Three Things

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.

So what if Trumps wins?

If Donald Trump wins the presidency on November 5, it will be the third time this century that a Republican has won with a minority of the vote. This owes to the anti-democratic elements of our 18th Century Constitution (the Electoral College, Senate and Supreme Court). The Republican Party is a minority party riding on every advantage our outdated system gives it. They win – with help from the Russians and arrogant tech lords like Musk – by converting Trump’s clownish authoritarianism into the false consciousness of whites who feel threatened by the increasing diversity of America despite being themselves among the richest 4% of the global population.

What would Trump’s victory mean? One can consider the U.S. domestic implications and the impact on the world in general.

Domestically, Trump will seek political vengeance while using the justice system to avoid prison. (Avoiding prison is his main reason for running.) His cohort of Project-2025ers will seek to undermine the administrative state while using state power to favor those capitalists that see government as hindrance. Together they will probably throw our economy, politics, courts, health & education systems, social safety nets and society in general, into turmoil. Their efforts to govern through authoritarianism and populism – the essence of MAGA – will test our democratic institutions and wreck havoc.

But we are not Weimar Germany. Our institutions will hold, although any Trump effort to use the military for domestic actions – such as dealing with “illegal migration” – could lead to a real crisis. It may well be that in the midterm elections of 2026, the upheaval would be enough to lead to a Democratic resurgence. (It will be interesting to watch a Vice President Vance. He could call the policy shots from the background. As an opportunist par excellence, he may be sensitive to the popular reaction to the various outrages pushed by the P-2025ers and tack accordingly.)

A Trump regime’s impact on the world stage is another matter. He will favor isolationism, economic nationalism, unilateralism, pro-Russian approaches in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, disengagement from the Mideast and who knows what with North Korea. This will fundamentally weaken the global position of the U.S. But let’s consider this from the 35,000 foot level.

The U.S. has held center stage in the world since the end of World War II. The various political and economic institutions of the global order – including the UN, IMF, World Bank, NATO etc – were ours by design. We established the contours of the Cold War that divided the world into good guys and bad guys and led to many distortions of the domestic affairs of other countries. After the fall of the USSR, we found other ways to define bad actors by choosing – often unwisely – which regional states to offer favored status and protection. As we began to lose our industrial advantage – with other economies coming online – globalism became our religion and we used the available levers to impose austerity and free trade everywhere we could.

We Americans have always been pretty self-centered, focused on our own navels. We governed the world – to the extent we did – for our own purposes, assuming that what was good for America was good for everyone. Trump’s obsession on making America “great again” is simply a dysfunctional flavor of this.

Our record as the predominant global hegemon has been mixed, to say the least. The world today can be legitimately described as a mess, with violent conflicts of various kinds and sources, terrorism, mass migration, political polarization, continued poverty and inequality, nuclear proliferation, the emerging technological singularity, and widespread and worsening climate disruptions. The U.S. did not cause any of these – at least not by ourselves – but they all happened on our watch. Meanwhile, the world has increasingly begun to just ignore us. (Watch China, India and the other BRICS cozy up to Putin despite his assault on world order.) Our inability to anything about the Mideast has not surprised anyone but ourselves. Maybe it’s better that we do withdraw somewhat from world affairs and let folks get on with finding their own way? If Trump wins in November, however messy it will be, maybe it’ll be what the world needs?  Like a heart attack that scares you into changing your bad habits? 

(Maybe we Americans will finally upgrade our Constitution.)