Yves here. This post is one of the few comparatively sane ones about what the left should do in light of Donald Trump’s fast and aggressive moves to implement plutocrat-friendly policies and roll back social programs and policies that aid minority and lower-income groups.
Perhaps the reason this piece is a departure from widespread histrionics is that its authors Liz Theoharis and William D. Hartung are hardened veterans of the old left, as in the Democratic-party diminished cohort that focused on delivering concrete material benefits to broad swathes of American, as opposed to liberals, who are fixated on moral posturing and have succeeded in pitting identity factions against each other to preserve their advantaged position against each other. These liberals, particularly members of the PMC, are simply aghast that a large portion of America rejects or is indifferent to their finger-wagging and are at a loss as to what to do next (save go to court when Trump’s actions do trample statues and precedents, which is a valid strategy but not sufficient to arrest this campaign to change America’s trajectory).
By Liz Theoharis and William D. Hartung. Originally published at TomDispatch
With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, advocates for peace, social justice, racial and economic equality, fair immigration policies, climate renewal, trans rights, and other movements for change are bracing for hard times. The new administration will be doggedly opposed to so many of the values we hold dear, as well as programs that have helped keep millions of Americans above the poverty line.
Only recently, newly reelected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson reaffirmed his commitment to an “America First” agenda, which distills the most harmful aspirations of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 into 10 priority areas, including slashing social welfare, healthcare programs, and public education; supporting increased military spending to promote “peace through strength”; unleashing a nightmarish version of immigration enforcement; and restricting voting rights.
Many of us are now asking ourselves, how did we end up here? Part of the answer is simple enough: the status quo, regardless of which party has been in power, simply hasn’t been working for all too many Americans. Research compiled by our colleague Shailly Gupta Barnes of the Kairos Center indicates that some 140 million of us live either in poverty or one financial emergency away from joining the ranks of the poor. One out of six children in this country now lives below the official poverty line and the families of nearly half of all kids are in a state of economic precarity or food insecurity. Meanwhile, the average life span of white American males is actually declining, while more than 20 million people lost their access to health care in 2024 alone.
All of this is, of course, a far cry from the conventional wisdom that America’s economy is doing well, based on statistics like the unemployment rate or the rate of economic growth as a whole, none of which capture the lived experience of so many of us. Indeed, the head of Moody’s Analytics recently told the Financial Times that, while “high-income households are doing fine, the bottom third of U.S. consumers are tapped out.”
Although the system isn’t working for millions of Americans, a business-as-usual, market-based approach remains what’s on offer in official Washington. This has been the governing modus operandi across party lines for the past 30 years and continues to enjoy bipartisan support, even as faith in government declines in the country as a whole. Without a viable plan that could change the basic living conditions of people in need, it’s easier for right-wing populists to offer false promises of change or, even worse, provide scapegoats like undocumented immigrants to “explain” declining living standards and the outright desperation so many people now feel.
Of course, this propaganda is fueled by countless millions of dollars contributed by rich donors, often enough billionaires, who, for starters, want more tax cuts, more deregulation of business, unfettered access to government contracts, and free rein for cryptocurrency. It’s reinforced by proponents of religious nationalism who organize around single issues like opposition to abortion, while falsely portraying moves towards racial and gender equality as “threats” to Christian values. Over the past several years, such interests have combined forces to usher Donald Trump back into the White House and dozens of “Christian nationalists” into the judicial and legislative branches of government, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
Contrary to mainstream accounts that put the responsibility for Trump’s rise and then return to power on working-class voters (some of whom did indeed press the lever for him), the real victors in the November elections were the wealthy and powerful, many of whom used their public profiles and deep pockets to help propel the Trump-Vance ticket to victory. They and their corporations are now ready to receive ample government contracts and benefit from the erasure of corporate regulations. Meanwhile, religious extremists will welcome further encroachment on reproductive and LGBTQ rights.
