Conor here: Appreciate that Solomon reserves much of his criticism for most Democrats who aren’t all that opposed to much of what Trump is doing, but I fail to understand the faith in Bernie and AOC:
Well well well. Would you look at that. https://t.co/euAIfrcHv0 pic.twitter.com/teCxXHeaMR
— Toomin 🇵🇸 (@ramthebladeship) April 28, 2025
By Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and most recently War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press). Originally published at TomDispatch.
America desperately needs a united front to restrain the wrecking ball of the Trump regime. While outraged opposition has been visible and vocal, it remains a far cry from developing a capacity to protect what’s left of democracy in the United States.
With the administration in its fourth month, the magnitude of the damage underway is virtually impossible for any individual to fully grasp. But none of us need a complete picture to understand that the federal government is now in the clutches of massively cruel and antidemocratic forces that have no intention of letting go.
Donald Trump’s second presidential term has already given vast power to the most virulent aspects of the nation’s far-right political culture. Its flagrant goals include serving oligarchy, dismantling civil liberties, and wielding government as a weapon against academic freedom, civil rights, economic security, environmental protection, public health, workers’ rights, and so much more.
The nonstop Trumpist assaults mean that ongoing noncooperation and active resistance will be essential. This is no time for what Martin Luther King, Jr., called “the paralysis of analysis.” Yet the past hugely matters. Repetition compulsions within the Democratic Party, including among self-described liberals and progressives, unwittingly smoothed the path for Trump’s return to power. Many of the same patterns, with undue deference to party leaders and their narrow perspectives, are now hampering the potential to create real leverage against MAGA madness.
“Fiscal Conservatism and Social Liberalism”
Today, more than three decades after the “New Democrats” triumphed when Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, an observation by Washington Post economics reporter Hobart Rowen days after that victory is still worth pondering: “Fiscal conservatism and social liberalism proved to be an effective campaign formula.” While campaigning with a call for moderate public investment, Clinton offered enough assurances to business elites to gain much of their support. Once elected, he quickly filled his economic team with corporate lawyers, business-friendly politicians, lobbyists, and fixers on loan from Wall Street boardrooms.
That Democratic formula proved to be a winning one — for Republicans. Two years after Clinton became president, the GOP gained control of both the House and Senate. Republicans maintained a House majority for the next 12 years and a Senate majority for 10 of them.
A similar pattern set in after the next Democrat moved into the White House. Taking office in January 2009 amid the Great Recession, Barack Obama continued with predecessor George W. Bush’s “practice of bailing out the bankers while ignoring the anguish their toxic mortgage packages caused the rest of us,” as journalist Robert Scheer pointed out. By the time Obama was most of the way through his presidency, journalist David Dayen wrote, he had enabled “the dispossession of at least 5.2 million U.S. homeowner families, the explosion of inequality, and the largest ruination of middle-class wealth in nearly a century.”
Two years into Obama’s presidency, his party lost the House and didn’t regain it for eight years. When he won reelection in 2012, Republicans captured the Senate and kept control of it throughout his second term.
During Obama’s eight years as president, the Democrats also lost upward of 900 seats in state legislatures. Along the way, they lost control of 30 legislative chambers, while the Republican share of seats went from 44% to 56%. So GOP state legislators were well-positioned to gerrymander electoral districts to their liking after the 2020 census, making it possible for Republicans to just barely (but powerfully) gain and then retain their stranglehold on the House of Representatives after the 2022 and 2024 elections.
Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024 ran for president while sticking to updated versions of “fiscal conservatism, social liberalism,” festooning their campaigns with the usual trappings of ultra-mild populist rhetoric. Much of the media establishment approved, as they checked the standard Democratic boxes. But opting to avoid genuine progressive populism on the campaign trail meant enabling Trump to pose as a better choice for the economic interests of the working class.
Mutual Abandonment
The party’s orientation prevents its presidential nominees from making a credible pitch to be champions of working people. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted immediately after the 2024 election. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.”
