thenation--2020-10-17--Progressive Kara Eastman Is Pulling Ahead in Omaha’s Bellwether Congressional District

Joe Biden is surging in the polls and his campaign is looking to run up the Democrat ’ s Electoral College numbers in unexpected places—like Omaha .
Political junkies know that Nebraska is one of two states—the other is Maine—that assign electors for president not according to the statewide vote but rather on the basis of voting in individual congressional districts .
That distinction has made the Omaha-based Second Congressional District a presidential battleground , as well as a bellwether for the nationwide campaign of progressive Democrats to build up their power in Congress by flipping key US House seats @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and Trump still leads statewide .
But as the wheels come off the president ’ s reelection campaign , at least some Nebraska Republicans are distancing themselves from a president who Senator Ben Sasse this week ripped as a political liability who has “ flirted with white supremacists ” and whose family “ has treated the presidency like a business opportunity.
” Sasse is a cynical political player who is positioning for what he imagines will be a post-election scramble to redefine the GOP .
But that doesn ’ t mean he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump ’ s “ stupid political obsessions ” are alienating voters in this election season .
Or when he observes : If young people become permanent Democrats because they ’ ve just been repulsed by the obsessive nature of our politics , or if women who were willing to still vote with the Republican Party in 2016 decide that they need to turn away from this party permanently in the future , the debate is not going to be , you know , “ Ben Sasse , why were you so mean to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going to be “ What the heck were any of us thinking that selling a TV-obsessed narcissistic individual to the American people was a good idea ?
” It is not a good idea .
If a Trump derailment causes a “ Republican bloodbath ” in November , as Sasse suggests is possible , the best measure of it could come in Nebraska-2 .
A new Congressional Progressive Caucus poll from the district has Biden leading 53-42 , while a recent New York Times/Siena College survey has him up 48-41 .
FiveThirtyEight , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ Biden is favored to win Nebraska ’ s 2nd District.
” The Election Isn ’ t Over Until Trump ’ s Gone A Calm , Cool , and Presidential Joe Biden Won the ‘ Debate ’ That Wasn ’ t But that ’ s not the only big win Democrats could score in Nebraska-2 , and in a number of swing districts like it across the country .
While much of the attention to the district has been on Biden ’ s bid for its Electoral College vote , an even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ campaign for its US House seat .
Progressive Democrat Kara Eastman , who came within 5,000 votes of winning the seat in 2018 , is surging in this year ’ s race against Republican incumbent Don Bacon .
The October 8 Progressive Caucus poll has Eastman leading Bacon 47-45 , and among early voters who have already cast ballots—roughly one-fifth of those surveyed—she ’ s up 59-36 .
If Eastman wins , it will be a major victory for progressive forces , on a par with this year ’ s primary wins by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Jamaal Bowman in New York , and Cori Bush in Missouri—high-profile contenders who , like Eastman , have run this year with backing from Justice Democrats .
Like a number of other grassroots groups , Justice Democrats argue that the party needs to embrace progressive policies and candidates who , in the spirit of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , seek to push the Democratic Party and Congress in bolder directions .
Eastman has twice beaten more cautious , establishment-tied Democrats in Nebraska primaries .
After her 2018 primary win , she got little help @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Democratic insiders poured resources into a campaign to beat her for the nomination .
Yet she swept to a 62-31 victory .
Now , she ’ s getting more national party support as strategists sense a win is within reach .
Eastman is running as a champion of economic , social , and racial justice who is prepared to address the climate crisis and advocates for a foreign policy that ’ s focused on “ negotiation , diplomacy and alliance building in order to prevent unnecessary conflict in the world.
” She argues @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most pragmatic and practical solution to this problem , ” explaining , “ We need to untether employment from health insurance .
Covid-19 makes this case even CLEARER .
I ’ m on the RIGHT side of history with this issue and am unafraid to say it.
” That kind of talk has won her strong backing from Vermont SenatorBernie Sanders , who points out that Eastman is “ facing the same incumbent Republican she came within just 1.9 % of defeating two years ago while running on a strong progressive platform that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Omaha and beyond.
” Congressional Progressive Caucus cochair Mark Pocan calls Eastman “ one of the best candidates running anywhere in the country.
” Pocan , who has traveled to Nebraska to campaign with her , says , “ It would be a huge message to have a smart progressive like Kara Eastman elected from Omaha .
That would be another signal that people favor progressive issues everywhere , and that they will vote for smart progressives who run on those issues .
”

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Joe Biden is surging in the polls and his campaign is looking to run up the Democrat’s Electoral College numbers in unexpected places—like Omaha.
Political junkies know that Nebraska is one of two states—the other is Maine—that assign electors for president not according to the statewide vote but rather on the basis of voting in individual congressional districts. That distinction has made the Omaha-based Second Congressional District a presidential battleground, as well as a bellwether for the nationwide campaign of progressive Democrats to build up their power in Congress by flipping key US House seats. Want more from John? Check out the first-ever Nation Festival featuring John Nichols alongside an extraordinary group of speakers. Nov. 18-21.
Nebraska is a historic Republican stronghold, and Trump still leads statewide. But as the wheels come off the president’s reelection campaign, at least some Nebraska Republicans are distancing themselves from a president who Senator Ben Sasse this week ripped as a political liability who has “flirted with white supremacists” and whose family “has treated the presidency like a business opportunity.”
Sasse is a cynical political player who is positioning for what he imagines will be a post-election scramble to redefine the GOP. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t right to recognize that Trump’s “stupid political obsessions” are alienating voters in this election season. Or when he observes:
If young people become permanent Democrats because they’ve just been repulsed by the obsessive nature of our politics, or if women who were willing to still vote with the Republican Party in 2016 decide that they need to turn away from this party permanently in the future, the debate is not going to be, you know, “Ben Sasse, why were you so mean to Donald Trump?” It’s going to be “What the heck were any of us thinking that selling a TV-obsessed narcissistic individual to the American people was a good idea?” It is not a good idea.
If a Trump derailment causes a “Republican bloodbath” in November, as Sasse suggests is possible, the best measure of it could come in Omaha and the suburban communities of Douglas and Sarpy counties that make up Nebraska-2.
A new Congressional Progressive Caucus poll from the district has Biden leading 53-42, while a recent New York Times/Siena College survey has him up 48-41. FiveThirtyEight, the political prognostication site, now says, “Biden is favored to win Nebraska’s 2nd District.” Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann More From John Nichols A GOP Debate Without Trump Is the Definition of Pointlessness August 11, 2023 A Win for Abortion Rights, a Win for Democracy: Ohio Voters Reject Issue 1 August 9, 2023 The Biggest Threat to Donald Trump Could Be the Constitution Itself August 4, 2023
But that’s not the only big win Democrats could score in Nebraska-2, and in a number of swing districts like it across the country. While much of the attention to the district has been on Biden’s bid for its Electoral College vote, an even more striking breakthrough could occur in the campaign for its US House seat.
Progressive Democrat Kara Eastman, who came within 5,000 votes of winning the seat in 2018, is surging in this year’s race against Republican incumbent Don Bacon. The October 8 Progressive Caucus poll has Eastman leading Bacon 47-45, and among early voters who have already cast ballots—roughly one-fifth of those surveyed—she’s up 59-36.
If Eastman wins, it will be a major victory for progressive forces, on a par with this year’s primary wins by House candidates Marie Newman in Illinois, Jamaal Bowman in New York, and Cori Bush in Missouri—high-profile contenders who, like Eastman, have run this year with backing from Justice Democrats. Like a number of other grassroots groups, Justice Democrats argue that the party needs to embrace progressive policies and candidates who, in the spirit of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seek to push the Democratic Party and Congress in bolder directions.
Eastman has twice beaten more cautious, establishment-tied Democrats in Nebraska primaries. After her 2018 primary win, she got little help from national Democrats. This year, Democratic insiders poured resources into a campaign to beat her for the nomination. Yet she swept to a 62-31 victory. Current Issue View our current issue
Now, she’s getting more national party support as strategists sense a win is within reach. With that said, Eastman’s still a grassroots-focused candidate, who celebrates the small-dollar donations that helped her to significantly out-raise Bacon in the latest fundraising quarter.
Eastman is running as a champion of economic, social, and racial justice who is prepared to address the climate crisis and advocates for a foreign policy that’s focused on “negotiation, diplomacy and alliance building in order to prevent unnecessary conflict in the world.” She argues for Medicare for All as “the most pragmatic and practical solution to this problem,” explaining, “We need to untether employment from health insurance. Covid-19 makes this case even CLEARER. I’m on the RIGHT side of history with this issue and am unafraid to say it.”
