The Democratic Party had one last chance to implement the kind of New Deal Reforms that could save us from another Trump presidency and Christian fascism. It failed.
Chris Hedges
March 17, 2024
Joe Biden and the Democratic Party made a Trump presidency possible once and look set to make it possible again.
If Trump returns to power, it will not be due to Russian interference, voter suppression or because the working class is filled with irredeemable bigots and racists.
It will be because the Democrats are as indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza as they are to immigrants, the poor in our impoverished inner cities, those driven into bankruptcy by medical bills, credit card debt and usurious mortgages, those discarded, especially in rural America, by waves of mass layoffs and workers, trapped in the serfdom of the gig economy, with its job instability and suppressed wages.
Biden and the Democrats, along with the Republican Party, gutted antitrust enforcement and deregulated banks and corporations, allowing them to cannibalize the nation. They backed legislation in 1982 to greenlight the manipulation of stocks through massive buybacks and the “harvesting” of companies by private equity firms that resulted in mass layoffs.
They pushed through onerous trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which crippled union organizing. They were full partners in the construction of the vast archipelagos of the U.S. prison system — the largest in the world — and the militarization of police to turn them into internal armies of occupation.
They fund the endless wars.
The Democrats dutifully serve their corporate masters, without whom most, including Biden, would not have a political career. This is why Biden and the Democrats will not turn on those who are destroying our economy and extinguishing our democracy. The slops in the trough would dry up.
Advocating reforms jeopardize their fiefdoms of privilege and power. They fancy themselves as “captains of the ship,” labor journalist Hamilton Nolan writes, but they are “actually the wood-eating shipworms who are consuming the thing from inside until it sinks.”
Authoritarianism is nurtured in the fertile soil of a bankrupt liberalism. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia. And it is true now.
The Democrats had four years to institute New Deal reforms. They failed. Now we will pay.
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