Thing One: As noted before, we now have front row seats to Trump’s attack on governing, the Constitution, his enemies, migrants, and the government protections built up over decades to protect us from the ravages of unrestrained capitalism, climate change, and globalized disease. The pundits have recognized that Trump’s aggressive efforts to see what he can get away with – the courts being the only potential obstacle – is an intentional effort to enlarge his power not by flaunting law and order but by bending it to his will.
The mostly unqualified sycophants with which he is seeking to stuff his cabinet will pass or not through the Senate – Hegseth squeaking by J.D. – and thus fully legally. As Jon Stewart recently noted, this is not fascism but entirely consistent with the 18th Century founding document – allowing a presidential monarchy – we seem to be stuck with. We will have to do something about that someday if we are to ever grow up. This bring me to ….
Thing Two: In the face of Trump flooding the field to keep everyone else off balance, the Democrats are either hiding, lost in a forest of self-analysis, or just plain waiting for the Trump chickens to come home to roost on all of those deluded people who voted for him. That is not much of a political party, more a herd of well-fed sheep. The Democrats need to find a way to address the issues that drove so many to place hope for a better life in Trump and the oligarch-loving Republicans amassed under the MAGA banner. This brings me to ….
Thing Three: The Democrats need, the country needs, to find a way to deal with the forces driving so many to feeling relatively deprived. All too many Americans feel that they and their children cannot reach, or maintain, the lifestyle of their own parents or grandparents. They are right to so believe.
The post-WWII economy of the Boomers peaked by the early ‘80s. Since then, inequality has been increasing while the Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats have favored capital over labor. Good paying union jobs gave way to low paying service sector work. Big capital fought off unions. The 21st Century has added further automation, now powered by AI, to further diminish the good paying working class jobs of the past. Health costs have risen, public schools struggle, drug use moved well beyond inner cities. Folks wonder what happened? So they look for those to blame – migrants, Jews, anyone different – and those to save them.
We need to face up to a few basics. We will never be a country full of high-paying work again. Tariffs won’t do it and build-it-here won’t do it. Most remaining (or recaptured) industry and many so called white-collar jobs will be done by machines and computers. For a while we may still need some skilled craftspeople like plumbers and electricians. But picking our crops, slaughtering our animals and rebuilding our outdated infrastructure will be done by machines and those migrants we say we don’t need. (No high paying jobs there.)
What is to be done? The Democrats will need to bite the bullet and revisit that approach long made anathema by the rich and their Republican servants: socialism. By which I mean, collecting substantial taxes from the obscenely rich and from big business, perhaps nationalizing fundamental platforms of the 21st Century economy such as Amazon and providing a guaranteed minimum income to everyone. This last would not be means tested or require looking for work and should be at least a few multiples of the basic poverty line. (Free healthcare, life-long education and varied public goods would supplement this.) We should, in other words, separate making and providing the goods we sell to ourselves and the world from the necessity to make them through human labor.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
