far right, has never mentioned Project 2025. But he had been looking to establish ties with the Heritage Foundation since at least 2023, according to documents submitted by a lobbyist to the U.S. Department of Justice.

And a copy of the ‘Mandate for Leadership’ was handed to Milei by Heritage’s executive vice-president Derrick Morgan when the two met in Washington in February for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), according to Argentina’s government website which lists gifts received by the president.

A central goal of Project 2025 is to “dismantle the administrative state” allegedly co-opted by the left or wokism. It entails disbanding federal ministries and agencies, cutting public funding for health, education and welfare, and eliminating programs and resources to combat gender-based violence, discrimination, pollution and climate change.

If there is one country already trying some of Project 2025’s most extreme policies to weaken the state and render the enjoyment of rights obsolete, it is Argentina.

Milei has worked fast in his first ten months in power and has followed this script entirely. The argument for many of his new measures has been the need to lower public spending to balance a lopsided economy, with an annual inflation at 211% and a huge debt owed to the International Monetary Fund. There is nothing wrong with cutting superfluous spending of course, but Milei has gone so much further than anyone might have initially imagined, in what many have dubbed his “chainsaw-style approach” to reducing the size of the state.

“I love being the mole inside the state,”I Milei said in an interview in June. “I'm the one destroying the state from within”.

“I love being the mole inside the state. I'm the one destroying the state from within”
Milei

Milei has made an unprecedented cut to all public spending at close to 30%. He cut investment in education by 40%, denied increases to pensions, cut access to life-saving drugs for cancer patients, defunded the science and technology system and universities, and laid off almost 27,000 public employees.

He closed the public media and froze food distribution to soup kitchens. Now, he’s set to sell-off public companies in the fields of nuclear energy, aviation, fuel, mining, electricity, water, cargo transport, roads and railways.

Milei has eliminated nine ministries, including the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity and the Ministry of Education— something that the Mandate for Leadership mentions and Trump has also spoken about.

He has dismantled all gender policies and defunded services including those for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Last year, more than 170,000 people accessed these services, while official figures show that a femicide is committed every 35 hours in Argentina. It is now unclear whether anyone will continue to keep track of these statistics.

He also closed the Institute against Discrimination, Racism and Xenophobia, which he called a “sinister body used for ideological persecution.” Project 2025 authors would no doubt be delighted. Their blueprint for Trump goes to great lengths to explain how every diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policy, program and fund must be removed.

The ‘Mandate for Leadership’ details the need to assemble an army of loyalists from day one to carry out this task of reducing the state. The Heritage Foundation has a database of some 20,000 people in the U.S. who would make up a transitional staff for Trump. But it would require firing tens of thousands of career civil servants to replace them with people loyal to their ideology and ban public employees’ right to unionise.

Milei is actively persecuting civil servants who don’t follow his mindset. In a letter to the diplomatic corps, he demanded those who don’t align with his foreign policy ideas to “step aside,” specifically referencing his plan to repudiate the UN's Agenda 2030 which governments have signed to combat poverty, inequality and environmental destruction.

Days later, in a statement, he announced a purge: “The executive branch will launch an audit of the career staff of the foreign ministry with the aim of identifying promoters of anti-freedom ideas.”

War on gender

According to Project 2025, the next US president must “remove from every existing rule, regulatory agency, contract, grant, regulation, and federal law the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights.”

Abortion is mentioned 199 times in the document, including proposing a federal ban, increased criminalization, more restrictions on providing care for miscarriages and obstetric emergencies, defunding emergency contraception and strict surveillance systems on people who have abortions or suffer miscarriages.

Heritage also wants to impose its worldview across borders: restore the so-called ‘Mexico City policy,’ which prohibits any U.S. public funding to foreign non-governmental organizations if they include any abortion-related activity—even if they do so with their own funds.

The right to abortion, legalized in 2021 in Argentina, is in danger under Milei. His party introduced a bill to repeal abortion which he’s referred to as “aggravated murder.” He’s also defunded the distribution of abortion pills and contraceptives.

Milei eliminated a program to prevent teenage pregnancy and has not set aside any funds in the 2025 budget for comprehensive sex education—which is mandatory by law and considered essential to prevent child abuse. Instead, authorities hired the Chilean Catholic organization Teen Star, that promotes abstinence, for training teachers in charge of CSE.

Milei banned the use of gender inclusive language in public services, and put a Catholic lawyer, Ursula Basset, in the foreign ministry to review all the country's positions on gender and climate change. At the last Organization of American States (OAS) General Assembly, Basset stymied the negotiations by demanding the removal of “LGBTI people,” “gender,” “tolerance,” “climate change,” and “families” from agreed intergovernmental statements.

“Argentina was the only G20 country to oppose the Ministerial Declaration on Gender Equality,” signed last month in Rio, Ávila-Guillén told me. The disagreement stemmed from the fact that “family care” was defined as work and the term “reproductive rights” was mentioned. Argentina ended up in a more extreme position than Saudi Arabia or Russia.

“At the G20 meeting, Argentina ended up in a more extreme position on gender than Saudi Arabia or Russia”

Respectability and academic tone is just a veneer for hate in Mandate for Leadership. You only need to skim the document to find polarizing language and the construction of an internal enemy. Milei likewise calls his opponents “rats,” “human excrement,” “fucking lefties,” “imbeciles,” or “traitors.”

“The idea that Milei is the most Argentinian thing that could happen to Argentina is ridiculous; he is part of a much bigger agenda, crafted in the U.S. and which is trying to be implemented in different parts of the world,” Ávila-Guillén says.

The lobbyist that connected Milei with the Heritage Foundation last year is Damián Merlo, partner director of Latin America Advisory Group, a company which lobbies in the U.S. on behalf of authoritarian Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. Merlo is close to digital strategist Fernando Cerimedo, who also works for Milei and has done so for the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Cerimedo is currently under investigation in Brazil for his alleged role in the 2022 failed coup attempt led by Bolsonaro against Brazilian president Inácio Lula da Silva.

When Milei took office, he warned the Argentine people that their economic plight might briefly worsen under his harsh measures. This is exactly what millions are now suffering: more poverty and recession.

In the last days of the U.S. election campaign, a similar message was spread by billionaire Elon Musk who put more than $100 million into Trump's campaign, and who would be, according to Trump, his “secretary of cost-cutting.” Such cuts, Musk warned, might cause “temporary hardship,” but they were necessary in the path to “long-term prosperity.”