Case in point: on the day that Donald Trump was pronounced victorious in the 2024 election, the eight richest men in the world were instantly worth another $64 billion. Nevertheless, much of the analysis surrounding the 2024 elections continues to emphasize the notion that Trump’s victory was primarily due to decisions made by the working class and the poorest Americans.
So, what is to be done? This is no time to blame those who are going to be hurt by Trump’s draconian policies, nor is it a moment to get in a defensive crouch to fight off only the worst policies in the making without also putting forth a vision of the world we’d actually like to see, a world where people’s needs are met with real programs, not diversionary rhetoric and false promises.
Promoting a Government That Works for All
While people like billionaire Elon Musk are busy hatching schemes to dismantle large parts of the federal government, we need to push for an agenda in which the government actually works for everyone. Shifting federal budget priorities toward improving lives and away from war spending and tax breaks for the rich would be a central element of such a program. Pouring resources — more than a trillion dollars a year — into the war machine and the national security state starves other priorities, ranging from public health to environmental protection. In fact, defunding such programs, an essential part of Trump’s second-term plans, risks another pandemic or the “quad-demic” that health officials have been warning about, as well as increased hunger, untreated medical conditions, and dirtier air and water. The problems to come won’t just involve an imbalance on a spreadsheet. There are all too many lives at stake, as surely as lives are at stake in a shooting war.
Imagine how starkly different this country would be if we were to invest in the lives of people rather than filling the coffers of the military-industrial complex. Take the expanded (and fully refundable) child tax credit, or CTC. Created in March 2021 through the American Rescue Plan, this federal policy granted modest monthly cash payments to families with children, including poor families, independent of their work or tax status. Families making less than $150,000 received regular cash infusions they could use to pay daily expenses or shore up slim to nonexistent savings.
The results were staggering. By December 2021, that program had reached more than 61 million children, nearly four million of whom had been lifted above the official poverty line. In its first and only year, official child poverty witnessed a dramatic decline, the single largest drop in American history, including a 25% decrease in poverty among Black children, narrowing the overall racial gap among poor kids. At the time, Moody’s estimated that the impact of the CTC on the economy was comparable to, if not greater than, the jobs created through military spending.
Despite its success, the expanded CTC was abandoned as 2021 ended. Two Democrats and 49 Republicans voted to end it, with West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin claiming that poor families might be using the money to buy drugs. The CTC, of course, hadn’t failed. The failure was that of an impoverished democracy, increasingly captive to the interests of the rich and powerful and willing to leave nearly half the population living hand to mouth, despite proven policies that could help lift the load of poverty.
And consider that the real danger of the second Trump administration, which has already appointed a record 13 billionaires to government posts, is its debt to the enormously wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. You need look no further than Trump’s cozy relationship with future trillionaire Elon Musk. As co-head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, with business interests in the very institutions he’ll have some authority over, Musk will also, it seems, have an undue influence on future federal budgets, priorities, and programs. Indeed, DOGE co-chairs Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have already set their sights on shutting down the Department of Education and cutting about one-third of the federal government’s annual budget, or $2 trillion.
We’re preparing for this and more in the coming weeks and months, but it doesn’t need to be this way.
What Is to Be Done?
In 1968, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was organizing against the triple evils of racism, militarism, and poverty in what would be the last crusade of his life, he said, “Power for poor people will really mean having the ability, the togetherness, the assertiveness, and the aggressiveness to make the power structure of this nation say yes when they may be desirous to say no.” His theory of change was to turn those most adversely impacted by poverty into a political force powerful enough not to be denied, even by the greatest economic and military power in the world.
Under the second Trump administration, there will be a torrent of emergencies to deal with, including threats of mass deportation, the shredding of the social safety net, and attacks on efforts to promote racial and economic justice and gender equality. Some of this will be new to us, including potentially massive immigration raids on schools and churches, while much of it has already been unfolding at a state level. For example, in 2024 alone, more than 650 bills were introduced nationwide to restrict the rights of trans people. Because such bills were massively unpopular, well over 600 of them failed. This may change, however, if they’re taken up at the federal level in 2025.