That kind of talk has won her strong backing from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who points out that Eastman is “facing the same incumbent Republican she came within just 1.9% of defeating two years ago while running on a strong progressive platform that prioritizes the needs of working people in Omaha and beyond.”
Congressional Progressive Caucus cochair Mark Pocan calls Eastman “one of the best candidates running anywhere in the country.” Pocan, who has traveled to Nebraska to campaign with her, says, “It would be a huge message to have a smart progressive like Kara Eastman elected from Omaha. That would be another signal that people favor progressive issues everywhere, and that they will vote for smart progressives who run on those issues.”


thenation--2020-10-19--Can Jamie Harrison Really Beat Lindsey Graham?

olumbia , —Does Jamie Harrison really have a chance to unseat Lindsey Graham ?
Yes .
But it won ’ t be easy—despite some current polls showing the race in a dead heat and Harrison raising money hand over fist .
In a hopeful mood , I ’ m curious to see how the state that introduced “ interposition and nullification ” to our ongoing racial strife , was the first to succeed from the Union , and remains the soul of the Confederacy handles sending two Black senators to Washington .
I could be “ just whistling Dixie ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Graham might be doable .
First , in this election year , one person makes all the difference for me and many others .
That person is Donald Trump .
I ’ m voting against him—and Harrison reaps the benefit .
Our BBQ restaurant , which shuttered in March and reopened in mid-June for take-out , sits across the street from the Richland County Administration Building housing the county election office .
Since early voting began on October 5 , lines have been around the block , with voters lining up early morning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Tom Steyer ’ s South Carolina Support Isn ’ t Just About the Benjamins Most of the early voters I ’ ve seen have been Black .
Despite efforts to protect voting by mail , most Black voters are choosing not to trust mail-in voting and are showing up in person at early voting spots across the state .
Once inside , voters are taking about 10 minutes or less to cast their ballot—which suggests they ’ re voting a straight Democratic ticket .
I come to work early in the morning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
When they have to use the restroom ( the county building has been pretty much closed since March ) , they walk across the street to us .
They need water , and we ’ ve given it to them with the joking stipulation ( OK , we ’ re kind of serious ) that they come back and buy some barbeque .
They need a place to park ; park in our lot .
Maybe early voting will help Harrison win—but it sure has helped our restaurant financially survive the Covid-19 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Harrison needs to come close to , match , or exceed Barack Obama ’ s 2008 or ’ 12 turnout numbers .
In 2008 , though losing the state to his Republican challenger , Obama garnered 862,449 votes—and 865,941 in his second go-round in 2012 .
Presently , there are over 1 million nonwhite registered voters in the state .
Record turnout along with an erosion of support for Graham is critical for Harrison .
Graham ’ s vote totals from 2008 to 2014 show significant erosion of support among Republicans .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ against Lindsey .
Harrison and the Democrats have spent money on billboard ads using Graham ’ s negative comments against Trump as a weapon .
Comments like : “ He ’ s a race-baiting , xenophobic , religious bigot ” or “ You know how you make America great again ?
Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.
” Or “ We have to reject this demagoguery , and if we don ’ t reject Donald Trump , we ’ ve lost the moral authority…to govern this great nation.
” Over the previous @ @ @ @ @ @ @ forum with Harrison , “ If you ’ re a young African-American , an immigrant , you can go anywhere in this state , you just need to be conservative , not liberal.
” In a couple days , Graham was buying time on Black radio stations for damage control to cover what was deemed an insult by Black people .
Although the Amy Coney Barrett Supreme Court confirmation hearings are once again putting Graham center stage , they also put the spotlight on his Achilles ’ heel : his hypocrisy .
Not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ flipping over to the Trump cause , but also his “ Use my words against me ” quote when his party denied Barack Obama the opportunity to even get a hearing for his Supreme Court nominee , Merrick Garland , in the last 10 months of his term .
Blacks see denying Obama the Garland nomination yet allowing Trump to place Barrett in Ruth Bader Ginsberg ’ s empty seat as not only hypocritical but racist to boot .
I like Harrison—although he ’ s no Bernie Sanders progressive , and most likely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Democratic senator , the late Ernest “ Fritz ” Hollings .
I haven ’ t been personally involved in South Carolina Democratic Party politics , other than as a critic , in decades .
I met with Harrison and his staff along with the Rev .
Jesse Jackson last summer during the state party convention .
It was the first time that I had attended the convention in 35 years .
Nineteen eighty-eight was the first and last time I spoke at the State Convention—after Jackson had won the state presidential caucus carrying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the time , Blacks had no major role in the party leadership and our demand was for the chair of the party to be Black .
Our cry then was , “ If not now , when !
” Harrison and the progress in leadership , and his ability to run a campaign and get support from the party , grew from our grassroots efforts .
I only mention this because Harrison began the work of reaching out to many of the disinterested and often ignored factions early in the process .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Carolina , from former Governor Dick Riley to Fritz Hollings , shows that victory comes when the Democrats build a grass roots–based campaign , ignoring no one—as opposed to just spending money on media .
Still , Donald Trump is a powerful motivating force to get Black people to the polls .
Ironically , that ’ s what Trump and Obama have in common : their ability to motivate Black voters .
And that bodes well for Harrison .

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C olumbia, S.C. —Does Jaime Harrison really have a chance to unseat Lindsey Graham? Yes. But it won’t be easy—despite some current polls showing the race in a dead heat and Harrison raising money hand over fist.
In a hopeful mood, I’m curious to see how the state that introduced “interposition and nullification” to our ongoing racial strife, was the first to secede from the Union, and which remains the soul of the Confederacy handles sending two Black senators to Washington. I could be “just whistling Dixie” but here’s why Harrison beating Graham might be doable.
First, in this election year, one person makes all the difference for me and many others. That person is Donald Trump. I’m voting against him—and Harrison reaps the benefit.
Our BBQ restaurant, which shuttered in March and reopened in mid-June for take-out, sits across the street from the Richland County Administration Building housing the county election office. Since early voting began on October 5, lines have been around the block, with voters lining up early morning through late evening to cast their ballots. More From Kevin Alexander Gray Remembering Frank Watkins, Longtime Lieutenant to Jesse Jackson September 30, 2022 Smoking Meat, Hoping to Survive December 23, 2020 Tom Steyer’s South Carolina Support Isn’t Just About the Benjamins February 27, 2020
Most of the early voters I’ve seen have been Black. Despite efforts to protect voting by mail, most Black voters are choosing not to trust mail-in voting and are showing up in person at early voting spots across the state. Once inside, voters are taking about 10 minutes or less to cast their ballot—which suggests they’re voting a straight Democratic ticket.
I come to work early in the morning and voters are out waiting to vote. When they have to use the restroom (the county building has been pretty much closed since March), they walk across the street to us. They need water, and we’ve given it to them with the joking stipulation (OK, we’re kind of serious) that they come back and buy some barbeque. They need a place to park; park in our lot. Maybe early voting will help Harrison win—but it sure has helped our restaurant financially survive the Covid-19 pandemic.
To have a winnable chance, Harrison needs to come close to, match, or exceed Barack Obama’s 2008 or ’12 turnout numbers. In 2008, though losing the state to his Republican challenger, Obama garnered 862,449 votes—and 865,941 in his second go-round in 2012. Presently, there are over 1 million nonwhite registered voters in the state. Current Issue View our current issue
Record turnout along with an erosion of support for Graham is critical for Harrison. Graham’s vote totals from 2008 to 2014 show significant erosion of support among Republicans. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
In a way, Lindsey is running against Lindsey. Harrison and the Democrats have spent money on billboard ads using Graham’s negative comments against Trump as a weapon. Comments like: “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” or “You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” Or “We have to reject this demagoguery, and if we don’t reject Donald Trump, we’ve lost the moral authority…to govern this great nation.” Related Article Lindsey Graham Just ‘Committed a Crime in Plain Sight’ John Nichols
Over the previous weekend, Graham quipped in a debate forum with Harrison, “If you’re a young African-American, an immigrant, you can go anywhere in this state, you just need to be conservative, not liberal.” In a couple days, Graham was buying time on Black radio stations for damage control to cover what was deemed an insult by Black people.
Although the Amy Coney Barrett Supreme Court confirmation hearings are once again putting Graham center stage, they also put the spotlight on his Achilles’ heel: his hypocrisy. Not just his hypocrisy as it relates to flipping over to the Trump cause, but also his “Use my words against me” quote when his party denied Barack Obama the opportunity to even get a hearing for his Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, in the last 10 months of his term. Blacks see denying Obama the Garland nomination yet allowing Trump to place Barrett in Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s empty seat as not only hypocritical but racist to boot.