Prosperity for whom is not clear—but a recipe for hardship, denial of rights and persecution is on display in Argentina, if you can bear to take a look.

As the dust settles over election day, it’s worth reflecting that it’s not only the election results that have been at stake, but the future of the presidency and its powers. Over the course of the first quarter of this century, the American presidency has accumulated ever more power, rendering the office increasingly less constrained by either Congress or the courts. With Donald Trump’s reelection, the slide toward a dangerously empowered president has reached a moment of reckoning, particularly when it comes to foreign affairs and warfare.

Presidential Powers

Throughout American history, presidents have repeatedly sought to increase their powers, nowhere more so than in the context of war. As historian James Patterson has pointed out, “War and the threat of war were major sources of presidential power from the beginning.” Whether it was George Washington’s insistence that he was the one to formulate foreign policy when it came to diplomacy, treaties, and more; Thomas Jefferson’s assertion of complete control over whether or not to attack the Barbary Pirates; James Polk’s decision to take actions which risked war with Mexico; or Abraham Lincoln’s “sweeping assertions of authority” in the Civil War era, executive claims to authority when it comes to matters of foreign relations and warfare have been a persistent feature of American history.

The Trump administration took unchecked presidential authority to a new level...

The twentieth century saw a continued rise in the powers of the presidency. As historian Jeremi Suri noted in his book The Impossible Presidency, the four terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt were a transformative moment, essentially multiplying the responsibilities of the president with the ultimate goal of “mak[ing] the national executive the dominant actor in all parts of American life.” The presidents who followed Roosevelt continued to display such enhanced powers, especially when it came to foreign affairs.

As legal scholar Matt Waxman has reminded us, FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, went to war in Korea without congressional authorization. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who did consult with Congress over the need to protect U.S.-allied Pacific coastal islands from possible Chinese aggression and, in his farewell address, warned against “the military-industrial complex,” still believed “that the president had broad powers to engage in covert warfare without specific congressional approval.” In fact, his successor, John F. Kennedy, exercised those powers in a major way in the Bay of Pigs incident. Richard Nixon unilaterally and secretly launched the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, and Ronald Reagan created a secret Central American foreign policy, while arranging the unauthorized transfer of funds and weaponry to the Nicaraguan rebels, the Contras, from the sale of U.S. arms to Iran, despite the fact that such funding was prohibited by an act of Congress, the Boland Amendment.

The Twenty-First Century

Even within the context of repeated presidential acts taken without congressional assent (or often even knowledge) and in defiance of the constitutional checks on the powers of the presidency, the twenty-first century witnessed a major uptick in claims of executive power. In the name of war, this century has seen an astonishing erosion of constraints on that very power, as Yale law professor Harold Hongju Koh details in his illuminating new book, The National Security Constitution in the Twenty-First Century.

At the dawn of this century, the attacks of September 11, 2001, led to an instant escalation of presidential power and executive unilateralism. In the name of national security, President George W. Bush issued an order that authorized the indefinite detention of prisoners in what quickly came to be known as the Global War on Terror. He also set up an offshore prison of injustice at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and authorized military commissions instead of federal court trials for terrorism suspects captured abroad.

Meanwhile, Congress and the courts consistently deferred to the will of the president when it came to actions taken in the name of that war on terror. One week after the attacks of 9/11, Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which undermined its own power in Article I of the Constitution to declare war and weakened its powers of restraint on presidential actions carefully articulated in the 1973 War Powers Resolution (WPR), passed to guard against the very kind of secretive engagement in war that Nixon had unilaterally authorized in the Vietnam era.

Buy the Book

Now, turning their backs on the power given them by the Constitution and the WPR, Congress, with that AUMF, acceded to the expansion of presidential powers and opened the door to the disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere early in this century. The president, it stated, was “authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.”

In October 2001, Congress also passed the USA Patriot Act. It included an expansion of presidential power at home in the name of protecting the nation in the war on terror, including authorizing greatly expanded surveillance policies that would come to include, among other things, secret surveillance and searches that took place without evidence of wrongdoing, notably in Muslim communities in this country that were considered inherently suspect in the name of the war on terror.

As a result, when, in January 2009, Barack Obama entered the White House, his administration found itself with a strikingly expanded definition of the powers of the presidency on the table.

Obama’s Presidency

A former constitutional law professor, Barack Obama pledged to overturn some of the Bush administration’s most egregious, extralegal breaches, including the very existence of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility and the use of torture (or what the Bush administration had politely termed “enhanced interrogation techniques”) authorized by executive unilateralism as part of the war on terror. In what became known as “trust me” government, Obama also pledged to reform the excessive surveillance policies implemented in the war on terror. In 2013, David Cole, a civil rights attorney and currently the National Legal Director of the ACLU, credited Obama with making substantial “shifts” toward restraint by formally declaring an end to many of the Bush administration’s “most aggressive assertions of executive power.”

But while Obama did indeed trim some of the most striking excesses of the Bush era, his record of presidential reform fell significantly short. Jameel Jaffer, the founding director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, for instance, disputed Cole’s claims, citing the Obama administration’s continued reliance on illegal and extralegal policies that Bush’s aggressive actions had already put in play — among them, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, and the military commissions to try prisoners at Guantánamo. In addition, as Jaffer pointed out, the Obama administration frequently relied on the powers granted the presidency in that 2001 AUMF to authorize targeted lethal drone strikes globally, as in the case of the drone-killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, without further congressional authorization, by expanding the definition of “imminence” in order to appear to be complying with the international rule of law.

When it came to such targeted killings — a military tactic introduced under President Bush but greatly expanded during the Obama years for strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen — the president reserved for himself the right to have the final say in authorizing such strikes. As the New York Times reported at the time, “Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary, and the president’s own deep reserve.”

Although he served as legal adviser to the Department of State in the Obama administration, in his warnings about the perils posed by the slide towards unilateral presidential powers, Harold Hongju Kou concedes that the president could have done more to curtail the Bush era enhancement of the powers of the president. “[T]he cautious Obama administration,” he writes, “succeeded in swinging the national security pendulum only part of the way back” to restraint on executive power via the courts and Congress. While the “cascade of illegality” that defined the Bush era’s war on terror was indeed somewhat addressed by Obama, it remained, Koh reminds us, “undercorrected” — including not seeking “stronger accountability for past acts of CIA torture, and the stubborn continuation of a Guantanamo detention policy.”

