The New Backlash

In my previous article, I argued that the differences between the two main factions of the political left are too dramatic for them to fully reconcile any time soon. However, to follow up with something encouraging after publishing that somewhat negative piece, I'll now make the case for something else that I believe will happen  throughout the next few years: the emergence of a left-wing backlash during Trump's term which will be more powerful than the right-wing backlash that occurred during Obama's term.

The latter movement, as we know, has made a serious impact on American political history. After the Democratic sweeps in 2006 and 2008, grassroots conservative activists-mainly the ones on the far right-wasted no time trying to regain their dominance over politics. In the months after Obama's inauguration, the political vacuum of right-wing populist anger that had appeared was filled by the Tea Party, Fox News demagogues like Glenn Beck, and far-right groups like the Oath Keepers.

And while the Tea Party peaked early in Obama's presidency, the former followers of it and lesser right-wing populist movements that appeared around that time have since enormously influenced government. Tea Partiers managed to get a considerable amount of their representatives elected in 2010, and later elected their ideological heir Donald Trump to the presidency. They've also turned the tables on the Democrats, with the Democratic Party now being in worse shape electorally than Republicans were in 2008.

This all would seem to vindicate the post-election celebrations of Trump supporters. But the hidden weakness in the political structure that the far right has built in the last eight years is that not that much of the electorate helped build it. Specifically, around 26% of Americans were involved in the construction.

"The full backlash wasn't really 47 percent," wrote Will Bunch in his 2010 book The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, And Paranoid Politics In The Age Of Obama, referring to the percentage of the vote that John McCain received in 2008. "As the first weeks of the Obama administration dragged into months, the parameters of the hard-core resistance emerged, with a figure that was attached to 26 percent, maybe less. These were the 26 percent of Americans, according to Newsweek, who still approved of George W. Bush in the waning days of his presidency; the 26 percent who in 2009 said they'd like to see Sarah Palin as Obama's successor in 2012, according to CBS; the 26 percent who reported to Fox News they were outraged when President Obama bowed to the Japanese emperor; the 26 percent who believed Obama's 2008 election was not legitimate, that the much ballyhooed antipoverty group ACORN had somehow swooped down and 'stolen' the contest by recruiting new voters in the heavily black and Latino communities."

And when you look for the polls that show how big the similarly radical left is, the figure is more than two times bigger than 26 percent. It's 52 percent of Americans who believe in high taxes on the rich to redistribute the wealth; it's 59 percent of Americans who supported Occupy Wall Street; it's 56 percent of Americans who have consistently believed throughout the last 30 years that the wealth should be more equally distributed; and it was 53 percent of Americans who would have voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 general election had he been the Democratic nominee. None of this is surprising, seeing as even more than 52 to 59 percent of Americans generally support the goals of Sanders and Occupy, if not Sanders and Occupy themselves.

In other words, left-wing populists outnumber right-wing populists by 2 to 1 at the least. And thus during the Trump era, I believe we are going to witness a backlash to the backlash which far surpasses the former one in its strength and impact.This belief of mine is supported by the fact that unlike was the case with the right-wing backlash just a month after Obama's 2008 election, the left-wing counterrevolution has already started.

Bernie Sanders has emerged in the weeks since the election as a dynamic figure in the effort to organize a progressive backlash, participating directly in the anti-oil pipeline protests in Standing Rock, North Dakota, calling for an overhaul of the Democratic Party's corporatist leadership, and holding public events that resemble his campaign rallies. He's just one of the many progressive leaders who have been working towards such a movement in the past month, among them Michael Moore, who's advocated for an anti-Trump resistance "that will dwarf Occupy Wall Street."

And if public opinion polls and the behavior of Americans so far after the election are any indication, he'll get one. In addition to all of this, donations to organizations that oppose Trump's agenda have surged, with the fundraising of the ACLU, for just one example, having gone up by 7000 percent within the first 24 hours after the election.

Even Trump's supporters have admitted that his presidency will provoke massive resistance, such as when Rush Limbaugh said in July regarding the political dynamics that would be put into motion in the event of a Trump victory on a Election Day, "I want you to think: What’s going to happen that night? What’s going to happen the next day? What’s going to happen every day there after? What’s going to happen the day Trump gets inaugurated? What is the left going to do? They’re not going to just sit idly by and accept this."

No, we are not. Throughout Trump's presidency, it's reasonable to assume that there will be a constant series of protests, victories in electoral politics, and pressure put upon political leaders on the part of the left. And as progressives build this new political structure, the quarter or so of the population that built the old one will not only be rendered largely apathetic due to Trump's reassuring presence, but will be shrinking due to an increase in millennial and nonwhite voters.

In short, whereas Donald Trump and the Tea Party took control of the American political steering wheel in the age of Obama, Bernie Sanders and whatever Occupy-esque movement that emerges during the coming years will do the same in the age of Trump. And in this case, I suspect, the new driver will retain their role as the defining force in politics for quite some time.