But there’s little evidence that the party leadership wants significant change, beyond putting themselves back in power. Midway through April, the homepage of the Democratic Party seemed like a snapshot of an institution still disconnected from the angst and anger of the electorate. A pop-up that instantly obscured all else on the screen featured a drawing of a snarling Donald Trump next to the headline: “We’re SUING Trump over two illegal executive orders.” Underneath, the featured message proclaimed: “We’re rolling up our sleeves and organizing for a brighter, more equal future. Together, we will elect Democrats up and down the ballot.” A schedule of town halls in dozens of regions was nice enough, but a true sense of urgency, let alone emergency, was notably lacking.
Overall, the party seems stuck in the mud of the past, still largely mired in the Joe Biden era and wary of opening the door too wide for the more progressive grassroots base that provides millions of small donations and volunteers to get out the vote (as long as they’re genuinely inspired to do so). President Biden’s unspeakably tragic refusal to forego running for reelection until far too late was enabled by top-to-bottom party dynamics and a follow-the-leader conformity that are still all too real.
On no issue has the party leadership been more tone-deaf — with more disastrous electoral and policy results — than the war in Gaza. The refusal of all but a few members of Congress to push President Biden to stop massively arming the Israeli military for its slaughter there caused a steep erosion of support from the usual Democratic voters, as polling at the time and afterward indicated. The party’s moral collapse on Gaza helped to crater Kamala Harris’s vote totals among alienated voters reluctant to cast their ballots for what they saw as a war party, a perception especially acute among young people and notable among African Americans.
The Fact of Oligarchy
Pandering to potential big donors is apt to seem like just another day in elected office. A story about California Governor Gavin Newsom, often touted as a major Democratic contender for president in 2028, is in the category of “you can’t make this stuff up.” As reported by Politico this spring, he “is making sure California’s business elite can call him, maybe. Roughly 100 leaders of state-headquartered companies have received a curious package in recent months: a prepaid, inexpensive cell phone… programmed with Newsom’s digits and accompanied by notes from the governor himself. ‘If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away,’ read one note to a prominent tech firm CEO, printed on an official letterhead, along with a hand-scrawled addendum urging the executive to reach out… It was Newsom’s idea, a representative said, and has already yielded some ‘valuable interactions.’”
If, however, you’re waiting for Newsom to send prepaid cell phones to activists working for social justice, telling them, “If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away,” count on waiting forever.
The dominance of super-wealthy party patrons that Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been railing against at “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies has been coalescing for a long time. “In the American republic,” wrote Walter Karp for Harper’s magazine shortly before his death in 1989, “the fact of oligarchy is the most dreaded knowledge of all, and our news keeps that knowledge from us.” Now, in the age of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the iron heel of mega-capital is at work swiftly crushing democratic structures, while top Democrats race to stay within shouting distance of the oligarchs.
A paradoxical challenge for the left is that it must take part in building a united front that includes anti-Trump corporatists and militarists, even while fighting against corporatism and militarism. What’s needed is not capitulation or ultra-leftism, but instead a dialectical approach that recognizes the twin imperatives of defeating an increasingly fascistic Republican Party while working to gain enough power to implement truly progressive agendas.
For those agendas, electoral campaigns and their candidates should be subsets of social movements, not the other way around. Still, here’s one crystal-clear lesson of history: it’s crucial who sits in the Oval Office and controls Congress. Now more than ever.
Fascism Would Stop Us All
A horrible reality of this moment: a fascist takeover of the government is within reach — and, if completed, any possibility of fulfilling a progressive agenda would go out the Overton window. The words of the young Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, murdered in 1969 by the Chicago police (colluding with the FBI), ring profoundly true today: “Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all.”
But much of the 2025 Democratic Party leadership seems willing to once again pursue the tried-and-failed strategy of banking on Trump to undo himself. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the party leaders in the House and Senate, have distinctly tilted in that direction, as if heeding strategist James Carville’s declaration that Democrats should not try to impede Trump’s rampage against the structures of democracy.