While President Obama adhered more closely to restraints on presidential power than his predecessor, his administration did not make the kinds of structural and procedural changes necessary to deter future presidents from following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, as we were soon to learn, since, as Koh points out, enhanced unilateral presidential and executive powers would be “sharply re-intensified” under Donald Trump.

The Trump Years

Indeed, the first Trump presidency vastly accelerated the claims of expanded presidential power. Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer, lawyers who worked in the Bush and Obama administrations, respectively, served, as they put it, “very different presidents” and hold “different political outlooks.” Yet they agree that the Trump administration took unchecked presidential authority to a new level. In their 2020 book, After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, they contended that “Donald Trump operated the presidency in ways that reveal its vulnerability to dangerous excesses of authority and dangerous weaknesses in accountability.”

And as they make all too clear, the stakes were (and remain) high. “The often-feckless Trump,” they wrote, “also revealed deeper fissures in the structure of the presidency that, we worry, a future president might choose to exploit in a fashion similar to Trump — but much more skillfully, and to even greater effect.” And with the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding the immunity of Donald Trump for acts taken while in the Oval Office, the shackles that once tied presidential acts in wartime to Congressional authorization are arguably now fully off the table, should a president be determined to act on his or her own say-so. (As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, the ruling “will have disastrous consequences for the presidency and for our democracy,” arguing that it will, in essence, “let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends.”)

The Biden Years

When it comes to recognizing limits on presidential powers, President Biden has had a distinctly mixed record. He immediately withdrew Trump’s executive order known as “the Muslim ban,” set out to close Guantánamo (but has not yet succeeded in doing so), rejoined the Paris climate accord, and revived international ties around the world that had been disrupted by Trump. And yet, that quintessential institutionalist, who prided himself on his ability to work with Congress, nonetheless veered in the direction of presidential unilateralism in the conduct of foreign affairs.

As Professor Koh put it: “In foreign affairs, even the longtime senator Joe Biden — who widely proclaims his love of the Senate — now operates almost entirely by executive fiat,” including a reliance on “classified policy memoranda, with minimal congressional oversight.” Overall, in fact, Biden issued more executive orders than any president since Richard Nixon. Though Biden wisely relied upon an interagency group of lawyers to advise him on national security decisions, following their advice, he issued “nonbinding political agreements, memoranda of understanding, joint communiques, and occasionally ‘executive agreements plus,’” just as Obama had done on the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal, relying on “preexisting legislative frameworks” rather than new Congressional authorizations. When it came to the war in Ukraine, Biden leaned heavily on “the coordinated use of sanctions, enhanced almost weekly post-invasion.” Most of those sanctions were set, as Koh also points out, “by executive orders and regulatory decrees,” rather than in consultation with Congress.

Our Future

A second Trump presidency will undoubtedly take unilateral presidential powers to a new level. After all, he already indicated that he might withdraw the U.S. from NATO and end support for Ukraine. Nor is Trump likely to be deterred by Congress. Reporting on Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s nearly 1,000-page prescription for a second Trump presidency, written primarily by former office holders in the first Trump administration, New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman reported that Trump “and his associates” plan to “increase the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”

In particular, Project 2025’s stance on nuclear weapons is a reminder of just how dangerous a president who refused to be restrained by law or precedent will be. After all, in his first term in office, Trump unilaterally pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions on that country, leading its leaders to increase its nuclear capacity. Meanwhile, the march toward nuclear confrontation has accelerated worldwide. In response, Project 2025 argues for ramping up America’s nuclear arsenal yet more. “[T]he United States manifestly needs to modernize, adapt, and expand its nuclear arsenal,” the treatise declared, in order to “deter Russia and China simultaneously,” adding that the U.S. needs to “develop a nuclear arsenal with the size, sophistication, and tailoring — including new capabilities at the theater level — to ensure that there is no circumstance in which America is exposed to serious nuclear coercion.”

Consider all of that a frightening vision of our now all-too-imminent future: a president freed from the restraints of the constitution, unchecked by Congress or the courts — or by his cabinet advisors. In the words of MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, Project 2025 has set the stage for Donald Trump to be the very opposite of what this country’s founders intended, “a king,” surrounded not by “groups of qualified experts” but by “unblinking yes-men.”

(Dis)Trust in the Presidency

The growing power of the presidency has been taking place in plain view, as unilateral powers have accumulated decade after decade in the Oval Office, while the recent choice of president has also become a grim choice about the nature and powers of the presidency itself. Notably, the rise in executive powers has coincided with a creeping distrust of government in this country. Since the early 1960s, when nearly 80% of Americans said they trusted government “most of the time,” the public’s faith in this country’s federal government hovers at just over 20%, according to the Pew Research Center. And no wonder. When the office of the president refuses to accept the checks and balances that underlie the democratic system, the country’s trust in negotiated, reasonable, and restrained outcomes understandably falls away.

Sadly, in this era, the benefits of restoring the very notion of checks and balances that birthed the nation have come to seem ever more like a quaint dream.

A pair of quotes, separated by eight years, spotlight a chronic political mentality at the top of the Democratic Party:

“The path to victory in a state like Michigan, Harris campaign officials are betting, is through suburban counties that are home to many college-educated and white voters,” the New York Times reported three weeks ago.

“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin,” Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer said in July 2016.

The same basic approach of Democratic Party elites that first opened the door to the White House for Donald Trump has done it again.

Loyalty to the powerful is a repetition compulsion disorder with horrendous consequences.

After losing a national election, political parties sometimes muster the wisdom to compile an “autopsy” report—assessing what went wrong and what changes are needed for the future. But after Hillary Clinton lost as a corporate war-hawk candidate in 2016, the Democratic National Committee showed that it had no interest in doing any such report.

So, here at RootsAction we decided to do it ourselves, with a task force of researchers and activists who wrote “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis.” Many of our key findings about the 2016 election apply to the latest one. For example:

The Democratic National Committee and the party’s congressional leadership remain bent on prioritizing the chase for elusive Republican voters over the Democratic base: especially people of color, young people and working-class voters overall.