I like Harrison—although he’s no Bernie Sanders progressive, and most likely he’ll govern like the last Democratic senator, the late Ernest “Fritz” Hollings.
I haven’t been personally involved in South Carolina Democratic Party politics, other than as a critic, in decades. I met with Harrison and his staff along with the Rev. Jesse Jackson last summer during the state party convention. It was the first time that I had attended the convention in 35 years. Nineteen eighty-eight was the first and last time I spoke at the State Convention—after Jackson had won the state presidential caucus carrying 64 percent of the delegates. At the time, Blacks had no major role in the party leadership and our demand was for the chair of the party to be Black. Our cry then was, “If not now, when!” Harrison and the progress in leadership, and his ability to run a campaign and get support from the party, grew from our grassroots efforts.
I only mention this because Harrison began the work of reaching out to many of the disinterested and often ignored factions early in the process. The history of winning Democratic candidates in South Carolina, from former Governor Dick Riley to Fritz Hollings, shows that victory comes when the Democrats build a grass roots–based campaign, ignoring no one—as opposed to just spending money on media.
Still, Donald Trump is a powerful motivating force to get Black people to the polls. Ironically, that’s what Trump and Obama have in common: their ability to motivate Black voters. And that bodes well for Harrison.


thenation--2020-10-19--Progressives Won’t Wait for Biden to Set the Course

On October 8 , the Working Families Party released the People ’ s Charter , a progressive “ road map out of our current state of crisis , ” endorsed by several leading progressive legislators and insurgent congressional candidates , including Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and other members of “ the Squad , ” as well as organizations including the Movement for Black Lives Electoral Justice Project , the Service Employees International Union , and MoveOn .
Earlier , the Green New Deal Network , an even broader coalition anchored by Indivisible , released the Thrive Agenda endorsed by 85 sitting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , civil rights , and citizen action groups .
These serve not only as policy statements but as political markers as well : If Biden wins next month as expected , progressives will not give him a pass but will seek to drive bold reforms from the get-go .
The contrast with 2012 and the early days of the Obama administration is stark .
Obama , swept into office in large part by the energy of citizen movements , was wildly popular among progressive activists .
National organizations , with leaders jockeying for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ support his agenda .
The Obama White House organized an outside roundtable to coordinate grassroots support .
Progressives largely stood by as Obama dithered away his filibuster-proof majority in the Senate , diluting his agenda in a fruitless pursuit of support from mythical Senate Republican moderates .
When Obama prematurely embraced austerity with unemployment still in double digits , outcries from progressive economists had little support .
Biden won ’ t get that pass .
He has signed off on the boldest progressive agenda of any Democratic candidate in recent history , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on pursuit of more moderate suburban voters and the ever-elusive disaffected Republicans than on mobilizing his own base .
His closing argument features moving beyond red-state and blue-state divides “ to revive the spirit of bipartisanship in the country , ” promising to work across the aisle , pledging that cooperation “ is the choice I ’ ll back as president.
” This can be written off as routine electoral posturing , but it also reflects Biden ’ s history as a Senate centrist proud of his ability to work with Republicans .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ rediscover their horror of deficits and start braying about the need for austerity .
While progressives—led by Bernie Sanders—have generally gone all in in the effort to eject Trump , most harbor serious doubts about Biden ’ s willingness to champion fundamental reforms .
Progressives are in a far stronger position to drive the debate than they were at the beginning of the Obama administration .
There is widespread agreement on elements of a bold reform agenda , in significant part drawn from the Sanders campaigns .
Both the Thrive Agenda and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ public investment to modernize our infrastructure , move to clean energy , and create millions of jobs .
Both would target public investment to low-income Black and brown communities .
Both embrace universal health care and basic worker provisions like universal child care , paid family and medical leave , and paid sick days .
Both emphasize the need to empower workers to organize and bargain collectively .
Both call for strengthening public institutions from the postal service to public education .
Both detail bold responses to help workers displaced in the pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Supreme Court That ’ s at Stake Biden Must Resist the Calls for a ‘ Sister Souljah ’ Moment The Democrats Just Showed Us a Weakness in Their 2020 Strategy Each has distinctive features .
The People ’ s Charter calls for creating public banks , establishing public ownership stakes in corporations that are bailed out , and buying out oil and gas companies .
Its first priority is moving funds from policing , jails , and endless wars into schools , public housing , and other services .
The Thrive Agenda makes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of its eight pillars .
Neither includes an alternative trade agenda , reflecting the relative weakness of industrial unions in the coalitions .
Progressives also have greater strength in both the House and the Senate than they did at the beginning of the Obama era .
The Thrive Agenda is endorsed by 85 legislators , and 10 senators including not only progressives like Sanders , Elizabeth Warren , and Jeff Merkley but also Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer .
In the House , the Congressional Progressive Caucus , under the leadership of Representatives @ @ @ @ @ @ @ begun to act with greater cohesion and to exercise more power within the Democratic caucus .
It will be bolstered by the election of several exciting new members who will add new energy to the push for a bolder agenda .
The victories of Jamaal Bowman , Cori Bush , and Marie Newman over long-serving Democratic incumbents send a message to powerful older Democrats in safe Democratic seats that they have to lead , not resist , the new agenda .
Driving all of this are the citizens in motion across the country @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the growing climate movement , women ’ s protests are in the streets .
Importantly , independent worker strikes—from the teachers in red states to the Fight for $ 15 by fast food and other workers to the workers protesting unsafe conditions in the pandemic—presage a new period of worker activism that could dramatically expand the demand for change .
The battle will be joined immediately after the election if Biden is elected and if—a big if—Democrats take back the Senate .
The first fight will be with the Senate Democratic caucus over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to curb Republican obstruction .
Biden , an institutionalist , has expressed doubts about the change .
Sanders , Our Revolution , and much of the left will mobilize to pressure Democrats to move .
Biden ’ s early agenda will feature reversing many of Trump ’ s follies , ending his immigration abuses , reentering the Paris Accord , rolling back the assault on environmental protections .
A first big skirmish is likely to be over the scope of the tragically delayed next Covid-19 rescue package .
The next test is likely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will be a growing Republican and establishment call of austerity in the face of large deficits .
What ’ s clear is that progressives won ’ t wait for Biden to set the course .
They will be pushing for bold reforms immediately .
In the Great Depression , when the early Roosevelt agenda failed , growing populist movements and liberals in the Congress forced Roosevelt to embrace what became the second New Deal—Social Security , the Works Progress Administration , the National Labor Relations Act , rural electrification , and more .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ from day one .
After claiming that he plans to be the “ most progressive president since FDR , ” Biden would be well-advised to lead the push , not resist it .

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On October 8, the Working Families Party released the People’s Charter, a progressive “road map out of our current state of crisis,” endorsed by several leading progressive legislators and insurgent congressional candidates, including Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and other members of “the Squad,” as well as organizations including the Movement for Black Lives Electoral Justice Project,the Service Employees International Union, and MoveOn. Earlier, the Green New Deal Network, an even broader coalition anchored by Indivisible, released the Thrive Agenda endorsed by 85 sitting legislators and legions of unions, environmental, civil rights, and citizen action groups. These serve not only as policy statements but as political markers as well: If Biden wins next month as expected, progressives will not give him a pass but will seek to drive bold reforms from the get-go.
The contrast with 2012 and the early days of the Obama administration is stark. Obama, swept into office in large part by the energy of citizen movements, was wildly popular among progressive activists. National organizations, with leaders jockeying for positions in the administration, united to support his agenda. The Obama White House organized an outside roundtable to coordinate grassroots support. Progressives largely stood by as Obama dithered away his filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, diluting his agenda in a fruitless pursuit of support from mythical Senate Republican moderates. When Obama prematurely embraced austerity with unemployment still in double digits, outcries from progressive economists had little support.
Biden won’t get that pass. He has signed off on the boldest progressive agenda of any Democratic candidate in recent history, but he’s focused his campaign more on pursuit of more moderate suburban voters and the ever-elusive disaffected Republicans than on mobilizing his own base. His closing argument features moving beyond red-state and blue-state divides “to revive the spirit of bipartisanship in the country,” promising to work across the aisle, pledging that cooperation “is the choice I’ll back as president.” This can be written off as routine electoral posturing, but it also reflects Biden’s history as a Senate centrist proud of his ability to work with Republicans. And that bodes particularly ill as Republicans rediscover their horror of deficits and start braying about the need for austerity. While progressives—led by Bernie Sanders—have generally gone all in in the effort to eject Trump, most harbor serious doubts about Biden’s willingness to champion fundamental reforms.
