Ten for ’25
A Plan for the Resistance
The return of Donald Trump dominated the news and the news media this year, and I was compelled to do my bit as well. At my most creative, that “bit” consisted of one On TAP almost immediately after Trump took office, which noted that the coming anti-Trump protests should be premised on the pending 250th anniversary of our independence. The proper celebration of the revolution that began at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, I wrote on February 6, should have a “No Kings” focus, which may have been the first article to suggest that newly germane and fundamentally American theme for our protests. Read the story.
Trump Seeks Monument to Self, Gold Preferred. Here’s My Idea.
My other anti-Trump notion came much later in the year, after Trump had put a gold trim on every White House object, had the mint coin a commemorative dollar with his face engraved on both sides, declared he’d build an “Arc de Trump” on the Virginia end of the Memorial Bridge (at the D.C. end is the Lincoln Memorial), and torn down the White House’s East Wing to build a ballroom scaled to the Great Pyramid of Giza. Pondering the proper expression for Trump’s megalomaniacal monumentalism, I realized the truest expression of Trumpism and its cult would be a golden calf with Trump’s head on it. Read the story.
When L’État C’est Trump, the U.S. Goes in for State Capitalism
I realized as well that Trump’s quest for autocracy sometimes ran roughshod over the traditional Republican belief in “free markets.” Trump, it turned out, was fine with state capitalism so long as he was the state—with controlling interests in U.S. Steel and Intel, and a chunk of Nvidia. Thus, the L’état c’est moi presidency. Read the story.
So Much for Consumer Product Safety
As for government agencies devoted to serving the public interest, Trump saw to it that they bit the dust. Death came (or at least approached) not just to such sometime liberal bastions as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and OSHA, but to such widely supported agencies as the Consumer Product Safety Commission, whose members Trump sacked right after they required safety modifications to the batteries in electric scooters and bikes that had caught fire and killed 39 riders. Read the story.
Will the Court Rule for Trump or for Wall Street?
This December, the Republican justices on the Supreme Court made clear that they would permit Trump to end the independence of every regulatory agency by striking down a 90-year-old ruling that forbade presidents from firing commissioners who didn’t kowtow to the president’s politics. At that hearing, though, some of those justices were groping for ways to exempt the government’s chief defender of capital and wealth—the Federal Reserve—from their pending abolition of agency independence. Thus, a showdown between the Court’s two governing beliefs—Trump über alles and capital über alles—impends. Read the story.
The $79 Trillion Heist
Capital über alles, of course, has been the rule controlling the American economy for the past 45 years. In a feature story for our most recent print issue, I looked at the role of inadequate incomes in the current affordability crisis, and concluded that if the same share of the national income had gone to the bottom 90 percent of American workers during those decades as they had received during the 30 years after World War II—when unions were powerful, taxes were progressive, billionaires were scarce, and New Deal laws and regulations were still in place—the current annual income of each of those workers would be $28,000 higher than it actually is. Read the story.
Candidate Trump Boosts Republican Turnout. President Trump Boosts Democratic Turnout.
Is there a way out of this shit swamp into which Trump and his Republicans have plunged us all? This fall, I noted that Republicans have done well in every post-2014 election when candidate Trump is not in office, drawing to the polls sometime voters who love his vicious, scabrous attacks on those in power, even as they’ve done poorly in every post-2014 election when President Trump is in office, drawing to the polls sometime voters who are unimpressed and/or repulsed by his record and conduct in office. Read the story.
Montanans Go After ‘Citizens United’
During the year, I also looked at creative ways that states and cities were endeavoring to navigate around Trump’s autocracy and the oligarchs’ control of politics. To that end, I reported on a proposed and very innovative Montana ballot measure that would effectively negate Citizens United through rewriting the state’s law on corporate charters. Read the story.
Mamdani: Son of La Guardia and FDR
And finally, as someone who’s been a democratic socialist for the past 50 years, I not only cheered on Zohran Mamdani’s brilliant campaign, but situated it in a long and illustrious line of such prominent New York social democrats as Fiorello La Guardia, A. Philip Randolph, and (only sporadically without ever acknowledging it) Franklin Roosevelt. Read the story.
How Mamdani’s Predecessors Built Democratic Socialism
As regards the intra-Democratic Party debates over the party’s direction, I suggested that the Mamdani road map had been laid out by such social democratic predecessors as Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King in their 1966 “Freedom Budget,” and that their preference for universal programs over targeted ones was not only a way for today’s Democrats to win back portions of the working class but also to recapture their strategic balance and moral footing. Read the story.
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