One of the large groups with a voter-turnout issue is young people, “who encounter a toxic combination of a depressed economic reality, GOP efforts at voter suppression, and anemic messaging on the part of Democrats.”

“Emerging sectors of the electorate are compelling the Democratic Party to come to terms with adamant grassroots rejection of economic injustice, institutionalized racism, gender inequality, environmental destruction and corporate domination. Siding with the people who constitute the base isn’t truly possible when party leaders seem to be afraid of them.”

The Democratic Party’s claims of fighting for “working families” have been undermined by its refusal to directly challenge corporate power, enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the people.

Now that a fascistic party has won the presidency along with the Senate and apparently the House as well, the stakes for people and planet are truly beyond comprehension.

“What must now take place includes honest self-reflection and confronting a hard truth: that many view the party as often in service to a rapacious oligarchy and increasingly out of touch with people in its own base,” our autopsy argued. The Democratic Party should disentangle itself—ideologically and financially—from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex and other corporate interests that put profits ahead of public needs.

Four weeks ago, when asked on ABC’s The View if she would have done anything differently than President Biden, the reply from Kamala Harris was more than notable: “Not a thing comes to mind.”

Such loyalty to the powerful is a repetition compulsion disorder with horrendous consequences. Harris’s reply—after a full year of ongoing mass murder and genocide in Gaza, made possible by U.S. military aid—was a moral failure and a prelude to electoral disaster. Harris stuck with her patron in the Oval Office and his role as an accomplice to Israel while disregarding the clear wishes of the Democratic Party’s base.

Now that a fascistic party has won the presidency along with the Senate and apparently the House as well, the stakes for people and planet are truly beyond comprehension. Grassroots organizing should include maximum possible nonviolent pressure on officials in government and other institutions, insisting that compromise with Republican leaders is completely unacceptable.

"If you're not worried about encroaching fascism in America, before long it will start to feel normal. And when that happens, we're all in trouble,” the author of How Fascism Works, Jason Stanley, warned in a video. That was six years ago.

"Normalization of fascist ideology, by definition, would make charges of 'fascism' seem like an overreaction, even in societies whose norms are transforming along these worrisome lines,” Stanley wrote in his 2018 book. “Normalization means precisely that encroaching ideologically extreme conditions are not recognized as such because they have come to seem normal. The charge of fascism will always seem extreme; normalization means that the goalposts for the legitimate use of 'extreme' terminology continually move."

Resisting such normalization is now imperative.

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 a two notes in particular that deserve a deeper dive.

First. In Missouri, a state Trump won by 58 percent, 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. Proposition A was backed by unions and workers’ advocacy groups, social justice and civil rights organizations, and even over 500 state business owners despite the opposition of the Chamber of Commerce, the big corporate lobby wing.

“We’ve shown the rest of the world, the rest of the country, that regardless of what’s going on outside of our state, we’re able to come together and win,” said Terrence Wise of Stand Up KC, a coalition of low wage workers. “We felt that we have the power as everyday Missourians to come together and make our lives better.”

In Nebraska, another red state won by Trump, voters also passed a paid sick leave measure, Initiative 436, by 75 percent. Paid Sick Leave for Nebraskans and other supporters noted that 250,000 Nebraskans were working full-time without paid sick days, especially in restaurants and other service jobs, construction, manufacturing, warehousing, retail, educational support, and transportation.

“These are old school Democratic Party policy proposals that Republicans have actively voted against in DC, but are hugely popular. Harris barely campaigned on them—despite progressives begging her to. Voters were clearly looking for solutions to their economic angst and agreed with Democrats on these policies, even if not associating those policies with Harris and her party,” ABC News correspondent MaryAlice Parks said in a social media post.

Second. In the multitude of exit poll results, one particularly stands out—94 percent 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. It was the major issue for many Joe Biden voters in 2020 who Vice President Kamala Harris lost in 2024.

Much has been written and said about Latino voters, but the Washington Post assessment seems right: Seven in 10 Latino voters nationally rated the economy as “not so good” or “poor,” and a narrow majority supported Trump. Four in 10 Latino voters termed the economy their top issue, and those chose Trump by a 2-to-1 margin.

Another demographic that should cause concern are the youngest voters. Again from the Post analysis: Though voters under 30 supported Harris by 13 points, in 2020, Biden won that age group by a 24-point margin.

Some of those were certainly disaffected by the Biden/Harris administration’s disastrous support for Israel’s horrific war and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. But there are many indications that many more were discouraged by an economy of relentless high prices the past four years and by the difficulty in finding living-wage jobs.

The Biden administration passed important legislation to tackle inflation and high prices, and it made laudable efforts to reduce student and medical debt despite the unified Republican opposition and conservative courts. Yet, the pain of struggling families, including many young people across the country, persisted.

After Biden’s calamitous debate with Trump in late June, he unveiled an expansive progressive campaign platform on multiple issues influenced by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Squad members, the Progressive Caucus and Congressional Black Caucus. It included multiple proposals to end medical debt and other dramatic reforms.

“To win the election, the president … needs to … fight for a bold agenda that speaks to the needs of the vast majority of our people — the working families of this country, the people who have been left behind for far too long,” Sanders wrote in a New York Times op-ed on July 13.

Harris embraced much of that agenda and she expanded it with innovative ideas to call for a national ban on corporate price gouging on grocery and other food costs, expanded child tax and new born credits, subsidies for new home buyers, and more.

She could have done more, such as aligning with proposed progressive reforms such as those passed by voters in Missouri, Nebraska and other states, and highlighting the vital work of Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan in attacking corporate abuses. Instead, much of the critical final weeks was focused by the campaign’s appeals to Republican voters and the emphasis on demonizing Trump.

In large part the campaign 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.

In a Guardian column after Trump’s victory in 2016, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich made trenchant observations about the Democratic Party shift, aptly headlined “Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more.”

Reich wrote:

What has happened in America should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency. It is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.

Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don’t reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.

The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in “swing” suburbs.

Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of those years had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline in working-class wages and economic security.

The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn’t wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump.”

It's now 2024 and very soon it will be 2025. The working people of this country can't wait a moment longer for Democrats to learn the lesson progressives have been screaming for decades.

In Philadelphia this past weekend, I met a number of people who’d given up on democracy. They railed about politicians who make promises they don’t keep. They spun conspiracy theories about the government. A number of those who answered the door told me that they weren’t going to vote.