Progressives are in a far stronger position to drive the debate than they were at the beginning of the Obama administration. There is widespread agreement on elements of a bold reform agenda, in significant part drawn from the Sanders campaigns. Both the Thrive Agenda and the People’s Charter call for large-scale public investment to modernize our infrastructure, move to clean energy, and create millions of jobs. Both would target public investment to low-income Black and brown communities. Both embrace universal health care and basic worker provisions like universal child care, paid family and medical leave, and paid sick days. Both emphasize the need to empower workers to organize and bargain collectively. Both call for strengthening public institutions from the postal service to public education. Both detail bold responses to help workers displaced in the pandemic. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann More From Robert L. Borosage Jesse Jackson Is Keeping Hope Alive July 13, 2023 The Left Should Support Ending Violence in Ukraine April 27, 2023 Biden, Go Bold in the State of the Union February 6, 2023
Each has distinctive features. The People’s Charter calls for creating public banks, establishing public ownership stakes in corporations that are bailed out, and buying out oil and gas companies. Its first priority is moving funds from policing, jails, and endless wars into schools, public housing, and other services. The Thrive Agenda makes fair treatment of sovereign native nations one of its eight pillars. Neither includes an alternative trade agenda, reflecting the relative weakness of industrial unions in the coalitions.
Progressives also have greater strength in both the House and the Senate than they did at the beginning of the Obama era. The Thrive Agenda is endorsed by 85 legislators, and 10 senators including not only progressives like Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Jeff Merkley but also Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. In the House, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, under the leadership of Representatives Mark Pocan and Pramila Jayapal, has begun to act with greater cohesion and to exercise more power within the Democratic caucus. It will be bolstered by the election of several exciting new members who will add new energy to the push for a bolder agenda. The victories of Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, and Marie Newman over long-serving Democratic incumbents send a message to powerful older Democrats in safe Democratic seats that they have to lead, not resist, the new agenda.
Driving all of this are the citizens in motion across the country. The Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the growing climate movement, women’s protests are in the streets. Importantly, independent worker strikes—from the teachers in red states to the Fight for $15 by fast food and other workers to the workers protesting unsafe conditions in the pandemic—presage a new period of worker activism that could dramatically expand the demand for change. Current Issue View our current issue
The battle will be joined immediately after the election if Biden is elected and if—a big if—Democrats take back the Senate. The first fight will be with the Senate Democratic caucus over whether to get rid of the filibuster to curb Republican obstruction. Biden, an institutionalist, has expressed doubts about the change. Sanders, Our Revolution, and much of the left will mobilize to pressure Democrats to move.
Biden’s early agenda will feature reversing many of Trump’s follies, ending his immigration abuses, reentering the Paris Accord, rolling back the assault on environmental protections. A first big skirmish is likely to be over the scope of the tragically delayed next Covid-19 rescue package. The next test is likely to be how Biden responds to what will be a growing Republican and establishment call of austerity in the face of large deficits.
What’s clear is that progressives won’t wait for Biden to set the course. They will be pushing for bold reforms immediately. In the Great Depression, when the early Roosevelt agenda failed, growing populist movements and liberals in the Congress forced Roosevelt to embrace what became the second New Deal—Social Security, the Works Progress Administration, the National Labor Relations Act, rural electrification, and more. Under Biden, the pressure will begin from day one. After claiming that he plans to be the “most progressive president since FDR,” Biden would be well-advised to lead the push, not resist it.


thenation--2020-10-19--How Did We Get Here?

How Did We Get Here?

Here is a version of the old rock-paper-scissors game , on a topic that should be of urgent concern to people on the left : How did Trump ’ s America happen , and what can we do to dislodge its hold on our politics ?
One can argue that Donald Trump didn ’ t really win the 2016 election or that he won it only through some combination of voter suppression , Russian meddling , and the peculiarities of the American constitutional system .
Even so , somebody who shouldn ’ t have been a serious candidate got tens @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s legitimate ( urgent , if we are to avoid a repeat performance this November ) to ask why .
Was it racism ?
Misdirected economic frustration ?
Expert manipulation of public opinion ?
A deterioration of democratic norms ?
All of these combined ?
Three new books by prominent liberal intellectuals—Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson ’ s Let Them Eat Tweets , Robert B. Reich ’ s The System , and Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Teles ’ s Never Trump—give strikingly different answers to these questions .
Each @ @ @ @ @ @ @ important , and yet each one also vitiates the others .
The System : Who Rigged It , How We Fix It Let Them Eat Tweets : How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality Never Trump : The Revolt of the Conservative Elites Let Them Eat Tweets and The System are notionally similar .
Both books insist that our very high and rising levels of economic inequality have relentlessly corroded the integrity of our political system , in ways that enabled the rise of Trump and his politics of anger @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , at least in Trump ’ s hands , is disconnected from any real program that would help the people he claims to represent .
The two books treat it as axiomatic that a social democratic system with higher and more equitable taxes and more generous government provision would help cure us of this corrosion , and they blame a small , powerful cohort of very rich people—Hacker and Pierson call them plutocrats , while Reich terms them oligarchs—for creating this crisis and making it so hard to resolve .
Trump , they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deep , systemic deterioration than a cause .
But in explaining the sources of this deterioration , the authors part ways .
Hacker and Pierson see it as almost completely a Republican phenomenon , the result of the GOP ’ s transformation from a center-right to a far-right party .
Reich argues that the oligarchs have captured both parties , and he devotes far more of his critical attention to the Democrats .
If Hacker and Pierson have it right , we should focus our attention and political energies on the Republicans .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t do much good ; it ’ s the political system as a whole that needs to be radically changed if it is going to do better by working people .
Saldin and Teles ’ s Never Trump comes at the Trump phenomenon from a different angle .
It seeks to explain not why American politics has turned away from social democratic policies but rather why the Republican establishment failed to deter Trump ’ s rise .
Never Trump is written in a less passionately argumentative style than the other two books @ @ @ @ @ @ @ prescriptive .
Implicitly , though , it makes its own case for what went wrong and in so doing subverts the others .
Saldin and Teles leave one with the impression that Trump and his followers are actually an independent , unaligned , and alarming political phenomenon whose advent demonstrates that the Republican elite exercises less control over the party than many of us assumed it does .
They argue that rather than continue to be obedient , those voters whose interests the elite ignored for years staged an uprising that brought us @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , then the next logical step in their argument would be that the Democrats do not need to disempower the elite of either party .
Instead , they should focus on wooing those descendants of the New Deal voters who left the Democratic Party , by addressing their economic needs .
Reich was a classmate of Bill Clinton ’ s and a fellow Rhodes scholar in the late 1960s .
The two remained close through the years , and Reich ’ s 1991 book The Work of Nations was widely seen ( in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ blueprint for Clinton ’ s presidency and for a post–New Deal , postindustrial liberal political economy in which the government would promote high-skilled , high-paying jobs as a way for people to succeed in the global economy .
After Clinton was elected in 1992 , Reich became his first labor secretary and pushed for higher taxes on the rich and corporations , stronger labor laws , and limits on free trade .
But he quickly fell out with Clinton ’ s economic team—Lloyd Bentsen , Robert Rubin , Lawrence Summers , and so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Clinton ’ s first term .
Since then , Reich ’ s disillusionment with the Democratic Party deepened as it became clear that , at least on economic policy , it had become far more the party of Wall Street and Silicon Valley than of working-class Americans .
He has spent the last quarter-century teaching and writing and has published a new book every three or four years .
He ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 , and in 2008 he broke decisively with the Clintons by endorsing Barack Obama for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ become increasingly frustrated with the party ’ s continued neoliberal turn during the Obama years .
In 2016 and again during the 2020 campaign he endorsed Bernie Sanders for president .
The System is Reich ’ s latest condemnation of the country ’ s move away from the political economy that developed during the New Deal and continued for half a century .
It is structured as an extended essay intermittently addressed to Jamie Dimon , the head of JPMorgan Chase ( the country ’ s biggest bank ) and a major influence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ targets of Reich ’ s include the presidentially ambitious Democrats Tom Steyer and Howard Shultz .
( Notably , Reich mentions the Koch family only in passing . )
If a political system is like an ecosystem , in which each element exists in relation to the others , the Democrats , in Reich ’ s view , have destroyed the system ’ s historical balance by accepting formerly Republican causes like deunionization , deregulation , and the weakening of the social safety net .