“With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead,” Carville wrote in late February. “Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.” (Evidently impressed with his political acumen, the editors of the New York Times published the op-ed piece with that advice only four months after printing an op-ed he wrote in late October under this headline: “Three Reasons I’m Certain Kamala Harris Will Win.”)
As for the Democratic National Committee, it probably had nowhere to go but up in the wake of the chairmanship of Jaime Harrison, who for four years dutifully did President Biden’s bidding. Now, with no Democratic president, the new DNC chair, Ken Martin, has significant power to guide the direction of the party.
In early April, I informed Martin that my colleagues and I at RootsAction were planning a petition drive for the full DNC to hold an emergency meeting. “The value of such a meeting seems clear for many reasons,” I wrote, “including the polled low regard for the Democratic Party and the need to substantively dispel the wide perception that the party is failing to adequately respond to the current extraordinary perils.” Martin replied with a cordial text affirming that the schedule for the 448-member DNC to convene remains the same as usual — twice a year — with the next meeting set for August.
The petition, launched in mid-April (co-sponsored by RootsAction and Progressive Democrats of America), urged the DNC to “convene an emergency meeting of all its members — fully open to the public — as soon as possible… Business as usual must give way to truly bold action that mobilizes against the autocracy that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their cronies are further entrenching every day. The predatory, extreme, and dictatorial actions of the Trump administration call for an all-out commensurate response, which so far has been terribly lacking from the Democratic Party.”
No matter what, at this truly pivotal time, we must never give up.
As Stanley Kunitz wrote during the height of the Vietnam War:
In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.
While reasons for pessimism escalate, I often think of how on target my RootsAction colleague India Walton was in a meeting when she said, “The only hope is in the struggle.”
IMO, we’ve reached the point where only sustained violence will change government policy at the national level. Even number cruchers like Wolf Richter at Wolf Street are in hostile denial at even bringing up income distribution and break into glorious praise of wealth controllers in service to the ruling elites: when someone posting a comment that rising inequality posed a threat to the middle class and recent robust retail sales figures, he responded with a retort “no they spent too” because car sales. Sure, they spent too – by going further into debt unlike the wealthy. Ignoring the issue raised which was not total income and spending but it’s distribution. He was aided by libertarians openly hostile ANY questions on income distribution. And his comments that the spending decisions and FEELINGS of the rich are much more important than others.
Wolf is strictly a numbers guy, so he can make charts with squiggly lines.
It seems to work for his worldview-
Richter has provided good empirical data analysis through multiple upturns and downturns in the economy. I believe it is a good practice to separate data and analysis from political views, as I think many do who follow NC regularly.
Schumpeter …
IMO the mainstream opposition don’t even know the rules of the game being played.
Trump’s out here playing Calvinball while they are still working on their Bridge etiquette.
beating the dust that used to be the bones of the horse that got loose.
demparty is way, way past moribund.its a corpse.
ground up grassroots is the only way.
and i fear the engineered mindf&ck and division are too far along.
dragons are required, at this point….and thats gonna take a clarity that can only come through widespread hardship.
“Ground up grassroots…”
Excellent!
Best…H
Amen. Change isn’t going to come from the dems and looking for it there is a waste and part of the problem.
Don’t forget that the GOP, while nominally in a better position, is effectively a ruined party as well.
Like one of those eels that sinks its fangs into the host and sucks out the guts, Trump has done a take-down of the elephants, leaving only sniveling sycophants like the “swamp stooge” Mike Johnson in his wake.
We’re gonna need bigger, badder dragons. With lots of fire to destroy everything.
Trump wasn’t elected – he was “selected” – by Wall Street and the Central Bankers. This is a controlled demolition of the US middle class and the dollar. The “right” and the “left” are the same. Wake up ppl.
Was K. Harris “selected”?