Then there were the grim young men who said, hell yeah, they were going to vote for Trump. They spoke of the Republican presidential candidate as if he were Tony Montana, the gangster played by Al Pacino in the film Scarface: violent, lawless, and powerful. Trump elicited respect laced with fear. According to his supporters, he’d stand up to America’s enemies abroad and be tough on crime domestically. Several said to me—with the usual preface of “don’t get me wrong but…”—that a woman president would be too weak or “mixed up by hormones” to do those necessary things.

If you cross celebrity culture with gun culture and add a few dollops of testosterone, you get Donald Trump.

Even as they wrap themselves in the American flag and the U.S. constitution, the American far right and its enablers are plotting against democracy itself.

Much has been written about the rise of the global far right (including by me). It’s important to understand that this global trend is not a type of politics. It is an anti-politics. The far right embodied by Vladimir Putin in Russia, Victor Orban in Hungary, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, and others is determined to unravel democracy. They have contempt for elections. They revise, bend, or undermine the constitutional order.

And they despise the civic engagement at the heart of thriving democracies. They crack down on dissent. They target protesters. They ruthlessly purge the “enemy within.” This is what Donald Trump has promised to do this time around.

The Republican campaign in 2024 relied on anti-government rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and violent innuendo (against FEMA, against the border patrol, against Republican politicians that didn’t toe the MAGA line) in order to do two things. These strategies drew the disaffected to the polls. And they pushed others not to vote: to give up on politics altogether.

Rage and apathy are the two modes of right-wing politicking. This is a variation on Albert Hirschman’s famous “exit, voice, and loyalty” distinction. The loyalists are voicing their anger, the apathetic are exiting, and the dissidents continue to organize in the hopes of avoiding the Russian scenario: an entire opposition in exile or jail.

Other countries have managed to buck the trend. Even little Moldova was able to successfully beat back the anti-democratic, pro-Russian, billionaire-supported candidate in its presidential election last weekend. Brazil got rid of Jair Bolsonaro. The French teamed up to stop Marine Le Pen at the polls. It can be done.

Rich, prosperous, arrogant America failed to do so.

Let’s face it: American politics, as we know it, is over.

To be sure, it was always possible for American politicians to win with dirty tricks. But then there’d be a course correction of sorts: Nixon followed by Watergate, Trump 2016 followed by impeachment and electoral loss. That loss in 2020 should have been an inoculation against outlandish lies, threats, and manipulations. Instead, the Republican Party doubled down. It abandoned the few remaining guardrails governing the conduct of a campaign, which is a preview of how the next administration will skirt the few remaining guardrails it reluctantly observed in the waning days of its previous term in office.

The political game is now fundamentally different. Forget “ground game.” Forget strategic messaging. Forget polling. In other words, forget about those traditional methods of mobilizing political sentiment in a democracy.

Never bring a knife to a gunfight, the pundits warn. The Democrats brought a computer to a gunfight. Those computer models of how to win an election now lie in ruins.

A funereal pall has descended over half of America, and naturally there is a lot of finger-pointing in the wake of the Democratic Party’s loss of the presidency and the Senate. It was misogyny. It was Black men abandoning the Democratic Party. It was poor whites voting against their economic self-interest. It was the Electoral College, Elon Musk’s money, and Russian disinformation. It was Joe Biden’s decision to run again, and Kamala Harris’ failure to explain her positions clearly.

It was all of that, of course. But it was also the failure of the Democratic Party to understand the rage coursing through the body politic. The Democrats failed to translate the economic gains of the last four years—the infrastructure bill, the watered-down version of the Green New Deal, the CHIPS Act—into populist language. Put another way, the ordinary gains of an ordinary political process did not prove inspiring because this is a post-political moment. And the Democrats were playing by the rules of the old era.

Here’s an instructive story.

A friend confessed to me before the election that he didn’t pay attention to politics. “They’re both bad,” he said “One’s a fascist, the other’s a communist.”

“Harris is a communist?” I said, surprised. “That’s ridiculous. She’s just a run-of-the-mill politician, straddling the center. I could understand if you were criticizing Bernie Sanders as a communist. He, at least, is a self-professed socialist. He’s not a communist, of course, but at least he’s–.”

“Oh, Bernie?” my friend interrupted me. “Oh yeah, I really like Bernie!”

There are several lessons here. Even for the apolitical, the lies of Trump (“she’s a Marxist!”) penetrated the population with the brutal repetitiveness of state propaganda. The level of political understanding in the populace is shockingly low (a fifth grader should be able to put Trump, Harris, and Sanders on a political spectrum). And Bernie’s populism transcends ideology. Like the Vermont senator, a successful political party must be able to channel anger as well as aspiration.

As the opposition regroups, it’s useful to repeat some truisms. Character is forged in adversity. Previous generations have successfully fought fascism to rescue democracy. And democracy is all about learning lessons and moving forward (especially after slipping backward). It’s long been clear that this country needs a new politics. To use a shopworn phrase, let’s build back better—after this third and most devastating hurricane of the season.

In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth imagined the alternative past of a fascist takeover of the United States. Charles Lindbergh, a pro-Hitler isolationist, wins the 1940 election with his slogan “Vote for Lindbergh, or vote for war.” In office, he fulfills his promise by keeping the United States out of World War II. But when Lindbergh’s plane mysteriously goes missing, Roosevelt gets reelected to the presidency in 1942. The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, and history resumes its well-known course.

It’s a chilling book that resonates with today’s headlines. It was a reminder, well before the political rise of Trump, that it can happen here.

But the current situation is different. This is not just a battle over the soul of America. This is a much larger confrontation. This conflict is being waged against Russia in Ukraine and against Israel in Gaza. It is being fought in polling places in democratic nations around the world. And it is being sustained by anti-authoritarian dissidents in streets, jails, and exile communities.

Even as they wrap themselves in the American flag and the U.S. constitution, the American far right and its enablers are plotting against democracy itself. It didn’t look promising in 1940 either, in Roth’s alternative reality or in the actual history. So, let the finger-pointing end and a new era of creative and savvy political organizing begin.

If you’ve ever questioned whether our country has an inequality problem, this election should provide all the evidence you need. As billionaires used their financial firepower to throw support their preferred candidates’ way, Americans who’ve been left behind took out their frustrations at the ballot box.