He writes in The System ’ s first @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of “ the obsolescence of right and left ” within mainstream party politics .
The great and undernoticed remaking of the American political economy over the last 40 years , Reich insists , was anything but a natural , inevitable process .
“ Governments organize and maintain markets , ” he explains .
And both parties have organized and maintained the markets to disempower labor , treat free trade as an absolute virtue , view sending jobs overseas as unavoidable , scale back antitrust enforcement and other forms of economic regulation , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ financial markets rather than workers or communities .
This abandonment of policies meant to correct the inequities of unimpeded capitalism created a self-reinforcing loop of greater inequality , Reich argues—a greater concentration of economic and political power that resulted in a further dismantling of the policies that would correct the problem .
The oligarchs have taken relatively liberal positions on noneconomic issues like climate change , immigration , and gay marriage that have obscured their conservative positions on labor , trade , and taxes .
The Clintons and Obama did not depart significantly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ economic policy , and that is why Sanders was able to ambush the Democratic establishment and Trump the Republican one .
Although it ’ s clear what Reich ’ s policy preferences are , his real concern is with calling attention to the oligarchs ’ capture of the Democratic Party , so he doesn ’ t end The System with a detailed program for governing .
Instead , his preferred first step toward a solution is a political realignment—not back to the Democrats but toward an entirely new party system .
“ Unless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ parties in the United States moves away from the established systems of political and economic power , ” he writes , “ a new party could unite the disaffected and anti-establishment elements of both major parties and give voice to the 90 percent of Americans who have been losing ground.
” If someone started such a party , Reich would clearly be at the head of the line to sign up .
Hacker and Pierson acknowledge that there are some plutocrats in the Democratic Party , but they insist that the great majority @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the authors devote no energy to criticizing Democratic politicians and a great deal to criticizing Republican ones , along with their donors and interest groups .
( Hacker , a politically active academic like Reich , has long been a promoter of the public option in health care , but he has not broken with his party ’ s leadership as Reich has . )
For Hacker and Pierson , the modern Republican Party put the American democratic system fundamentally at risk even before Trump became its unlikely head .
Rich people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they write , and will always face the challenge of how to bring people who aren ’ t rich into a political alliance with them .
Mainstream conservative leaders—Eisenhower , for example—often do so with appeals to tradition , patriotism , faith , and a minimal welfare state .
But the Republican Party in recent decades has pushed its economic agenda further and further to the right and so has to create other ways to appeal to the mass of voters .
Therefore the Republicans devised what Hacker and Pierson call “ plutocratic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ retaining the loyalty of their base while promoting economic policies that only the 1 percent could love .
Economically oriented groups like the Koch family network , the American Legislative Exchange Council , and the US Chamber of Commerce control the Republicans ’ policy agenda and its money supply , and culturally oriented organizations like Fox News , the National Rifle Association , and a wide range of fundamentalist Christian groups generate voter support by whipping up cultural and racial resentments .
Because the Republicans ’ policies on issues like taxes , Social @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more oriented toward the preferences of the very rich and because the GOP ’ s voting base is aging and concentrated in declining rural areas , the party increasingly has to resort to antidemocratic measures like gerrymandering and voter suppression to retain its hold on power .
In its techniques and the nature of its appeal to voters , the Republicans have come to resemble a European-style authoritarian party .
The last Republican leader to precede this plutocratic populist turn , in Hacker and Pierson ’ s telling , was George H.W .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ and eminently reasonable tax increase sealed his fate , they argue , and seems also to have sealed the fate of his form of conservative politics in the GOP .
His successor as the party ’ s most powerful figure , then–House Speaker Newt Gingrich , moved it substantially to the right and helped invent plutocratic populism as a political stance that combined relentless rhetorical assaults on elites with aggressive tax- and program-cutting economic policies .
When George W. Bush was elected , he began his presidency with a large tax cut and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attempted to begin the privatization of Social Security .
For his part , Trump has not departed from the GOP ’ s economic direction since 1990 .
Once in office , he pushed through another set of tax cuts and tried to undo Obama ’ s signature domestic achievement , the Affordable Care Act .
At the same time , Trump ramped up the party ’ s nativist , fundamentalist , and antidemocratic inclinations .
His incessant culture warring , Hacker and Pierson write , is necessary because the party ’ s fundamental @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anyone who isn ’ t rich .
Hacker and Pierson ’ s ideal policy menu would be a lot like Reich ’ s : for starters , an enlarged welfare state and a more equitable tax system .
Like Reich , they are primarily interested in creating a politics that would support such a program ; also like Reich , they believe that the different elements in a political system affect one another ’ s behavior .
In Reich ’ s view , the Democrats ’ move to the right on economic issues @ @ @ @ @ @ @ right .
For Hacker and Pierson , it was the Republicans who moved , pulling the rest of the system with them .
So one might expect them to call for the Democratic Party—reenergized in response to the economic and racial injustice of the Trump years—to restore balance to the political system .
But they don ’ t , remaining focused instead on changing the GOP .
“ The only lasting way out of our challenge is to make the Republican Party once again a contributor to a healthy polity , capable of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” they write .
The first step would be to deliver a stinging defeat to Trump in November in order to reactivate the saner elements in the GOP , but given the last several decades of Republican history that they discuss , it still sounds like quite a difficult project .
Saldin and Teles ’ s book is a more modest , monographic effort : an account of the internal Republican Party politics of 2016 , not a major analytical prescription for changing the political system .
But it contains more original @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of in-depth interviews with never-Trumpers , who are often amazingly candid in their answers .
Hearing Republican voices at length provides a rare picture of life inside the GOP that has a feeling of anthropological verisimilitude .
Although Never Trump steers clear of directly proposing a big theory , what emerges inter alia is an explanation of American politics today that is actually more disturbing than the other books ’ , in which Trump ’ s rise is properly understood as an expression of the authentic preferences of his supporters and as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was not a typical Republican presidential nominee , Saldin and Teles observe .
Indeed , he was not really a Republican at all ; during the first GOP debate , he was the only candidate who would not promise to support the party ’ s eventual nominee , and he mowed down what looked like a strong field of opponents—Jeb Bush , Marco Rubio , Scott Walker—who had much more experience , more substantial organizations , and more funding , precisely because he came from outside the party establishment .
( Saldin and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even enter the “ Koch primary , ” in which aspiring presidential candidates pay obeisance to the party ’ s most important donors . )
When campaigning , he departed from the GOP ’ s customary economic conservatism and its aggressive foreign policy .
He opposed free trade , criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan , and praised Social Security and Medicare .
These positions , along with his background and his generally unpresidential demeanor , horrified most of the party ’ s elites .
Saldin and Teles assert that there has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was as actively , publicly , and vociferously opposed by so many prominent members of his own party .
The sociologist Mario Luis Small has adapted to political use the phrase “ outgroup homogeneity bias , ” a psychological term for the ways the group you ’ re not a part of appears to be more uniform than it actually is .
In Reich ’ s book , which focuses on the Democrats , the Republicans—to the extent he mentions them at all—appear as a monolithic , naturally pro-oligarchy party .
In Hacker @ @ @ @ @ @ @ voters tend to fall into two neat categories : plutocrats and working-class whites who have been manipulated into voting against their interests .
In Never Trump , Saldin and Teles give us a more subtle and empathetic picture of elite Republicans ( at least those who opposed Trump ) , dividing them into several subcategories and carefully describing each one ’ s distinctive mentality and economic support system .
The major groups of never-Trumpers in this taxonomy are national security professionals , political operatives , public intellectuals , lawyers , and economists .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ illuminating but not necessarily exculpatory .
Sometimes , as in the case of the never-Trumpers who decided to keep their mouths shut after his nomination , they sound bluntly cynical .
Douglas Holtz-Eakin , the chief economic adviser for John McCain ’ s 2008 presidential campaign , was quietly but not actively anti-Trump during the fall campaign .
He tells Saldin and Teles that the president “ lacks honor .
He has no character .
He ’ s a horrible human being.
” Nevertheless , “ I wanted to get tax reform done @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reform done , and I want to get entitlement reform done .
I ’ ve been working on regulatory and education reform .
I have my bucket list , and I ’ m not going to give a rat ’ s ass who ’ s there.
” It ’ s astonishing to hear how little the never-Trumpers and Trump voters have in common .
Throughout the early primary season , the never-Trumpers , cohort by cohort , waged a series of direct and covert assaults on Trump .