But this movement will not just be in opposition to the new president. It will be going up against every leader and institution which defends the current economic paradigm of predatory capitalism, the Democratic Party being no exception. Unless Democrats soon start genuinely representing their base, the New Backlash will most likely become centered around an alternative political organization that's capable of addressing their needs, be it the Green Party or something else.

Whichever party or individual becomes the leader of this movement, though, every factor points to its success. And by the time it's likely gained control of the government four years from now, those on the left will be the ones saying that they've taken their country back.

Progressives will have some big opportunities throughout the next four years. Let's get to work on taking full advantage of them.

It Gets Worse

When thinking back to what the political climate was like in the early years of Obama's presidency, one gets a sense of deja vu. Amid the Great Recession, most felt betrayed by the political and economic establishment and strongly desired to change it, but in a lot of cases, this populist energy was going in the wrong direction; a political vacuum had appeared, and as often happens with political vacuums, demagoguery filled much of the empty space.

That era, as you remember, involved a surge in support for movements like the Tea Party, the rise of divisive media figures like Glenn Beck, and (somewhat below the surface) a growth of membership in far-right groups. The country had seen phenomenon like that before in recent decades, but in this instance, one person had reason to believe that such events reflected a far deeper and darker societal trend than usual.

In 2010, reports Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky gave a disquieting assessment of the state of the nation, saying that the current situation "Is very similar to late Weimar Germany," the regime which preceded the Third Reich. As was the case in early 1930's Germany, he explains, faith in established institutions and the ideological center was eroding due to widespread economic inopportunity, and that opened up the door for political monstrosities to arise.

"The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen," he said. "Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says 'I have got an answer, we have an enemy'? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election."

Such an event failed to transpire in the the election immediately following Chomsky's prediction, but ominous signs indeed began to appear. In the early stages of the 2012 Republican primaries, some abnormally extreme candidates like Michelle Bachman and Herman Cain were close to being the favorites at one point. It was only after then, of course, that things really started to get crazy.

Donald Trump, who may have become president in 2012 had he not put off running, is regarded by many as just the type of person Chomsky warned about. "Be very afraid," warned James Kunstler late last year. "Donald Trump isn’t funny anymore. He’s Hitler without the brains and the charm." Chomsky's reaction to Trump's victory is similarly dire: "For many years, I have been writing and speaking about the danger of the rise of an honest and charismatic ideologue in the United States, someone who could exploit the fear and anger that has long been boiling in much of the society, and who could direct it away from the actual agents of malaise to vulnerable targets. That could indeed lead to what sociologist Bertram Gross called 'friendly fascism' in a perceptive study 35 years ago. But that requires an honest ideologue, a Hitler type, not someone whose only detectable ideology is Me. The dangers, however, have been real for many years, perhaps even more so in the light of the forces that Trump has unleashed."

This may sound ludicrous, but I do not believe Trump is the person he's talking about.

Chomsky's assessment of the factors behind Trump's rise is entirely accurate; exit polls in both the primaries and the general election show that Trump voters are generally resentful towards the political (though not quite so much economic) establishment, and the promise of change was for the most part what lead to Trump winning.

In this piece, I'm going to explain why I think that Trump, awful as he is, is just the prelude to a larger horror that's looming on the horizon. And first on my list of reasons for this is the fact that Trump's intentions have more do to with satisfying his own ego than changing the country. As Michael Moore very plausibly claimed in August, Trump's decision to run for president was originally more of a publicity stunt than a scheme to usher in an era of tyranny:

Trump was unhappy with his deal as host and star of his hit NBC show, “The Apprentice” (and “The Celebrity Apprentice”). Simply put, he wanted more money. He had floated the idea before of possibly running for president in the hopes that the attention from that would make his negotiating position stronger. But he knew, as the self-proclaimed king of the dealmakers, that saying you’re going to do something is bupkus — DOING it is what makes the bastards sit up and pay attention.

Trump had begun talking to other networks about moving his show. This was another way to get leverage — the fear of losing him to someone else — and when he "quietly" met with the head of one of those networks, and word got around, his hand was strengthened. He knew then that it was time to play his Big Card.

He decided to run for president.

Of course he wouldn’t really have to RUN for president — just make the announcement, hold a few mega-rallies that would be packed with tens of thousands of fans, and wait for the first opinion polls to come in showing him — what else! — in first place! And then he would get whatever deal he wanted, worth millions more than what he was currently being paid.

And though this cynical tactic to exploit the political process has evidently morphed since then into a genuine effort from Trump to become president, given the information above I have little reason to believe that he intends to commit to the job-or to his campaign promises.

Firstly is the issue of trade. One of the few legitimate problems that Trump has promised to address, the injustice of having corporations abandon American workers for higher profits is something that has famously made Trump win over many people who feel it hurts the economy. And yet Trump's actions so far have not matched his words; his VP pick of staunch neoliberal trade advocate Mike Pence was the first sign that he can't be trusted to confront this issue, along with the fact that all of his economic advisors seek to serve the interests of the corporations that benefit from the current trade system.