How do we get started on this next chapter in the fight to reverse extreme inequality? With Senate Republicans still short of a filibuster-proof supermajority, next year’s debate over the expiration of the Trump tax cuts could still present one opportunity.

But it’s also likely that any near-term policy progress will have to start at the city and state levels and work its way up to the federal level. Three progressive tax victories from last night are an encouraging sign.

In addition to these fair tax victories, I’m heartened by the passage of pro-worker reforms in several “red” states last night—in sharp contrast to the positions of their Republican representatives in the U.S. Congress.

Washington state’s Initiative 2109 was the most important tax-related ballot measure of the year. Hedge fund executive Brian Heywood bankrolled this campaign, hoping to repeal the state’s innovative capital gains tax on high earners.

With 62% of votes counted, the rollback proposal went down in a 63-37% landslide.

“This victory shows that advocacy in support of creating a more equitable tax code works,” Melinda Young-Flynn, communications director at the Washington State Budget and Policy Center, told Inequality.org.

“So many groups and individuals—including business owners, labor unions, teachers, racial justice advocates, parents, lawmakers, and many more—have worked together for more than a decade to help the public at large in our state make the connection between commonsense progressive taxes and the very real needs of our communities.”

Introduced in 2022, Washington state’s path-breaking policy imposes a 7% excise tax on capital gains from the sale of stocks, bonds, and other assets that exceed $250,000 per year (excluding real estate sales). Who makes that much from their financial investments? Fewer than 1% of the state’s richest resident.

Prior to the introduction of this tax in 2022, Washington’s wealthy had flourished under a state constitution that prohibits income tax. The capital gains tax does an end-run around that ban and the state supreme court has ruled it constitutional.

In its first two years, the capital gains levy has raised $1.3 billion for investments in childcare and early learning, public schools, and school construction.

“The people of Washington have sent a clear message,” says Young-Flynn. “The well-being of kids takes precedence over tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy. All those of us who care about economic justice know it’s well past time to stop giving the ultra-wealthy a special deal in the tax code at the expense of everyone else.”

Washington state voters also beat back an effort to allow employees to opt out of a new payroll tax for long-term care insurance if they waive the benefit of that state-operated program. If this measure had passed, it likely would’ve rendered the insurance program financially unviable. Fortunately, voters rejected the proposal by a 55-45% margin.

In Illinois, voters expressed support for an extra 3% tax on income of over $1 million, with revenue going to property tax relief. With 89% of votes counted, Illinois voters approved the ballot measure by an 89-11% margin. While this measure is nonbinding, organizers hope this victory will stoke efforts to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2026 to authorize the new tax on the rich.

In addition to these fair tax victories, I’m heartened by the passage of pro-worker reforms in several “red” states last night—in sharp contrast to the positions of their Republican representatives in the U.S. Congress. Voters in Nebraska, Missouri, and Alaska approved guaranteed paid leave and Missouri and Alaska also passed state minimum wage hikes.

A friend just wrote to me with this message: “A tree outside my window is nearly bare. Perhaps it is an image of our national life this morning. We have a choice: to focus on the bare branches or to appreciate the colorful leaves.”

These state victories against the scourge of inequality are some of the colorful leaves I’m appreciating today.

I feel like I’ve been in a brawl, a massive street fight where the punches are words and concepts instead of fists. I got clobbered while trying as hard a possible to warn the Democrats that they are losing the working class and that they absolutely must change course.

It should have been obvious that the Democrats could not cuddle up to Wall Street and then pretend that the “opportunity society” would help working people emerge from 40 years of mass layoffs and stagnant wages. It was so clear that the Democrats would be viewed as members and defenders of the elite establishment that rules over both the economy and government, and that Trump would be seen as the disrupter—the friend of the working class.

It really hurts to have called this one. I so wanted to be wrong.

The Democrats assumed the working class had nowhere else to go. They were wrong!

Exactly how the Democratic Party lost the working class is described in my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Destroyed the Working Class and What to do about it.

It’s about how Democratic Party elites abandoned the working-class over the past four decades while enriching financial elites, promoting runaway inequality, and tolerating a tsunami of mass layoffs.

The book provides original research that shows how the Democratic Party vote declined in the Blue Wall counties of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin as the mass layoff rate increased. The Democrats—once the party of the working class—were blamed for the economic and social destruction that followed. They earned it by doing nothing to stop mass layoffs whose sole purpose was to enrich CEOs and their Wall Street partners.

The book also refutes the widely shared notion about the “deplorable” white working class. It provides conclusive data that shows these workers actually have become more liberal, not illiberal, on divisive social issues over the past several decades.

The Democrats assumed the working class had nowhere else to go. They were wrong!

Actually, the book should be retitled: Wall Street’s War on Workers and How the Democrats Enabled It.

It's time to end this sad chapter in U.S. history when the Democratic Party leaders refuse to be genuine allies for workers and the Republican Party is rewarded for pretending to be.

BTW, Amazon is giving away the book for $5.67, hardback or Kindle. All royalties go to the Labor Institute’s Political Economy for Workers courses, one of which was conducted this year for Amazon workers who are struggling to form a union.

I am, of course, sad.

I had hoped, almost more than I let myself really feel, that America was about to elect a smart Black woman president of the United States, moving us further down the path that we have haltingly followed throughout my life. Instead, quite knowingly, we elected someone who stood for the worst impulses in our history. I think the next four years—and perhaps longer—will be very hard on many fronts. One is the concern of this newsletter, climate and energy, where we can expect the oil industry to have carte blanche.

But I actually think the message and the moment is much deeper than that. What happened last night was that the cord that stretched back to FDR snapped. It had been badly frayed, especially in the Reagan years, but the Depression and World War II had been such deep and defining events that the formula that got us through them—a kind of solidarity at home and abroad—more or less held. No more.

Everything is up for grabs now, including the basic entitlement programs that defined the New Deal. (If you haven’t read Project 2025 this would be a good day to start). In foreign policy terms it’s all far more complicated, and has been from Vietnam through Gaza—but today is a bad day to be Ukrainian, Taiwanese, or a Palestinian on the West Bank. Can things get worse? I think they can, and I think we will find out, here and around the world. But I don’t think it will last either, because the promises on which this new MAGA order are built are mostly nonsense.

And I also think the sun rose this morning—there was a leaden sky in the Green Mountains of Vermont when I went out to walk the dog, but I could sense the sun behind it.