I wish posts like this would address the actual practical problems of coordination and information in the current age. Specifically, 1) social media is a non-starter for organizing or coordinating any large scale movement opposed to the oligarchs. It is owned by oligarchs and infested with spooks and bad-actors. This has been obvious for at least a decade yet you virtually never see it mentioned in post like this. “Dialectics” aren’t going to help when there is no platform. You can’t print pamphlets and hand out fliers in 2025. The people are online and online is actively hostile to anti-establishmentariansm outside of the neutered
2) Bad actors – intentional and unintentional are everywhere and immediately infest and dominate the discourse in any real world institution or physical space where genuine strategic coordination might occur. Even when active sabotage isn’t occurring, the pushiest and most entitled people rarely fail to dominate discourse, seize procedural power and control of limited resources, demand performances of right-thinking, and discourage the majority.
3) Confusing sanctioned online conversations and media (social and otherwise) with the actual sentiments of regular people. The Luigi incident showed that huge numbers of people are furious and prepared to undertake radical solutions. They know perfectly well who the enemy is and that fear and power are the only languages they understand. I would argue that a significant plurality of USAians know that the Republicans are evil and that Democrats are evil tempered by carefully cultivated cowardice. A whole generation hoped with Obama, rallied for Bernie, and were kicked and mocked for it, resulting in widespread disengagement, depression, and simmering rage.
People of most political persuasions have come to realize that corporate lackeys, condescending academics, and the billionaire narcissists they serve are the problem, and I guarantee 10s of millions would jump at any realistic opportunity to do anything that didn’t feel like another Charlie Brown football kick, or even just hang out together in a place that’s “safe” from saboteurs, spooks, and the people who invented safe spaces.
Your (2) reminds me of a story I heard on NPR before I stopped listening. An activist with and anti-prison organization was lamenting that a young, white guys joined the group. Every time the group tried to discuss substantive business, the white kid turn language police and insist that the group use the proper woke terms. The activist telling the story eventually told the kid that their group was about helping imprisoned people not changing the language.
After the experience I have had with wokie language police professionally, I just assume at this point that they are all bad actors out to derail substantive work with their constant virtue signalling harangues.
The Democrats are the very thing preventing a united front.
Case in point, Chuck Schumer brags about writing a sternly worded letter with tough questions over the Trump administration going after Harvard. Harvard itself is complaining that it is standing up for pluralism and academic freedom, and yet FIRE shows it is the absolute worst for free speech. Funny how Harvard suppresses academic freedom and demands conformity (not pluralism) from its faculty and students, and then whines about Trump. Give me a break. To the contrary, to the extent that Trump is demanding that Harvard drop mandatory DEI based in Kendi/DiAngelo dogma I am in favor of his actions.
Why exactly should I “unite” with the resistance when they have nothing on offer except protecting their own rice bowls from being smashed? As for Bernie and AOC, how come they only come out to complain about the oligarchs when the Dems are out of power, but knuckle under when the Dems are in power? “Resistance” my backside.
Christopher, you nailed it! Bernie and AOC are not the answer and never were. They are part of the problem. Frankly, the attacks on Harvard are in no way meaningful to the average person. This is the place people like Obama care about, not me.
I refuse to give up hope, and the only hope that I see lies in the reformation of the Democratic Party. It’s not impossible that the MAGA element will wake up to the fact that populism is the chosen technique for their exploitation, but I think that unlikely. Someone pointed out that their identities have been fused with Trump’s.
I see hope in AOC and Bernie, and I also see reason to support early Biden policies. Maybe they should have spoken out earlier if they could see Biden’s descent imbecility, but that seems to been pretty well hidden, at least from the general public. In my opinion, AOC should not aim directly for the White House in 2028, but in to replace POS Schumer. She would be a stronger candidate in 2028 as an incumbent Sen., and it would demonstrate strength to her detractors.
I don’t know who could replace Jeffries, nor do I know that he is irredeemable like Schumer. I think he is an AIPAC puppet, and that does not bode well.
I agree. The Ds and Rs are there to misinform, distract and divide the public, while their bribe-masters asset-strip and pillage the place.
