Welcome to Trump's New Gilded Age - Thanks, Obama?
Four years after being ousted, the long bipartisan effort to hollow out pro-working-class movements and policies has paved the way for a second Trump term predicated on an alliance with oligarchy.
Earlier today, beneath the dome of the United States Capitol’s rotunda, Donald J. Trump once again took his oath of office. Four years after his ouster, let’s remember the 2020 election, which was held on the heels of a largely bungled response to the COVID-19 pandemic, protesters in the streets demanding criminal justice reform being met with violent suppression, and a term largely characterized by failing to meet Trump’s own populist campaign promises, such as the lack of construction on his controversial border wall or his failure to end wars abroad, with his crowning policy achievement being what was effectively a $2 trillion tax cut for the wealthiest cohort of Americans.
Nonetheless, like a geriatric phoenix from the ashes, Trump managed to achieve an unprecedented comeback to retake the White House. Despite the negative perception of Trump v1, our collective memory appears to be comparable to that of a goldfish. That four years of boomer-posting, blood-and-soil rhetoric, and the promise of political retribution was enough to carry Trump to the first Republican popular vote victory in decades is less a testament to Republicans’ own political savvy and more an indictment for how badly Democrats have bungled their opposition strategy.
Barrack Obama was elected under the pretense that his presidency would mark the start of a new political era. A powerful orator cloaked in populist mystique, Obama ran a campaign which paid lip service to anti-war sentiment and healthcare as a human right. His identity as the first black president helped to further drive his distinction from both recent and historical counterparts. Ultimately, Obama reneged on most of this vision and governed largely as a center-right politician. His immigration policy earned him the moniker of Deporter-in-Chief, his escalating drone wars in Somalia and the Middle East wrought untold havoc and inhumanely furthered the abstraction of war, his response to the 2008 Financial Crisis disproportionately favored banks and corporations while underserving the general populous, and while his Affordable Care Act did ultimately expand healthcare access to more people, it was definitely a far cry from the promise of universal healthcare access and represented a halfway compromise based around ideas from the conservative group Heritage Foundation. Obama was elected on a mandate to shift from the austere, business-class-focused domestic politics and the adventurist world-police foreign policy regime of the Reagan era onward that led to the widely panned wars in the Middle East and the ‘08 Financial Crisis. Instead, he governed under and perpetuated those very same norms.
Even still, these failures in the electoral realm did not stop a nationwide pro-working-class sentiment from taking shape. Rapidly expanding wealth inequality, evolving cultural sensibilities, and worsening crises like climate change began to give weight to a nationwide populist uprising. A decade long through line can be drawn from Occupy Wall Street, through Bernie Sanders’ electoral runs, the election of the Squad to Congress, and most recently, steadily rising union membership and union optimism across the country. Like Obama, Joe Biden was handed the presidency with a mandate to be different than what came before, but this time with a much more vocal and organized populist left-wing that was beginning to resemble progressive eras of yore. A new and emboldened left was beginning to command influence. It was united under a political banner which pledged that we could only achieve righteous progress in criminal justice reform, universal healthcare proliferation, broadened social protections for minority groups, and an end to imperialist U.S. foreign policy when we began to adversarially contend with monied interests and billionaires, and this message was becoming increasingly popular.
In the early days of Biden’s presidency, he paid lip service to both proponents of this aforementioned movement and the material pains of the American people, especially as they pertain to COVID-19-induced economic hardship. His relief package was more balanced in its consideration of working class priorities than Obama’s similar stimulus from his response to the ‘08 Crisis, and the original proposed scope of Build Back Better would have been materially transformative even in the short term. He kept his promise to stop burning American money to continue to prop the futile $2 trillion war in Afghanistan, and he staffed agencies like the NLRB, the FTC, and the DOJ with actors who were taking sweeping action against corporate abuse. For a moment, it seemed as though Biden might be caving to the progressive pressure which tepidly awarded him the presidency, and that he may exceed expectations.