And in that sunrise there is for me the hint of where that next huge realigning New Deal-sized thing will come from. The reshaping of our energy system—to cope with climate change, and to reflect the rock-solid fact that we live on an Earth where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun—may offer, if we are clever and good-hearted, a new basis on which to remake the world.

More local, more peaceful, less controllable by oligarchs and plutocrats. I don’t know if we can make it—the headwinds are stronger than they were yesterday—but I know we can try. And I know that only this project is big enough in scale to give us a real chance at a fresh start.

That’s what this community will continue to focus on, and I’m glad you’re a part of it.

I won’t try to hide it. I’m heartbroken. Heartbroken and scared, to tell you the truth. I’m sure many of you are, too.

Donald Trump has decisively won the presidency, the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives and the popular vote, too.

I still have faith in America. But right now, that’s little comfort to the people who are most at risk.

Millions of people must now live in fear of being swept up by Trump’s cruel mass deportation plan – documented immigrants, as he has threatened before, as well as undocumented, and millions of American citizens with undocumented parents or spouses.

Women and girls must now fear that they’ll be forced to give birth or be denied life-saving care during an ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage.

America has become less safe for trans people – including trans kids – who were already at risk of violence and discrimination.

Anyone who has already faced prejudice and marginalization is now in greater danger than before.

Also in danger are people who have stood up to Trump, who has promised to seek revenge against his political opponents.

Countless people are now endangered on a scale and intensity almost unheard of in modern America.

Our first responsibility is to protect all those who are in harm’s way.

We will do that by resisting Trump’s attempts to suppress women’s freedoms. We will fight for the rights of women and girls to determine when and whether they have children. No one will force a woman to give birth.

We will block Trump’s cruel efforts at mass deportation. We will fight to give sanctuary to productive, law-abiding members of our communities, including young people who arrived here as babies or children.

We will not allow mass arrests and mass detention of anyone in America. We will not permit families to be separated. We will not allow the military to be used to intimidate and subjugate anyone in this country.

We will protect trans people and everyone else who is scapegoated because of how they look or what they believe. No one should have to be ashamed of who they are.

We will stop Trump’s efforts to retaliate against his perceived enemies. A free nation protects political dissent. A democracy needs people willing to stand up to tyranny.

How will we conduct this resistance?

By organizing our communities. By fighting through the courts. By arguing our cause through the media.

We will ask other Americans to join us – left and right, progressive and conservative, white people and people of color. It will be the largest and most powerful resistance since the American revolution.

But it will be peaceful. We will not succumb to violence, which would only give Trump and his regime an excuse to use organized violence against us.

We will keep alive the flames of freedom and the common good, and we will preserve our democracy. We will fight for the same things Americans have fought for since the founding of our nation – rights enshrined in the constitution and Bill of Rights.

The preamble to the Constitution of the United States opens with the phrase “We the people”, conveying a sense of shared interest and a desire “to promote the general welfare”, as the preamble goes on to say.

We the people will fight for the general welfare.

We the people will resist tyranny. We will preserve the common good. We will protect our democracy.

This will not be easy, but if the American experiment in self-government is to continue, it is essential.

I know you’re scared and stressed. So am I.

If you are grieving or frightened, you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans feel the way you do.

All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. Time and again, we have come to each other’s aid. We have resisted cruelty.

We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, the horrors of 9/11, and George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny.

Although peaceful and non-violent, the resistance will nonetheless be committed and determined.

It will encompass every community in America. It will endure as long as necessary.

We will never give up on America.

The resistance starts now.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump won a second term. Handily. I see, already, the overwhelming dread flooding my social media. After all, Americans elected a man who has bragged about grabbing women by the pussy, who has bred fear and hatred toward Central American migrants, who has pledged to undo any climate protections he can get his grubby little orange hands on, who oversaw the eradication of abortion rights, who has praised white supremacist, antisemitic marchers as “very fine people,” and who fostered an insurrection. Again.

Knowing this, what do we do next?

As a scholar of social movements in the United States, I look to what the activists of the past show us: Justice doesn’t come from the White House. It comes from us.

In 1977, dozens of disabled activists occupied a federal building in San Francisco, demanding that the Carter administration enforce Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Section 504 was the first piece of federal legislation that prohibited discrimination against people with disabilities, yet four years after its passage, the law just sat on the books with no regulation to power it. Disabled protestors camped out for 26 days, supported by a coalition of labor, queer, and Black groups—most importantly, the Black Panther Party, who fed the protestors warm food every single day. Eventually, the administration relented, vowing to regulate Section 504. If you know a child who has benefited from a 504 plan in school, that wasn’t because of the goodness of the government’s heart but because of the sweat, the joy, and the organizing of a group of disabled activists and their allies in the Bay Area.

There are countless examples before and after 1977 of tireless activists creating the world they want to live in despite the apathy of their government. And we can continue to follow their roadmap today by building the worlds we want to live in, we want to grow families in, without the permission of the electorate.

Here are some questions to guide us.

The Trump campaign mobilized its base by villainizing some of the most vulnerable youth, transgender, and non-binary kids, as symbols of a decaying world order. Knowing that, how are we going to uplift gender-non-conforming kids in our communities? Who are we going to elect to school board that will affirm trans kids’ dignity and protect their privacy? How are we going to open our homes to queer and trans youth who are rejected from their families? How are we going to build spaces for kids to explore their gender with love and curiosity?

The reality is, these are the same questions we should have been asking ourselves even if Kamala Harris had won the presidency.

The president-elect has been recorded bragging about touching women’s genitals without their consent, was found liable for sexual assault, and ushered in the end of Roe v Wade. Knowing that, how are we going to raise children with confidence in their bodily autonomy—and respect for others? How are we going to create reporting structures in our workplaces and schools that believe and support survivors? How can we move toward restorative justice practices that prioritize the healing of survivors and communities and prevent further harm? How are we going to mobilize to ensure every person has access to safe abortion care, no matter what state they live in, whenever it is needed?

The Trump campaign promised mass deportations, characterized immigrants as criminals, and admitted to spreading false claims about immigrants eating pets. Knowing this, how we do build communities that welcome immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers? How do we amplify stories that illustrate the humanity of brown and Black immigrants? How do we advocate local governments for policies that protect our neighbors from deportations and criminalization? How do we teach our children to welcome new cultures and traditions rather than fear the unknown?