There were public letters with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ impassioned appeals to prominent Trump-hating Republicans ( like the anti-Trump , then pro-Trump , and again anti-Trump retired Marine general James Mattis ) to jump into the race at the last minute .
None of it worked , and quite a few never-Trumpers went on to serve in the Trump administration .
Now they have three options : active rebellion ( as with the Lincoln Project ) , grudging assent , and waiting for the Republican Party they thought they knew to reemerge in 2024 .
In Sinclair Lewis ’ s Babbitt , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Howard Littlefield , PhD , the house intellectual at the Zenith Street Traction Company , who uses his Yale degree in economics to produce learned justifications for whatever the company wants to do .
Hacker and Pierson , by treating Republican conservatism as being based not on ideas but on the self-interest of the very rich , implicitly regard conservative intellectuals the same way .
Saldin and Teles grant them their authentic enthusiasms for Hayek and Churchill but present that as immaterial to Republican voters , whose core conviction—as Trump but none of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all-encompassing , information-resistant ethnonationalism .
Saldin and Teles cite one e-mail from an anonymous never-Trumper , written during the assembling of one of the public letters , saying , “ I think we have basically no chance of influencing any voters .
Any .
The things that drive Trump are not susceptible [ to ] rational discussion , and his potential supporters are not interested in having one.
” Another never-Trumper , Eric Edelman , a veteran Republican diplomat , quotes George W. Bush as telling him , “ You don ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Republican Party to hit a pretty deep vein of xenophobia and protectionism and isolationism .
My job as party leader is to push back against that.
” Trump defeated his Republican opponents because he went straight for that vein and they didn ’ t .
The picture of Republican voters that emerges from Never Trump is almost precisely the opposite of the one in Let Them Eat Tweets .
Rather than being expertly manipulated by plutocrats and interest groups , Republican voters are effectively in control of the party .
Trump ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ won .
It ’ s the party establishment , not the voting base , that is disempowered and obedient .
Early in his second term , Bush made two big domestic policy bets that backfired with this Republican base : He tried to liberalize immigration policy and to marketize Social Security .
Those failures , in retrospect , were a sign of things to come .
Another spectacular failure , the Iraq War , reawakened the isolationist strain in right-wing populism .
The 2008 financial crisis and the long-running effects of inequality , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ higher education , further fertilized the soil in which this economic and ethnonationalist populism thrives .
The Republican leaders from an earlier era , economically conservative but socially liberal , have come to realize that they had no followers .
After the 2012 election , when Mitt Romney drew just 27 percent of the Latino vote ( compared with Bush ’ s 40 percent in 2004 ) , the Republican National Committee produced a study , called “ The Autopsy , ” warning that the party had to broaden its appeal beyond white @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when the 2016 election cycle began .
So , too , was the conviction that Republican voters were generally libertarian on economic issues , especially trade .
The big money in the party placed its primary season bets on candidates who preached variations on the theme of open borders , lower taxes , and cultural tolerance .
It was an expression not only of what the Republican donor class wanted but also of the party ’ s tactical conviction that 40 years of being able to win by appealing to disaffected white voters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as one of the never-Trumpers admits to Saldin and Teles , Trump ’ s victory demonstrated that “ we did have one more election left ” in which the old appeals could produce a very narrow technical victory .
The authors of these three books disagree on a fundamental question : Are we living ( unhappily ) under the rule of a bipartisan oligarchy , a Republican plutocracy , or the GOP ’ s ethnonationalist base ?
But their books have some things in common , too .
All of them choose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ being about Trump personally ; instead , they see him as a phenomenon brought to us in part by large structural changes in the economy and in politics , resulting in the superempowerment of a small minority and the justified embitterment of many Americans who can be found voting for either party .
Political reform would entail some kind of major readjustment of the US political system so that one or both of the major parties would become more attentive to the needs of the majority of voters—or , as Reich suggests , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what the Democrats and Republicans have not .
In any event , a system this troubled isn ’ t going to be fixed in one election cycle .
It ’ s undeniable that inequality and the sense of deep frustration it brings are driving a great deal of the politics of the world .
But connecting inequality to the most obvious policy remedies and then to winning elections is far more complicated than it looks—and the left wing of the Democratic Party is only beginning to sort out how to do so on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ expect the Democrats to be the party that leads the way in creating a better , more just political economy , but given the party ’ s last quarter-century , one should be wary of making that assumption .
Reich is persuasive when he argues that the Democratic elite ’ s full embrace of markets has seriously subverted what ought to be the party ’ s mission .
Since about 1980 , when rising inequality began to take off , both the Democrats and the Republicans have moved to the right on economic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He is also correct to note that the Democratic base , mobilized mainly by Sanders , has pushed the party back in the direction of its historic concern with the economic lives of ordinary people .
Hacker and Pierson are persuasive in contending that the Republican Party can on its own imperil the whole system by pulling everything to the right , especially if it continues to restrict voting .
American mainstream politics has become profoundly out of sync with the economic realities that motivate most voters , and neither party can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they have ignored .
If it is possible to have a politics that successfully addresses economic injustice , it isn ’ t going to happen quickly or neatly .
If Republicans who can ’ t stand Trump defect and attain some influence in the Democratic Party , most of them will not push for a focus on inequality .
Few of the organized , established elements in the GOP will push in that direction , either ; as Hacker and Pierson point out , Trump as president has been far more traditionally libertarian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than he was as a candidate .
People identify themselves and make their political choices in nonstraightforward ways .
But that doesn ’ t mean they aren ’ t concerned with economic issues .
Most voters focus mainly on what ’ s right in front of them : Did the local factory move abroad ?
What ’ s the minimum wage ?
Has my employer laid people off ?
Having once been the party of working people in the United States , Democrats are just beginning to relearn a language that addresses those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of deregulation , anti-unionism , and the concentration of economic power .
Joe Biden , unexpectedly , is running for president on a less market-oriented economic platform than any Democratic nominee has done in decades , and the party is moving in the right direction .
But it is not clear whether , even if Biden wins , that will be enough to power the passage of a New Deal–like economic program .
Inequality has been rising for half a lifetime , and it will take more than just defeating Trump to turn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ happy result in November would make for a promising start , especially if it entails successfully presenting the Democrats as the party that is more authentically concerned with the lives of working people .

This article appears in the November 2/9, 2020 issue.
Here is a version of the old rock-paper-scissors game, on a topic that should be of urgent concern to people on the left: How did Trump’s America happen, and what can we do to dislodge its hold on our politics? One can argue that Donald Trump didn’t really win the 2016 election or that he won it only through some combination of voter suppression, Russian meddling, and the peculiarities of the American constitutional system. Even so, somebody who shouldn’t have been a serious candidate got tens of millions of votes, and it’s legitimate (urgent, if we are to avoid a repeat performance this November) to ask why. Was it racism? Misdirected economic frustration? Expert manipulation of public opinion? A deterioration of democratic norms? All of these combined? Three new books by prominent liberal intellectuals—Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Let Them Eat Tweets, Robert B. Reich’s The System, and Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Teles’s Never Trump—give strikingly different answers to these questions. Each book’s argument is strong and important, and yet each one also vitiates the others. Books in Review The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It By Robert B. Reich Buy this book Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality By Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson Buy this book Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites By Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Teles Buy this book
Let Them Eat Tweets and The System are notionally similar. Both books insist that our very high and rising levels of economic inequality have relentlessly corroded the integrity of our political system, in ways that enabled the rise of Trump and his politics of anger, resentment, and mistrust—a politics that, at least in Trump’s hands, is disconnected from any real program that would help the people he claims to represent. The two books treat it as axiomatic that a social democratic system with higher and more equitable taxes and more generous government provision would help cure us of this corrosion, and they blame a small, powerful cohort of very rich people—Hacker and Pierson call them plutocrats, while Reich terms them oligarchs—for creating this crisis and making it so hard to resolve. Trump, they argue, is more a symptom of deep, systemic deterioration than a cause.
But in explaining the sources of this deterioration, the authors part ways. Hacker and Pierson see it as almost completely a Republican phenomenon, the result of the GOP’s transformation from a center-right to a far-right party. Reich argues that the oligarchs have captured both parties, and he devotes far more of his critical attention to the Democrats. If Hacker and Pierson have it right, we should focus our attention and political energies on the Republicans. If Reich is correct, that won’t do much good; it’s the political system as a whole that needs to be radically changed if it is going to do better by working people.
Saldin and Teles’s Never Trump comes at the Trump phenomenon from a different angle. It seeks to explain not why American politics has turned away from social democratic policies but rather why the Republican establishment failed to deter Trump’s rise. Never Trump is written in a less passionately argumentative style than the other two books, and it’s also less prescriptive. Implicitly, though, it makes its own case for what went wrong and in so doing subverts the others.