As people of conscience fight back against such assaults, we should connect that resistance to calls for a government that reflects our deepest values and commitments to justice. To fight for such a future means making demands that are far beyond what’s politically possible now. Simply resisting what Donald Trump’s government tries to do won’t be enough. We need to build public support for a robust, carefully crafted plan for public investment that will be a viable stepping-stone toward a more equitable, peaceful, and just world.
During the first Trump administration, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival produced an ambitious social and economic agenda, “The Poor People’s Moral Budget: Everybody’s Got a Right to Live.” It called for the right to living-wage jobs, affordable housing, debt cancellation, strong anti-poverty programs, guaranteed adequate income, and much more. It made clear that, through far fairer taxation and the shifting of funds from bloated military budgets to programs of social uplift, it would be possible to “lift from the bottom” in America.
Imagine a country where everyone could exist free of the fear of poverty, hunger, homelessness, or lack of access to quality health care. Of course, trying to shift this country’s priorities in such a way would pose a major political challenge, but social and political organizations and movements have succeeded in the past, even in the darkest of times. The organizing of the Citizen’s Army during the Mine Wars in West Virginia early in the last century and the birth of the labor union movement successfully pressured both corporations and the government for better wages and working conditions that workers still benefit from today. In the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, military veterans in the Bonus Army Encampment in Washington, D.C., demanded that the government pay those promised “bonuses” and won. The Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Programs fed more children in the late 1960s than any other institutional entity. It paved the way for free breakfast and lunch programs in public schools across the country, while calling out the failures of the government to provide life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people. During those same years, welfare rights leaders formed the largest poor people’s organization of the time and secured essential benefits for tens of thousands of people, while more than doubling the amount of federal support flowing to the poorest Americans.
Because they did it then, we can do it now.
This is not to suggest that shifting funds from the Pentagon to domestic programs is a magic solution to America’s economic problems. Even cutting the Pentagon budget in half would not be enough to meet all this country’s unmet needs. That would require a comprehensive package, involving a major shift in budget priorities, an increase in federal revenues, and a crackdown on waste, fraud, and abuse in the expenditure of government loans and grants. It would, in fact, require the kind of attention and focus now reserved for war planning.
Imagine a real war on poverty, not the “skirmish” (as Dr. King called it) of the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson’s effort that would be cut short by the war in Vietnam. What’s needed is a coordinated series of campaigns that could change the conditions that produce poverty for good.
Now, let’s be real: 2025 is going to be a truly hard year for the poor and vulnerable in our society. But the promise and possibility of ending poverty, reclaiming democracy, and advancing peace and justice remain closer than any of us may think. What’s needed is to begin to build something better, with, as Dr. King suggested, “the ability, the togetherness, the assertiveness, and the aggressiveness” to make it so.
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When it costs billion dollars to finance a campaign, the billionaires are in charge regardless of who wins an election. If the authors truly believe the BS messaging in their article, then the answer would be for the Left to disassociate from the DNC and Democratic Party and run as a populist third party. Then they will have to figure out how to finance themselves when their messaging isn’t consistent with billionaire values. Any talk of changing the system has to start with campaign finance reform and bringing down the barriers that prevent third parties from appearing on ballots.
You don’t need financing to spread good ideas, I would think you need other things instead, the soundness of the ideas spreads itself. And even if you did, look at how Bernie Sanders raised funds without the billionaires, proving its possible to do with grassroots campaign and an online fundraiser with a “Contribute” button. His average donation being about $30, he raised $75 million.
And look how Sanders turned around and supported Biden, friend to plutocrats. That doesn’t mean he was a “sheepdog” but it does mean he was a dubious revolutionary. Some of us would contend that Trump is once again Sideshow Bob in all this and that the country is really ruled from Wall Street–at least when it comes to the issues mentioned above. That Black Lives Matter street painting should have been in front of the NY stock exchange instead of Trump Tower.
