
Most Americans wouldn’t recognize the United States before the New Deal came along. Modern America was shaped by the creation of the middle class and the New Deal played a large part in making that happen. It’s wild though, most people I talk to don’t seem to know this, especially young people. We probably stopped teaching it because it seems too biased to tell kids about reality. Today, Americans talk more about how great Reagan was than how FDR transformed this country.
Since no one remembers what it is here’s a quick history lesson. We had this thing happen called the Great Depression at a time when we already had terrible pollution, huge disparity in wealth, terribly low wages, state violence against union organizers, no social safety net, very low home ownership and massive poverty rates. Sound familiar? So to address it FDR managed to pass bills that created what we consider to be the normal order of things today. The concepts put out were built on for decades and they were designed to provide a basic social safety net through programs like Social Security and later, thanks to LBJ, Medicare. But also programs to expand homeownership, build out infrastructure, clean up the environment, codify the right to organize unions, enforce safety measures in the workplace and get rid of child labor, enforce labor laws in general, make sure our food is safe and our water is clean, promote equitable lending practices and pretty much every other safeguard we take for granted today.
Republicans, who first tried to prevent its adoption and then for a while took it as a fact of life, have been trying to undo it, or coopt it into a moneymaking scheme, ever since LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. Which essentially was an attempt to open up the promise of the New Deal to everyone. There were racial disparities, such as redlining, that needed to be addressed to make sure these advances benefited everyone. And then it was Reagan, just over a decade after LBJ left office, who put us on the path of not only undoing the New Deal but erasing from our collective memory why we had to do it in the first place. I’ve been watching them whittle away at this thing my whole life, and I’m old, but I feel young, I really do. Anyway, when Trump wins this election they will finally succeed. The bastards will have finally won.
And, ironically, most of his supporters, the people most responsible for putting this guy into office, won’t even recognize it as it’s happening. I find it ironic because I would argue that eroding the promise of the New Deal, something Bill Clinton was the first Democratic President to do, is a big part of what gave us Trump supporters in the first place. In many ways, the election of Donald Trump was a response to the Democrat’s betrayal of that promise. I think that’s why the Democrats get all of the blame even though the Republicans are the party most bent on destroying the New Deal. Clinton and the New Democrats, who I dislike as much as the next guy, were mainly responding to the popularity of Reagan, which was in part caused by the backlash of opening up the promise of the New Deal to non-white America. Sorry America, I know you don’t want to talk about it, and I just lost half of everyone reading this, but it’s in the mix. We’re adults, right? We can talk about stuff? Read the Sum of Us by Heather McGhee, she sums it up — pun intended. The basic premise is that there is a segment of our population that would rather not have something – such as a benefit or even public swimming pools – rather than allow everyone to have access to it. That was much more prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, but it’s not gone. Heather McGhee proves the point quite well and you should read her book if you haven’t already.
Anyway, so the 2016 election was the fuck-you heard around the world. And for the first time in decades, Democrats finally listened and they took some action and passed the first set of bills meant to begin undoing the damage of trickle-down economics (Reagan’s answer to the New Deal) and to start to mitigate some of the effects of NAFTA. And this is the part that drives me crazy, a huge section of our country can’t recognize this at all. They just can’t see it. Some of them may be blinded by the fact that these bills also try to make sure that the promise of the New Deal is felt by everyone. You can read my piece about the backlash against black farmers getting some well-deserved aid after decades of discrimination to get a sense of that. But I mostly think it’s just successful disinformation campaigns that are keeping too many Americans from making the connection that the bills passed by Democrats in the past four years were designed to help the middle class. I don’t mean just Trump supporters, it’s a widespread notion.