Saldin and Teles leave one with the impression that Trump and his followers are actually an independent, unaligned, and alarming political phenomenon whose advent demonstrates that the Republican elite exercises less control over the party than many of us assumed it does. They argue that rather than continue to be obedient, those voters whose interests the elite ignored for years staged an uprising that brought us Trump. If this is the case, then the next logical step in their argument would be that the Democrats do not need to disempower the elite of either party. Instead, they should focus on wooing those descendants of the New Deal voters who left the Democratic Party, by addressing their economic needs. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Reich was a classmate of Bill Clinton’s and a fellow Rhodes scholar in the late 1960s. The two remained close through the years, and Reich’s 1991 book The Work of Nations was widely seen (in retrospect, perhaps incorrectly) as a blueprint for Clinton’s presidency and for a post–New Deal, postindustrial liberal political economy in which the government would promote high-skilled, high-paying jobs as a way for people to succeed in the global economy. After Clinton was elected in 1992, Reich became his first labor secretary and pushed for higher taxes on the rich and corporations, stronger labor laws, and limits on free trade. But he quickly fell out with Clinton’s economic team—Lloyd Bentsen, Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, and so on—and left the administration at the end of Clinton’s first term.
Since then, Reich’s disillusionment with the Democratic Party deepened as it became clear that, at least on economic policy, it had become far more the party of Wall Street and Silicon Valley than of working-class Americans. He has spent the last quarter-century teaching and writing and has published a new book every three or four years. He ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, and in 2008 he broke decisively with the Clintons by endorsing Barack Obama for president during the Democratic primary season—only to become increasingly frustrated with the party’s continued neoliberal turn during the Obama years. In 2016 and again during the 2020 campaign he endorsed Bernie Sanders for president. Current Issue View our current issue
The System is Reich’s latest condemnation of the country’s move away from the political economy that developed during the New Deal and continued for half a century. It is structured as an extended essay intermittently addressed to Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase (the country’s biggest bank) and a major influence on the Democratic Party. Other oligarchical targets of Reich’s include the presidentially ambitious Democrats Tom Steyer and Howard Shultz. (Notably, Reich mentions the Koch family only in passing.) If a political system is like an ecosystem, in which each element exists in relation to the others, the Democrats, in Reich’s view, have destroyed the system’s historical balance by accepting formerly Republican causes like deunionization, deregulation, and the weakening of the social safety net. He writes in The System’s first chapter that the book is a study of “the obsolescence of right and left” within mainstream party politics.
The great and undernoticed remaking of the American political economy over the last 40 years, Reich insists, was anything but a natural, inevitable process. “Governments organize and maintain markets,” he explains. And both parties have organized and maintained the markets to disempower labor, treat free trade as an absolute virtue, view sending jobs overseas as unavoidable, scale back antitrust enforcement and other forms of economic regulation, and encourage corporations to orient themselves toward the financial markets rather than workers or communities.
This abandonment of policies meant to correct the inequities of unimpeded capitalism created a self-reinforcing loop of greater inequality, Reich argues—a greater concentration of economic and political power that resulted in a further dismantling of the policies that would correct the problem. The oligarchs have taken relatively liberal positions on noneconomic issues like climate change, immigration, and gay marriage that have obscured their conservative positions on labor, trade, and taxes. The Clintons and Obama did not depart significantly from the oligarchs’ bipartisan consensus on economic policy, and that is why Sanders was able to ambush the Democratic establishment and Trump the Republican one.
Although it’s clear what Reich’s policy preferences are, his real concern is with calling attention to the oligarchs’ capture of the Democratic Party, so he doesn’t end The System with a detailed program for governing. Instead, his preferred first step toward a solution is a political realignment—not back to the Democrats but toward an entirely new party system. “Unless one or both of the two major parties in the United States moves away from the established systems of political and economic power,” he writes, “a new party could unite the disaffected and anti-establishment elements of both major parties and give voice to the 90 percent of Americans who have been losing ground.” If someone started such a party, Reich would clearly be at the head of the line to sign up.
Hacker and Pierson acknowledge that there are some plutocrats in the Democratic Party, but they insist that the great majority are Republicans, and as a result, the authors devote no energy to criticizing Democratic politicians and a great deal to criticizing Republican ones, along with their donors and interest groups. (Hacker, a politically active academic like Reich, has long been a promoter of the public option in health care, but he has not broken with his party’s leadership as Reich has.)
For Hacker and Pierson, the modern Republican Party put the American democratic system fundamentally at risk even before Trump became its unlikely head. Rich people will always cluster in conservative parties, they write, and will always face the challenge of how to bring people who aren’t rich into a political alliance with them. Mainstream conservative leaders—Eisenhower, for example—often do so with appeals to tradition, patriotism, faith, and a minimal welfare state. But the Republican Party in recent decades has pushed its economic agenda further and further to the right and so has to create other ways to appeal to the mass of voters. Therefore the Republicans devised what Hacker and Pierson call “plutocratic populism,” a politics aimed at retaining the loyalty of their base while promoting economic policies that only the 1 percent could love.
Economically oriented groups like the Koch family network, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the US Chamber of Commerce control the Republicans’ policy agenda and its money supply, and culturally oriented organizations like Fox News, the National Rifle Association, and a wide range of fundamentalist Christian groups generate voter support by whipping up cultural and racial resentments. Because the Republicans’ policies on issues like taxes, Social Security, and health care are ever more oriented toward the preferences of the very rich and because the GOP’s voting base is aging and concentrated in declining rural areas, the party increasingly has to resort to antidemocratic measures like gerrymandering and voter suppression to retain its hold on power. In its techniques and the nature of its appeal to voters, the Republicans have come to resemble a European-style authoritarian party.
The last Republican leader to precede this plutocratic populist turn, in Hacker and Pierson’s telling, was George H.W. Bush. His acceding to a minor and eminently reasonable tax increase sealed his fate, they argue, and seems also to have sealed the fate of his form of conservative politics in the GOP. His successor as the party’s most powerful figure, then–House Speaker Newt Gingrich, moved it substantially to the right and helped invent plutocratic populism as a political stance that combined relentless rhetorical assaults on elites with aggressive tax- and program-cutting economic policies. When George W. Bush was elected, he began his presidency with a large tax cut and at the outset of his second term attempted to begin the privatization of Social Security.
For his part, Trump has not departed from the GOP’s economic direction since 1990. Once in office, he pushed through another set of tax cuts and tried to undo Obama’s signature domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act. At the same time, Trump ramped up the party’s nativist, fundamentalist, and antidemocratic inclinations. His incessant culture warring, Hacker and Pierson write, is necessary because the party’s fundamental program has become ever less appealing to anyone who isn’t rich.
Hacker and Pierson’s ideal policy menu would be a lot like Reich’s: for starters, an enlarged welfare state and a more equitable tax system. Like Reich, they are primarily interested in creating a politics that would support such a program; also like Reich, they believe that the different elements in a political system affect one another’s behavior. In Reich’s view, the Democrats’ move to the right on economic issues allowed the Republicans to move even further right. For Hacker and Pierson, it was the Republicans who moved, pulling the rest of the system with them. So one might expect them to call for the Democratic Party—reenergized in response to the economic and racial injustice of the Trump years—to restore balance to the political system. But they don’t, remaining focused instead on changing the GOP. “The only lasting way out of our challenge is to make the Republican Party once again a contributor to a healthy polity, capable of helping the nation address pressing public problems,” they write. The first step would be to deliver a stinging defeat to Trump in November in order to reactivate the saner elements in the GOP, but given the last several decades of Republican history that they discuss, it still sounds like quite a difficult project.
Saldin and Teles’s book is a more modest, monographic effort: an account of the internal Republican Party politics of 2016, not a major analytical prescription for changing the political system. But it contains more original research than the others, including dozens of in-depth interviews with never-Trumpers, who are often amazingly candid in their answers. Hearing Republican voices at length provides a rare picture of life inside the GOP that has a feeling of anthropological verisimilitude. Although Never Trump steers clear of directly proposing a big theory, what emerges inter alia is an explanation of American politics today that is actually more disturbing than the other books’, in which Trump’s rise is properly understood as an expression of the authentic preferences of his supporters and as a repudiation of the Republican establishment.