So if the “left” is going to truly pursue social justice they will have to take on the true rulers as was done with Occupy Wall Street and so easily given up after a few billy clubs. The play acting Antifa revolutionaries are not the way forward, and while the socialist era was somewhat doctrinaire at least it was based on real ideas rather than mere acting out.
“And so easily given up after a few billy clubs” it was a bit more than that. people had their fingers deliberately broken, were savagely beaten by police, whilst popular support was ground down by a relentless media campaign and a regime determined to save the banking and financial establishment which completely reneged on their ‘change’ mandate (which in turn brought us Trump) what’s this nonsense? How many fingers would be content to have broken before it broke you?
“Everyone’s a tough guy before they get punched in the face”.
The left is a tendency, it is not a coherent whole until it becomes one and you can’t blame a tendency for being continually suppressed before it can even form a coherent whole, anymore than you can blame a flower that is continually being trampled on for not growing or people for being led by the nose by an incredibly devious and unprecedented system of control and coercion in the from of social media designed to literally milk our brains for dopamine responses and encourages our worst most anti social and antagonistic impulses that no previous generation anywhere has ever had to contend with.
The first step starts not with not presuming to judge something that hasn’t even being given the chance to be born and slandering people for being ‘weak’ for going through physical torture at the hands of people supposedly paid to protect them, something that I sincerely hope you never have to endure.
Hadn’t heard about the fingers and I’m certainly not tut tutting police brutality. But as for
“hasn’t even being given the chance to be born”
the class struggle was born long before the Occupiers were born and faced much worse things than broken fingers. If you are going to confront power then violence is the norm, not an excuse for withdrawal. I’ll stick to my point that middle class kids in an encampment is not remotely the same thing as workers struggling for an 8 hr day and better than starvation wages. These same issues were discussed back in the day including the question of whether a middle class revolution can have staying power. For the 60s Boomers it really didn’t.
So no I don’t have any better suggestions for the situation we are in but do believe that making it about Trump is a distraction and on the part of the Dems a deliberate distraction.
True, but not enough to overcome structural issues in US Politics to get a chance to ask The People to voice their opinion about his positions. He found money but not power.
The federal electoral system in inherently corrupt and that is irredeemable – by design. Political power achieved through federal elections is a very expensive commodity only the billionaire class can afford.
Participation in such elections lends credence to fraud and leads our followers up a blind alley.
A better strategy would focus on direct action – civil disobedience.
Wealth is power. No matter how much progressives try to reform the system, as long as billionaires are billionaires, they can intervene in politics in any way they want. It is too late, but the billionaire is a self-perpetuating cancer cell that will kill the nation and should never have been born.
Imagine a country where everyone could exist free of the fear of poverty, hunger, homelessness, or lack of access to quality health care…Imagine a real war on poverty…Now, let’s be real: 2025 is going to be a truly hard year for the poor and vulnerable in our society.
Considering myself a “hardened veterans of the old left,” I am fully behind authors’ aspirations, but being “real in 2025” means taking into account the techno-structure that’s being deployed to make sure that the ruling elites are able to control these aspirations with the new tools at their disposal, new tools like CBDC, convergence of biology and technology, nanotech, etc…
What is to be done?
As people of conscience fight back against such assaults, we should connect that resistance to calls for a government that reflects our deepest values and commitments to justice. To fight for such a future means making demands that are far beyond what’s politically possible now. Simply resisting what Donald Trump’s government tries to do won’t be enough. We need to build public support for a robust, carefully crafted plan for public investment that will be a viable stepping-stone toward a more equitable, peaceful, and just world.
When I read statements like this I’m reminded of early tenure of the “Squad,” remember them, they made demands via “strongly worded, letters. Bernie (who just voted to confirm Rubio), AOC (create a “ruckus”), held such hope for some like myself initually only to be disappointed. ” Build Public support?” There is so much pent-up public support that it’s ready to explode…a “more equitable, peaceful and just world,” of course by all means. But there is something that is called “radical evil,” it something I remember Karl Jasper writing about.