But then, popular COVID-era relief programs, like the expanded child tax credit, were allowed to expire, quickly wiping away gains in indicators like child poverty reduction as rapidly as they were made. Through a series of rotating villains and concessions, Build Back Better was reduced to a husk of its original vision, of which the impact likely won’t be seen for years to come. Biden’s administration oversaw an expensive proxy war of historic proportion in Ukraine whilst actively undermining diplomatic efforts. Off the heels of the George Floyd criminal justice movement and nationwide revulsion towards Trump’s immigration policies, Biden massively grew police budgets, kept Trump-era immigration policies in place, and even sought to expand them through executive orders and bipartisan legislation, giving credence to bunk reactionary narratives about rising crime and the impact of illegal immigration while scoring zero brownie points with the constituencies most invested in those narratives. Supply chain whiplash gave corporate masters a brittle justification to price gouge consumers on even the most essential goods, and yet Democrats failed to reframe the narrative away from baseless claims by budget hawks around government spending causing inflation back toward this reality. Kamala Harris was hastily marked as campaign successor in what was effectively a coronation after Biden’s disastrous debate performance, even though the DNC had undermined the primary process, anyone with a pair of eyes could have seen Biden deteriorating long before the debate, and internal poll numbers already spelled doom for Biden’s campaign. The final nail in the coffin was perhaps Biden’s and the whole of government’s complicity in Israel’s attempted genocide in Gaza. Horrors from the ground were being beamed all over the internet while the Biden administration expropriated American taxpayer funds and put them towards bolstering those very same horrors, with a pace, tenacity, and bipartisan rigor unseen in the context of domestic crises.
Bernie Sanders’ two narrowly failed presidential runs (both of which were undermined by Democratic establishment foul play, of which Obama played an outsized role in perpetrating), his and the Squad’s general acquiescence to the establishment time and time again, disagreement over the direness of Trump’s (second) presidential win, and Biden’s failure to meet the moment all began to slowly reveal cracks in this new and fragile progressive coalition. The movement that apexed with Bernie’s massive grassroots support was understandably fractured and beside itself. With no unified progressive coalition to hold a government elected on those aforementioned ideals to account, a Democratic Party driven by holdovers from the Obama-era consultant class reverted to neoliberal tendencies, continuing to concede to right-wing demands and shifting the Overton window rightward in the process. A voting population resigned to nihilism and defeatism returned Trump to the highest seat of power, probably largely in the hopes that he would be an agent of chaos against a system that was not receptive to their needs and demands. Contrary to what the Republicans are selling, it was not a blow-out victory; voter turnout was lower than in 2020, and Trump only won the popular vote by a 1.5% margin of victory (which is historically slim) while not even managing an outright majority (over 50%) amongst the actual voting constituency, let alone all eligible voters. And if Trump v1’s record, the H1B visa fiasco, and Trump’s strengthened relationship with oligarchs are any indication, we are likely to see more of the same: exacerbated wealth inequality via policies that favor the wealthiest cohort of Americans over the working class.
If so, then Team Trump is hurdling towards a brick wall at 100 miles an hour. When they inevitably crash and the favorability pendulum swings back and away from the reactionary realm of Trumpism, a real opposition needs to be able and ready to catch it. Not the sort of resistance liberalism that was predicated on decorum and weakly substantiated Russia-gate fear mongering (the very same resistance that was largely responsible for putting a feckless Biden into office), but a real, organized left: one that can point to the heightened contradictions of Trump’s faux-populism and his inevitable failure to address the most pressing crises of our time; one that can provide an answer to the average American’s increasingly ailing material realities rooted in a systemic analysis of profit-seeking and the unholy alliance between industry and government rather than toxic nativism and scapegoats; and one that is willing to be adversarial towards and puts real pressure on the Democratic political establishment. But this sort of widespread movement building can’t happen overnight, and so it is incumbent upon all of us who wish to see this outcome materialize to act, whether it be via mutual aid, organizing, unionizing, or even wailing into the ether via newsletters like this one. Take this down-period where Trump’s worst political tendencies seem to be facing mainstream normalization as a chance to rebuild a greater opposition coalition rooted in a class-oriented value system, so that when the pendulum swings next, the right people will be there to catch it.