Can Dems Counter Trump’s Oligarchy with Bold Change?

A strategy to win back America and stand against Trump’s takeover.

All is not lost. Yet.

— Blue state governors and other officials are working to “Trump proof” their states and agencies. Organizations like MoveOn and Indivisible are seeing record sign-ups, donations are flowing into groups like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, and progressive newsletters like this one are seeing unprecedented levels of new subscribers and supporters. The resistance is energized.

— Trump doesn’t have as big a mandate as the media is promoting: If a mere 155,000 people in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin (out of a total 12,943,827 votes cast in those three states) had shifted their votes from R to D, Kamala Harris would be our incoming president. It’s true that voters shifted to the right in virtually every race in America, but that should be seen not as a defeat but as an opportunity — much like the one Republicans faced in 1976 and 2008 — for Democrats to reboot the party and reengage in the battle, the subject of this article.

— America was birthed in resistance; we have a long tradition of fighting oppression and, to the extent Trump and his billionaire allies plan to crush “the left,” they will face fierce opposition (which has already begun).

— We know what largely drove Trump’s win. As political scientist Rachel Bitecofer writes over at her brilliant Substack newsletter The Cycle, Republicans “successfully branded Democrats as out of touch elitists that care more about sex changes for prisoners than you.” We can do something about that, particularly since the suggestion that Democrats don’t care for average working people is a vicious lie.

That said, the Democratic Party must come to the realization that is now dawning across Europe that the old Blair/Macron/Clinton neoliberal consensus (low taxes, free trade, open borders, weak unions) is dead. That if its reverse, progressive populism, isn’t embraced by center-left parties, rightwing populism and oligarchy will fill that void with a vengeance (like they’re seeing across Europe — and we just saw here in last week’s election).

Source: Bloomberg

What Americans said in last week’s election was, “We want real change, and want to know that it’s happening.” Clearly, that’s not what they saw or believed.

Democrats must, in other words, go where the people are and promote new policies loudly. It’s time to espouse progressive populist positions across the Party with a fervor bordering on the passion with which Christian nationalists have lifted up the GOP and handed them victory this year.

Those should include three major policy bites:

Bring our jobs home. I laid out the strategy to do this using measured and intelligent tariffs and other trade barriers on September 17th here in an article titled Why Trump Is Wrong & Alexander Hamilton Was Right About Tariffs.

Prior to Reagan, American manufacturing — kept on this continent by the force of tariffs and other trade barriers — were at the core of the American Dream, with good union manufacturing jobs offering stability and prosperity to a growing American middle class from the 19th century until the 1990s. Tariffs also made America the technological leader of the entire planet.

The concept was simple: if a product could be made for $70 with cheap Chinese labor, but cost $100 to make with US labor, we’d put a $30 tariff on it to equalize the labor costs. Ditto if overseas manufacturing was subsidized by governments or by a lack of expensive pollution controls or worker safety protections: we’d match those cost advantages with tariffs. 

There was still a heck of a lot of trade going on in the world when tariffs were common. As late as 1975, our imports and exports were pretty much in balance (we had a $12 billion surplus). 

Sam Walton opened his first WalMart in 1962 with the slogan, “100% Made In The USA” (that was also the title of his autobiography). That all changed in the 1990s when Bill Clinton embraced the neoliberal trade deals Reagan and Bush Sr. had written; today it’s nearly impossible to find anything made in the US in a WalMart. That has to change, and every American knows it.

If Democrats fight Trump on tariffs like they did during this campaign, they’re cutting their own throats. Has Rana Foroohar wrote in today’s Financial Times:

“Unprovoked by her opponent, she raised the issue of tariffs as a “Trump tax”. …

“Let’s focus instead on how voters in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would have heard that comment. They would not have focused on the word inflation. They would have focused on the word tariff. And by decrying tariffs in that way, Harris would have immediately been interpreted as coming from the usual neoliberal economic camp that sold working people in manufacturing (and indeed, many services) down the river over the past two decades.”

This is why President Biden raised the tariff on steel from 7% to 25%, semiconductors from 25% to 50%, and Chinese EVs from 25% to 100%. Tariffs on semiconductors went from 25% to 50% this year, lithium-ion batteries from 7.5% to 25%, battery parts 7.5% to 25%, graphite and permanent magnets zero to 25%, critical minerals from zero to 25%, solar cells from 25% to 50%, ship-to-shore cranes zero to 25%, syringes and needles from zero to 50%, respirators from zero to 25%, surgical gloves to 25%

Unfortunately, the Harris campaign never mentioned any of this.

Tariffs can work for Democrats; they just have to do (and promote) them more intelligently than Trump has so far.

Fix immigration. I laid out a strategy to do this back on March 17, 2021 here on Hartmann Report in an article titled The Main Driver Of Immigrants & Refugees is the Republican Party Itself.

Prior to the Reagan era, getting a job in manufacturing, construction, or meat-packing was a surefire ticket to the middle class. Today those industries (along with multiple others) are dominated by low-wage often-undocumented immigrant labor.