As Jimmy Carter said: “the US is an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery”. This was of course, hardly covered in the mass media.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/jimmy-carter-u-s-is-an-oligarchy-with-unlimited-political-bribery-63262/
The Ds and Rs have a monopoly on electoral politics. Solomon, Hartmann, Sanders and AOC et al. are the ‘sheepdogs” for the DNC. They talk a good game, then bait and switch everyone during the so-called elections. We are told to “hold our nose” and vote for the D brand of genocide and institutional corruption. The “lesser evil” and all that BS. But evil is evil.
The same for the Rs. They want to believe that the Orange Idiot is a savior, but he’s Judas.
“The Rs stab you in the chest, then the Ds stab you in the back”
There is no meaningful choice, no functioning democracy, and the rule of law does not apply to the oligarchy or their henchmen. The US is an oligarchy, it should be glaringly obvious by now, but many turn a blind eye and pretend we can just “vote” one more time and
This article from 2015 explains how the game works.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/bernie-and-aoc-sheepdog-democrats
The most disturbing part of the situation is that most Americans are obviously, based on observed behavior, OK with the Trump era. Left out of the article is reference to the fact that, in the recent presidential primaries, all republicans voted for Trump and almost all democrats voted for Biden – when Biden was obviously capable of being no more than a propped up front for an unknown cabal. The current Trump administration could have been prevented if democrats had simply not voted for Biden. They didn’t have to vote for anyone else, just don’t vote for Biden. Even that was too much trouble for them. Also left out of the article, and most other discussions of the development of this crisis, is a reference to the influence of the corporate strategy of the hostile takeover. Instead of the playbook of autocracy, perhaps the playbook of buying, disassembling, and selling off companies is more/as applicable.
Carolina concerned, could you provide a link for this please:
Carolina concerned, yes people actually voting for an obvious dementia patient was unbelievable to me. Allowing the democrats to make a complete mockery of the entire election and democracy itself. Who was in charge in the Biden administration? It certainly wasn’t Biden. And Harris, the woman could not even answer simple questions. So voting for this as if it was okay, only allows these clowns to continue their game. I didn’t vote for either
Of them.
I’m wondering if the Democrats may be in the position of the dog that caught the car in about two years time. Consider. From what I can see, their strategy appears to be say and do nothing that might get them in trouble with their donors but just hunker down. Sure, send out Bernie and AOC but that does not matter as in three year time they will absolutely endorse Gavin Newsom as the 2028 Democrat Presidential nominee. Just keep those appeals for donations going for everything that Trump is doing. And as it stands, Trump & Co. are destroying their own support among people that voted them in so the Democrats don’t have to do anything but wag their fingers and lodge a lawsuit every now and then. But what happens if in the Midterms the Republicans lose control of both the House and the Senate with the Democrats now in charge. They caught the car. With two more years until the elections, they will be expected to do something about Trump. Oppose him. Vote down his laws and show their voters that they are capable of decisive actions. I, for one, will not be holding my breath.
Sounds about right.
But is there a single legacy medium pointing out this dishonesty/tactics by the Dems at least once in a while?
To quote Lavrov, you need two to tango. But in our media world it´s a one-man-band.
And nobody finds that narrative odd or inaccurate or simply false.
I expect a very aggressive effort to “prevent voter fraud” Rep version) or “vote suppression” (Dem version) aided by ICE actions as well as prosecutions.
text preview by Lee Fang:
Speaker Johnson Plans Vote to Curb Congressional Oversight of Trump, Musk
Congress will vote on new rules to shut down its own investigative powers of the executive branch.
https://www.leefang.com/p/speaker-johnson-plans-vote-to-curb
To paraphrase Einstein: you cannot vote your way out of a mess by voting for the same politicians who got you into the mess in the first place.
It was Democrats who paved the way over decades for Trump and his ilk with their feckless obeisance to their billionaire donors, woke culture wars, soft glove fascism, and enabling behavior.
Bad news folks: we’re not voting our way out of this mess, ever.