Trump was not a typical Republican presidential nominee, Saldin and Teles observe. Indeed, he was not really a Republican at all; during the first GOP debate, he was the only candidate who would not promise to support the party’s eventual nominee, and he mowed down what looked like a strong field of opponents—Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker—who had much more experience, more substantial organizations, and more funding, precisely because he came from outside the party establishment. (Saldin and Teles note that Trump didn’t even enter the “Koch primary,” in which aspiring presidential candidates pay obeisance to the party’s most important donors.) When campaigning, he departed from the GOP’s customary economic conservatism and its aggressive foreign policy. He opposed free trade, criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and praised Social Security and Medicare. These positions, along with his background and his generally unpresidential demeanor, horrified most of the party’s elites. Saldin and Teles assert that there has never been a recent presidential nominee who was as actively, publicly, and vociferously opposed by so many prominent members of his own party.
The sociologist Mario Luis Small has adapted to political use the phrase “outgroup homogeneity bias,” a psychological term for the ways the group you’re not a part of appears to be more uniform than it actually is. In Reich’s book, which focuses on the Democrats, the Republicans—to the extent he mentions them at all—appear as a monolithic, naturally pro-oligarchy party. In Hacker and Pierson’s book, GOP voters tend to fall into two neat categories: plutocrats and working-class whites who have been manipulated into voting against their interests. In Never Trump, Saldin and Teles give us a more subtle and empathetic picture of elite Republicans (at least those who opposed Trump), dividing them into several subcategories and carefully describing each one’s distinctive mentality and economic support system.
The major groups of never-Trumpers in this taxonomy are national security professionals, political operatives, public intellectuals, lawyers, and economists. The many long quotations from them are illuminating but not necessarily exculpatory. Sometimes, as in the case of the never-Trumpers who decided to keep their mouths shut after his nomination, they sound bluntly cynical. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the chief economic adviser for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, was quietly but not actively anti-Trump during the fall campaign. He tells Saldin and Teles that the president “lacks honor. He has no character. He’s a horrible human being.” Nevertheless, “I wanted to get tax reform done, and I wanted to get healthcare reform done, and I want to get entitlement reform done. I’ve been working on regulatory and education reform. I have my bucket list, and I’m not going to give a rat’s ass who’s there.” It’s astonishing to hear how little the never-Trumpers and Trump voters have in common.
Throughout the early primary season, the never-Trumpers, cohort by cohort, waged a series of direct and covert assaults on Trump. There were public letters with numerous signatories, new organizations, and impassioned appeals to prominent Trump-hating Republicans (like the anti-Trump, then pro-Trump, and again anti-Trump retired Marine general James Mattis) to jump into the race at the last minute. None of it worked, and quite a few never-Trumpers went on to serve in the Trump administration. Now they have three options: active rebellion (as with the Lincoln Project), grudging assent, and waiting for the Republican Party they thought they knew to reemerge in 2024.
In Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, the title character’s neighbor is Howard Littlefield, PhD, the house intellectual at the Zenith Street Traction Company, who uses his Yale degree in economics to produce learned justifications for whatever the company wants to do. Hacker and Pierson, by treating Republican conservatism as being based not on ideas but on the self-interest of the very rich, implicitly regard conservative intellectuals the same way. Saldin and Teles grant them their authentic enthusiasms for Hayek and Churchill but present that as immaterial to Republican voters, whose core conviction—as Trump but none of his rivals perceived—is a deeply tribal, all-encompassing, information-resistant ethnonationalism.
Saldin and Teles cite one e-mail from an anonymous never-Trumper, written during the assembling of one of the public letters, saying, “I think we have basically no chance of influencing any voters. Any. The things that drive Trump are not susceptible [to] rational discussion, and his potential supporters are not interested in having one.” Another never-Trumper, Eric Edelman, a veteran Republican diplomat, quotes George W. Bush as telling him, “You don’t have to scratch very deep in the Republican Party to hit a pretty deep vein of xenophobia and protectionism and isolationism. My job as party leader is to push back against that.” Trump defeated his Republican opponents because he went straight for that vein and they didn’t.
The picture of Republican voters that emerges from Never Trump is almost precisely the opposite of the one in Let Them Eat Tweets. Rather than being expertly manipulated by plutocrats and interest groups, Republican voters are effectively in control of the party. Trump’s campaign agenda represented their authentic preferences—and he won. It’s the party establishment, not the voting base, that is disempowered and obedient.
Early in his second term, Bush made two big domestic policy bets that backfired with this Republican base: He tried to liberalize immigration policy and to marketize Social Security. Those failures, in retrospect, were a sign of things to come. Another spectacular failure, the Iraq War, reawakened the isolationist strain in right-wing populism. The 2008 financial crisis and the long-running effects of inequality, especially on rural white men with no higher education, further fertilized the soil in which this economic and ethnonationalist populism thrives. The Republican leaders from an earlier era, economically conservative but socially liberal, have come to realize that they had no followers.
After the 2012 election, when Mitt Romney drew just 27 percent of the Latino vote (compared with Bush’s 40 percent in 2004), the Republican National Committee produced a study, called “The Autopsy,” warning that the party had to broaden its appeal beyond white voters. This was Republican conventional wisdom when the 2016 election cycle began. So, too, was the conviction that Republican voters were generally libertarian on economic issues, especially trade. The big money in the party placed its primary season bets on candidates who preached variations on the theme of open borders, lower taxes, and cultural tolerance. It was an expression not only of what the Republican donor class wanted but also of the party’s tactical conviction that 40 years of being able to win by appealing to disaffected white voters had come to an end. Instead, as one of the never-Trumpers admits to Saldin and Teles, Trump’s victory demonstrated that “we did have one more election left” in which the old appeals could produce a very narrow technical victory.
The authors of these three books disagree on a fundamental question: Are we living (unhappily) under the rule of a bipartisan oligarchy, a Republican plutocracy, or the GOP’s ethnonationalist base? But their books have some things in common, too. All of them choose not to understand this political moment as being about Trump personally; instead, they see him as a phenomenon brought to us in part by large structural changes in the economy and in politics, resulting in the superempowerment of a small minority and the justified embitterment of many Americans who can be found voting for either party. Political reform would entail some kind of major readjustment of the US political system so that one or both of the major parties would become more attentive to the needs of the majority of voters—or, as Reich suggests, until someone starts a party that does what the Democrats and Republicans have not. In any event, a system this troubled isn’t going to be fixed in one election cycle.
It’s undeniable that inequality and the sense of deep frustration it brings are driving a great deal of the politics of the world. But connecting inequality to the most obvious policy remedies and then to winning elections is far more complicated than it looks—and the left wing of the Democratic Party is only beginning to sort out how to do so on a national scale. You’d expect the Democrats to be the party that leads the way in creating a better, more just political economy, but given the party’s last quarter-century, one should be wary of making that assumption.
Reich is persuasive when he argues that the Democratic elite’s full embrace of markets has seriously subverted what ought to be the party’s mission. Since about 1980, when rising inequality began to take off, both the Democrats and the Republicans have moved to the right on economic issues, to some extent in tandem. He is also correct to note that the Democratic base, mobilized mainly by Sanders, has pushed the party back in the direction of its historic concern with the economic lives of ordinary people. Hacker and Pierson are persuasive in contending that the Republican Party can on its own imperil the whole system by pulling everything to the right, especially if it continues to restrict voting. American mainstream politics has become profoundly out of sync with the economic realities that motivate most voters, and neither party can automatically claim the loyalty of those whom they have ignored.
If it is possible to have a politics that successfully addresses economic injustice, it isn’t going to happen quickly or neatly. If Republicans who can’t stand Trump defect and attain some influence in the Democratic Party, most of them will not push for a focus on inequality. Few of the organized, established elements in the GOP will push in that direction, either; as Hacker and Pierson point out, Trump as president has been far more traditionally libertarian and far less of an economic populist than he was as a candidate.
People identify themselves and make their political choices in nonstraightforward ways. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t concerned with economic issues. Most voters focus mainly on what’s right in front of them: Did the local factory move abroad? What’s the minimum wage? Has my employer laid people off? Having once been the party of working people in the United States, Democrats are just beginning to relearn a language that addresses those immediate economic concerns and to be critical of deregulation, anti-unionism, and the concentration of economic power. Joe Biden, unexpectedly, is running for president on a less market-oriented economic platform than any Democratic nominee has done in decades, and the party is moving in the right direction. But it is not clear whether, even if Biden wins, that will be enough to power the passage of a New Deal–like economic program.
Inequality has been rising for half a lifetime, and it will take more than just defeating Trump to turn the tide against it. But a happy result in November would make for a promising start, especially if it entails successfully presenting the Democrats as the party that is more authentically concerned with the lives of working people.