The main thing that prevented American workers from competing with undocumented immigrant labor was the power unions once had over hiring decisions. When Reagan came into office, roughly one-in-three workers belonged to a union, and another third worked for employers who mimicked union standards as they’d set the wage, benefit, and standards-of-employment floor.

When Reagan gutted America’s unions, that first line of defense collapsed; today only one-in-twenty private sector workers are in a union. Business cheered, and Republicans were just fine with a flood of immigrants starting in the 1980s as it provided them with a steady stream of employees willing to work for low wages.

Anticipating this, Congress built into Reagan’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) provisions for employer sanctions and fines for hiring undocumented workers; businesses quickly figured out how to game the system, though, and the penalties have only rarely been enforced by any of the last six business-friendly neoliberal administrations.

This is why, as I wrote on April 25 in an article titled Southern Autoworkers aren’t Listening to the GOP’s BS Any More, Democrats should have embraced Card Check (as promised) during the Clinton and Obama administrations — and still can.

We also need to enforce the sanctions in the IRCA, although first those sanctions and penalties need to be given teeth and enforced rigorously. Mitt Romney was right on this when he said:

“If people are not able to have a card, and have through an E-Verify system determine that they are here illegally, then they’re going to find they can’t get work here. And if people don’t get work here, they’re going to self-deport to a place where they can get work.”

Instead of ridiculing him, Democrats and the then-Obama administration should have seized the opportunity to embrace this reform that’s already in place in every other developed country in the world.

End homelessness and the crime associated with it. This hits the lived experience of almost every American family, as I wrote on November 9, 2023 here on Hartmann Report in an article titled Democrats Can Win by Confronting Crime.

Cherelle Parker became the first woman elected mayor of Philadelphia in 2023, in part because of her tough-on-crime positions. She’s a progressive Democrat and beat five other Democrats in the primary (including one endorsed by both Bernie and AOC) before cruising to victory.

Her platform was straightforward and almost sounds like Rudy Giuliani back in the 1990s: hire 300 more police officers, fix broken streetlights, remove graffiti, fix up dilapidated buildings, and empower the new police on the street to stop pedestrians they believe may be committing a crime.

“At the time” she first made those proposals, her website notes, “many in the city, including some of those running for mayor now, were convinced that a plan that calls for more police would be political suicide. But she did not take cues from the loudest voices calling to defund the police, instead talking to and listening to people in communities across the city and taking action.”

Unlike with Giuliani, her hiring more police didn’t mean hiring more racist cops and tolerating racially motivated search-and-frisk. This can be done intelligently, and numerous other countries provide us with examples of that. Excessive sentencing like we saw brought forward by Newt Gingrich in the 1990s doesn’t reduce crime and actually makes social problems worse.

Confronting crime at the street level does, however, cause people to become more supportive of enforcing laws — even minor laws — that then reduces crime overall.

I know four people (two in my family) who’ve had five cars and two bicycles stolen in the past two years: in each case, the police said they lacked the resources to try to find either the vehicles or the thieves.

I saw a man stealing a car near my office a few months ago and called 911 (here in Portland they’re referred to as “Homeless Ubers”: people steal cars and then abandon them when they get to their destination). The phone was still ringing five minutes later as he drove off and I hung up, disgusted.

The Portland police wouldn’t have had the resources to do anything about it anyway: they’re stretched so thin they can barely enforce traffic laws. When somebody tried to break into our house and we had a picture of that person, the Portland Police Department ignored our report.

Much of this crime is rooted in homelessness: In addition to intelligently cracking down on crime, Democrats must take a stand against the giant Wall Street hedge funds and banks — and foreign investors — who’ve purchased millions of American single-family homes and either flipped them into high-priced rentals or left them vacant as investments.

We have 15 million vacant homes but only a million or so homeless people, and — as I detailed here on April 22 in an article titled Why Homelessness Stalks America Like the Grim Reaper — Democrats should take a cue from parts of Canada and other nations that have outlawed or tightly regulated corporate and foreign ownership of single-family homes.

Other areas where Democrats can make significant gains among working class people of all races are:

— Paid sick leave and low-cost child care (I wrote about this on September 18, 2023 in an article titled The American Dream Demands Paid Sick Leave & Low-Cost Child Care). It won on ballot initiatives in three Red states this year.
— Free and affordable college (Forgiving Student Debt Isn’t Giving a Gift — It’s Righting a Wrong on June 17, 2022).
— Affordable healthcare as a right of citizenship (Why Is America the Only Developed Nation With No Right To Healthcare? June 17, 2021).
— Taking on the billionaires with reasonable taxation (What Happens When You Tax Billionaires at 90 Percent? June 2, 2023).
— Build and support a Democratic-leaning openly progressive media infrastructure (Radio Silence: How Progressives Lost the Airwaves September 30).

But, as Bernie Sanders has been repeating like a mantra for three decades, the sweet spot for progressive populism will always be what FDR won four terms as president on: good American jobs for American workers, affordable housing, and low crime.

G-d willing, there will be another election in two years and every seat in the House and a third of the Senate — mostly Republicans — are up for reelection. While gearing up to oppose Trump’s most obscene policies, Democrats also need to begin fine-tuning their pitch now.   

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available.