But of course, Trump supporters do take it to a whole other level when it comes to making decisions based on what the facts are. In interviews, focus groups, just talking to them, it’s clear, they’re voting against things that don’t exist and a set of facts that are just upside down and backward. They live in a bizarro version of America. The disinformation surrounding the hurricanes should have made that clear to everyone. People are now believing anything and everything making it impossible to make informed decisions about what direction we should take our country. I mean if someone thinks that the government can control the weather and will use that ability to create hurricanes in order to steal people’s land to build lithium mines, well, you’re never going to convince them that the Inflation Reduction Act is the biggest reversal of trickle-down economics in their lifetime. Or that Biden just made the biggest investment into our social safety net in decades and that Kamala Harris is promising to do even more. That’s just never going to register for these folks. But it’s not just Trump supporters, a majority of Americans think Biden’s policies have been bad for our economy. They weren’t of course, inflation was a global problem and America has handled it better than most developed nations. But still, a majority of Americans believe that using their own tax dollars to invest in the middle class is somehow destructive. That’s right, and that’s how the bastards have won. And by bastards I mean Reagan.
That’s how effective years of misinformation have been. Millions of people are believing just absurdly crazy things and even Democratic voters don’t remember the type of policy that worked best for the middle class in America’s history. It should be obvious to anyone that the New Deal created the middle class and that trickle-down economics eroded it. And that if we want a strong middle class it’s an investment that shouldn’t be left to market forces. But it’s not obvious anymore. Sure, I oversimplified things but that’s the general gist. Poor Bernie, he’s been screaming about this for decades, and poor us for that matter.
Anyway, the battle over the New Deal’s place in history has already been won. Can we reverse it? Well maybe, if Kamala wins this election then maybe government investing in the middle class will become a thing Americans can accept again and even recognize as crucial to our well-being. But if she doesn’t, well, Trump and Company are promising to double down on destroying the last vestiges of the New Deal.
The team surrounding Trump, especially J.D. Vance and his cohorts, have designs to wipe out what’s left of what provides for the middle class. Social Security has always been a prize and even Forbes is saying that under Trump Social Security would be depleted faster and that tax cuts for the wealthy will take precedence over any attempt to shore it up. Phasing out Social Security has been on the Republican wish list since I was a kid and I can’t imagine it will go away under a Trump regime. They have plans to get rid of the Department of Education, an agency that assures a national standard of education. Aren’t we dumb enough, already? They want to replace tens of thousands of federal workers in agencies across the board with loyalists being vetted by the Heritage Foundation. Tucker Carlson is using his platform to recruit people for this project, Jesus, do you want people that listen to Tucker Carlson in these jobs? These agencies represent the foundation of what the New Deal built. They protect workers’ rights, product safety, environmental laws, food safety, banking laws, housing regulations, and all of the stuff we take for granted. It’s hard to understate what a bunch of sycophants will do in these positions or what kind of chilling effect it will have on the rest of the people working in these agencies.
I know it sounds like doomsday stuff, but sometimes a banana is just a banana. There are a thousand other ways a Trump administration is going to turbo-charge the Republican’s main goal of reversing the New Deal and obeying the rule of law and standard government procedures will not be a hindrance to them this time around. It was barely a hindrance last time. Trump still denies he lost the 2020 election and everyone in Congress and in his administration are prepared to repeat that lie til the cows come home. This time there’ll be nobody trying to reel in Trump’s worst instinct. But even worse, the people around him, especially J.D. Vance, are there because they want this more than even Trump does. Trump is tired, have you seen him lately? He can’t even do his make-up right anymore and he’s slurring his words. But the people around him? They have all of the energy in the world and they’re going to make sure to keep him happy while they run circles around him. They know just how to play him, it’s pretty easy actually. If this was just four more years of Trump bumbling around I wouldn’t be nearly as worried. But this is for the ball game. The people around Trump have a plan and it doesn’t include free and fair elections and it doesn’t include ensuring that there’s a strong middle class in America. The Democrats heard the cry, they’re ready to do something about it, they already have and unfortunately, not enough people recognized it.
Well, if Donald Trump wins this election, and they keep the House and win the Senate, then as they used to say on a popular television show in the 1950s, a time when the middle class was just coming into being thanks to the New Deal — Say goodnight Gracie. And by Gracie, I mean what’s left of the middle class.