I don’t know, am so “black pilled” that when I ready article like this I’m more disheartened then encouraged?
I agree with/feel your sentiments. Change will come, but it will be -to use a currently in vogue word- chaotic change that imposes physical and biological constraints/realities, not new narratives, on humanity. Also, any society that allows its “leaders” to aid and abet genocide is light years from the ability to create a just society.
Change has not come in nine thousand years. Why should we expect it…ever?
This is a good post, but it tends to ramble. It is a diagnosis and not a discussion of tactics. I will also criticize use of terms.
First, this diagnosis of what ails the U S of A is correct: “Many of us are now asking ourselves, how did we end up here? Part of the answer is simple enough: the status quo, regardless of which party has been in power, simply hasn’t been working for all too many Americans. Research compiled by our colleague Shailly Gupta Barnes of the Kairos Center indicates that some 140 million of us live either in poverty or one financial emergency away from joining the ranks of the poor.”
Authors Theoharis and Hurting then give plenty of backing to prove their point.
What they aren’t giving is a way forward. Now, I’m not going to be too tart here, but Theoharis is a minister, and U.S. Protestantism has run away from the Social Gospel ever since the late 1800s when the Social Gospel was first discussed. There was Jane Addams and the women at Hull House. Then there was, errrr, not much. So Theoharis is coming from the failure of her own ethic. If you haven’t delivered, you haven’t delivered. Quoting Martin Luther King doesn’t get the U.S. church off the hook.
That written, as I’ve been harping, the movement for justice, peace, and equality (and note that I’m not using convenient qualifiers like “social”) means redistribution of wealth:
–repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act and of so-called right-to-work laws.
–single-payer health insurance for all with Mental/Dental, to free people from being trapped in their jobs.
–a jobs policy and a higher minimum wage, enforced. And we’re talking a minimum wage in the U.S. of A. of what? It will have to start at 17 USD / hour.
–a clear path to becoming a landed alien and a clear path to citizenship, without the excessive fees.
–end of corporations being treated legally as persons.
–serious fines for employers who hire workers with dodgy papers and unclear status (cut off the demand for cheap labor).
–overturn of the Citizens United decision.
–peace. The end of an interventionist foreign policy and the reduction of the military and intelligence agencies to proportions that can be managed by the Congress, which is its duty.
These efforts will appeal to a broad base of U.S. citizens. Equality (before the law) is what U.S. citizens want, and the current maldistribution of wealth doesn’t allow it.
The questions for U.S. citizens: Can you destroy the two-party system? Do you have the time to participate in the work of broad social movements? Are you willing to show up?
Hear, hear, DJG for President! Seriously though a prerequisite to getting your platform before the voters would be a constitutional amendment reforming state ballot access rules to break the current two party stranglehold.
Well, they started talking about Trump, that is, the Boogie-Man. The only thing that can actually change the conditions of the United States (or any other country) is not a change of boogie-men but a change in the power structure, which includes the ownership and operation of the wealth. That’s it. That seems obvious, yet millions of people went to the polls not long ago and mailed in their contributions and ranted on social media for this boogie-man or that one, and so here we are.
Are you really asking?
>end of corporations being treated legally as persons.
I’ve often wished: Jeez, if Corporations are treated like people, than why can’t we give them the death penalty when they kill somebody. Or at least convicted of negligent homicide. Can’t “kill” the Corporation? Then how about the CEO?
Yes, I am hopelessly naive.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-joint-resolution/54/text
HJR-54 “Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States providing that the rights protected and extended by the Constitution are the rights of natural persons only.”
… Was sponsored by Pramila Jayapal and has 89 co-sponsors in the U.S. House. It will be re-introduced in the 119th Congress.