The Trump campaign has vowed to undo the minimal environmental protections we had. Knowing that, how are we going to ensure that our cities don’t dump environmental disasters on the doorsteps of our working class, Black, and brown neighborhoods? How are we going to push state governments to invest in clean energy, clean water, and clean air? How are we going to support Indigenous-led movements to return the land to its original stewards and protectors? How are we going to re-organize our daily lives to privilege sustainability over convenience and thus divest from corporate solutions that pollute our world?

The Trump campaign has used vulgar, racist, sexist, and just plain rude language to describe its opponents. How do we build communities grounded in love and kindness? How do we model such love and kindness to our children? How do we listen to marginalized communities and follow their lead on what language to use when organizing with them? How do we organize ourselves to protect the most targeted as beloved kin? How do we create opportunities for collective joy and creativity and friendship?

As individuals, we cannot tackle every question listed above, and in my post-election haze, I know I have left out critical issues. (How do we protect our children from gun violence? How do we stop the genocides in Gaza and Sudan and emerging genocidal threats across the globe? How do we abolish systems that criminalize Blackness, disability, and poverty?) But if you’re new to organizing and activism, you can find a group of people who are already grappling with the questions that resonate for you and can figure out how to amplify and support their work. And if you have been already doing this work for years, I thank you.

The reality is, these are the same questions we should have been asking ourselves even if Kamala Harris had won the presidency. Presidential candidates will never be our saviors. As always, it is up to us to forge the path to liberation, even in times of the deepest despair, grief, and shock. Especially in these times.

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” — Frédéric Bastiat, Economic sophisms, 2nd series (1848)

We just watched the final fulfillment of a 50 year plan. Louis Powell laid it out in 1971, and every step along the way Republicans have follow it.

It was a plan to turn America over to the richest men and the largest corporations. It was a plan to replace democracy with oligarchy. A large handful of America’s richest people invested billions in this plan, and its tax breaks and fossil fuel subsidies have made them trillions. More will soon come to them.

As any advertising executive can tell you, with enough money and enough advertising — particularly if you are willing to lie — you can sell anybody pretty much anything.

This is not the end... hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal.

Even a convicted felon, rapist, and friend and agent of America’s enemies.

America was overwhelmed this fall by billions of dollars in often dishonest advertising, made possible by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and it worked. Democrats were massively outspent, not to mention the power of the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” and 1500 hate talk radio stations.

Open the lens a bit larger, and we find that it goes way beyond just this election; virtually every crisis America is facing right now is either caused or exacerbated by the corruption of big money authorized by five corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court.

They are responsible for our crises of gun violence, the drug epidemic, homelessness, political gridlock, our slow response to the climate emergency, a looming crisis for Social Security and Medicare, the situation on our southern border, even the lack of affordable drugs, insurance, and healthcare.

All track back to a handful of Supreme Court justices who’ve sold their votes to billionaires in exchange for extravagant vacations, luxury yachts and motorhomes, private jet travel, speaking fees, homes, tuition, and participation in exclusive clubs and billionaire networks that bar the rest of us from entry.

For over two decades, Clarence Thomas and his wife have been accepting millions in free luxury vacations, tuition for their adopted son, a home for his mother, private jet and megayacht travel, and entrance to rarified clubs.

Sam Alito is also on the gravy train, and there are questions about how Brett Kavanaugh managed to pay off his credit cards and gambling debts. John Roberts’ wife has made over $10 million from law firms with business before the court; Neil Gorsuch got a sweetheart real estate deal; Amy Coney Barrett refuses to recuse herself from cases involving her father’s oil company.

None of this is illegal because when five corrupt Republicans on the Court legalized members of Congress taking bribes they legalized that same behavior for themselves.

As a result, we have oligarchs running our media, social media, and buying our elections, while the Supreme Court, with Citizens United, even legalized foreign interference in our political process.

Our modern era of big money controlling government began in the decade after Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell — the tobacco lawyer who wrote the infamous 1971 “Powell Memo” outlining how billionaires and corporations could take over America — on the Supreme Court in 1972.

In the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court ruled that money used to buy elections wasn’t just cash: they claimed it’s also “free speech” protected by the First Amendment that guarantees your right to speak out on political issues.

In the 200 preceding years — all the way back to the American Revolution of 1776 — no politician or credible political scientist had ever proposed that spending billions to buy votes with dishonest advertising was anything other than simple corruption.

The “originalists” on the Supreme Court, however, claimed to be channeling the Founders of this nation, particularly those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, when they said that “money is the same thing as free speech.” In that claim, Republicans on the Court were lying through their teeth.

In a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, President and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson explicitly laid it out:

“Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government.”

But Republicans on the Supreme Court weren’t reading the Founders. They were instead listening to the billionaires who helped get them on the Court in the first place. Who had bribed them with position and power and then kept them in their thrall with luxury vacations, “friendship,” and gifts.

Two years after the 1976 Buckley decision, the Republicans on the Supreme Court struck again, this time adding that the “money is speech and can be used to buy votes and politicians” argument applied to corporate “persons” as well as to billionaires. Lewis Powell himself wrote the majority opinion in the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision.

Justices White, Brennan, and Marshall dissented:

“The special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only our economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.”

But the dissenters lost the vote, and political corruption of everything from local elections to the Supreme Court itself was now virtually assured.

Notice that ruling came down just two years before the Reagan Revolution, when almost all forward progress in America came to a screeching halt.

It’s no coincidence.

And it’s gotten worse since then, with the Court doubling down in 2010 with Citizens United, overturning hundreds of state and federal “good government” laws dating all the way back to the late 1800s.

Thus, today America has a severe problem of big money controlling our political system. And last night it hit its peak, putting an open fascist in charge of our government.

No other developed country in the world has this problem, which is why every other developed country has a national healthcare system, free or near-free college, and strong unions that maintain a healthy middle class. It’s why they can afford pharmaceuticals, are taking active steps to stop climate change, and don’t fear being shot when they go to school, the theater, or shopping.

It’s why they are still functioning democracies.

The ability of America to move forward on any of these issues is, for now, paralyzed with the election of Trump and the GOP taking over the Senate.

This is not the end, though; hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal.

Many Americans will continue to speak out and fight for a democracy uncorrupted by the morbidly rich.

And so will I.