For more information, http://www.movetoamend.org
Carla, Your comment is a perfect example of magical thinking. To overturn Citizens United by a constitutional amendment would require that super-majorities of already corrupt politicians in the US Congress and 38 legislatures nationwide to reject their billionaire patrons. The federal electoral system is controlled by the “donor class” by design and that arrangement is irredeemable. There is no solution that will change the basic power relationships within the existing political system.
I dropped out of the “Social Justice” movement during the Obama years. Not because of national party issues but because it was in the process of being co-opted by the “Critical Theory” crowd and focus was being dragged from The Issue I felt strongly about (and the group had been pursuing for decades) to the broader Social Justice battle.
This article is more of why I walked. Attack everything and give up power on anything except a general embarrassing sense of ambiguous outrage.
MartyH, could you please explain more about why you dropped out of the “social justice” movement? I see in your comments, and others, the outlines of the frustration and disenchantment I’m feeling but can’t fully articulate.
You walked away; what (if anything) did you then walk toward? Thanks.
The “right” of men to invade women’s spaces and sports is something to “hold dear”? Really? Qui bono? Not me, as a woman.
Any movement that drinks the “trans” Kool-Aid isn’t excising critical thought or kindness toward girls and women (or boys and men, either). Men need to stay the hell out of women’s spaces and sports, even if it hurts their feelings. This is one of the few things I agree with Trump on, though of course for different reasons.
To paraphrase JK Rowling: dress as you please and love whom you please. It won’t change your sex. A man who performs sexist stereotypes associated with the opposite sex (gender) is free to do it; he’s still a man who performs stereotypes associated with the opposite sex. And the “TQ” in “LGBTQ” is antithetical to the “LGB”: one says gender trumps sex, and the other’s based on sex. Straight men who claim to be women are not lesbians. Why does this even need to be said?
Just one example of where this leads: men housed in women’s prisons. Imagine being an incarcerated woman forced to share a cell with a man. Actually, no need to imagine: look up Mozzy Clark, who is suing the Washington State Department of Corrections for having to endure this.
A few men incarcerated with women in the state of Washington:
Bradley “Aurora” Richard Sirvio, convicted murderer
Brett David Sonia, aka “Brooke Lyn Sonia,” convicted child rapist
Nathan Goninan, aka “Nonnie Lotusflower,” convicted of murdering a teenaged girl
I have little hope for the future, with the climate crisis, ever-increasing inequality, a largely numbed populace, and incompetent, greedy “leaders.” Even so, should we “hold dear” the “right” of men to invade women’s spaces and sports? No. Men’s feelings are not more important than women’s privacy, safety, and ability to set and hold boundaries. Conservatives are open about it; so-called progressives dress it up in glitter and rainbows. Still no.
Thank you for this excellent comment. It’s hard to understand how leftists dedicated to material benefits for the masses can fall for the reality challenged notion that people can change their sex simply by declaring it to be so. It’s sad that this has leached from the faux IDpol left to the hard left. What would Marx have said about these idiocies?
It’s time to see the trans movement for what it is: a clandestine and profoundly misogynistic men’s movement intent on colonizing women’s spaces, culture, and basic existence. Not to mention a spearhead for the anti-human, and billionaire backed, transhumanism ideology which seeks to commodify the most fundamental aspects of our humanity. Then there is the grooming of the young, led by wealthy foundations, medical associations, and activists in education, academia, and the media is a marketing campaign seeking to create lifelong patients-for-profit.
> What would Marx have said about these idiocies?
Homeric laughter.
Homeric Simpson laughter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkXc3OkHc9M
Love this non sequitur presented as a logical conclusion, when will AI’s get this slimy?
Paging Thomas Frank
“As people of conscience fight back…”
There are also 10s of millions of people on the populist right who are also people of conscience. They hate the deep-state, surveillance, and increasingly distrust elites of any sort. Why not try to connect with such people rather than assuming that you are morally superior
Why not? Because the Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, is devoted to capitalism.