And then comes Trump's promise to "drain the swamp" of political corruption. In addition to how Trump is the most corrupt presidential candidate in history, this claim is made very hard to believe by the cabinet picks he's made so far, which include numerous lobbyists and former corporate donors to his campaign.

Other things that Trump has vowed to accomplish but likely won't is deport all undocumented immigrants, which he's decided not to attempt since being elected, and impose a ban on Muslims from entering the country, which the system won't allow him to do whether wants to or not. None of this is to say that he'll be unwilling or unable enact the other sinister policies that he and his aides have embraced-a return of waterboarding, a strengthened police state-but for the most part, it seems the authoritarian strongman that Trump supporters are looking for will not turn out to be Trump.

But if these failures of Trump's principle and integrity don't turn off his fans, who are extremely committed to remaining loyal to him, his handling of the economy will likely be what does in his initial support. Those in the bottom 99.9% of the income bracket, who are already very much feeling the financial consequences of forty years of neoliberal policies, will predictably become even poorer under the economic policies of Trump and the Republicans in the House and the Senate. And finally, the most dramatic way that Trump will betray his promises to improve the quality of life of Americans is by failing to adequately regulate the financial sector, which is sure to cause a new financial crisis that's likely to hit sometime within the first half of his term.

In short, though whether Donald Trump is charismatic is a matter of opinion, he is certainly not honest in his intentions. He may be a tyrant-in-the-making, but his inexperience, poor judgement, and lack of core values all make him destined for political failure. I can easily imagine that in time for the next election cycle, a great deal of Trump's former supporters will no longer view him as the appealing outsider who gave them hope in 2016, but as exactly what he is: another establishment politician. As Chomsky said, most demagogues and deceivers ultimately defeat themselves, and Trump will be no exception.

Unfortunately, this is where the opportunity will appear for the rise of something far worse than Trump.

While the extreme unpopularity of Trump circa the 2020 election cycle will of course make it easy for the left to win against him, the same will be true for the extreme right. It's a real possibility that after Trump has politically destroyed himself, a new demagogue who possesses far more skill and principle will beat him in the 2020 Republican primaries (or even upstage him while running third party) and become the next face of the ever more sinister American fascist movement.

If this sounds implausible, think of what author Umair Haque wrote last year regarding the direction that the political environment has been headed in for the past several years: "If I’d told you last Christmas that the leading contender for President of the richest and most powerful country on the globe had openly said that he was OK with armbands, internment camps, extra-judicial bans, and blood rights, unless you were a card-carrying member of Conspiracy Theorists International, you probably would have laughed at me."

And we may well see such an upset again, except this time it will represent something that genuinely resembles the Third Reich. No one illustrates my point better than John Feffer in his piece The Most Important Election Of Your Life Is Not This Year, the following quote from which, though I've used it before, is entirely appropriate for this article:

The real change will come when a more sophisticated politician, with an authentic political machine, sets out to woo America B [conservative America]. Perhaps the Democratic Party will decide to return to its more populist, mid-century roots. Perhaps the Republican Party will abandon its commitment to entitlement programs for the 1%.

More likely, a much more ominous political force will emerge from the shadows. If and when that new, neo-fascist party fields its charismatic presidential candidate, that will be the most important election of our lives.

As long as America B is left in the lurch by what passes for modernity, it will inevitably try to pull the entire country back to some imagined golden age of the past before all those "others" hijacked the red, white, and blue. Donald Trump has hitched his presidential wagon to America B. The real nightmare, however, is likely to emerge in 2020 or thereafter, if a far more capable politician who embraces similar retrograde positions rides America B into Washington.

While I used to think such an event would only materialize if Hillary Clinton had won, I now realize that the dark political energy capable of producing it has the ability to manifest itself regardless of whether a Democrat or a Republican is in charge. Either way, the factors which are causing these fascist, reactionary sentiments will continue to antagonize the public, inching the nation ever closer to tyranny.

And when it gets to that point, we'll no doubt look back fondly on Glenn Beck and the teabaggers.

Hillary Plays The Fiddle As The Democratic Party Burns

Aside from the small portion of the population that supported Donald Trump from the start of his presidential bid and are therefore the only ones who are truly glad to see him win (which, by the way, he only did so because of the rules of the Electoral College), all Americans can in some way agree that these last 24 hours have been a disappointing experience. From the many Republicans who thought his loss would have been for the best, to the marginalized groups who now fear for their safety, to the billions of people around the world from all walks of life who simply don't want a person like him to represent what's (for now) the most powerful nation, the results of yesterday's election were received bitterly.

There was another group of people, though, which was dismayed by the results: the 57% of Americans who want a third major political party in the United States. Though Gary Johnson and Jill Stein both had a good shot at receiving 5% or more of the popular vote, which would have qualified them for federal matching funds in 2020 and helped their parties rise to prominence, they both significantly under-performed, with Stein getting 1% and Johnson getting 3%. And since it was the irresponsible actions of the two major parties that created the factors behind Trump's success in the first place, this blow to the hopes of building a better alternative means that Trump won in two ways last night.

However, there's something that those who hope for the rise of a third party can take heart in: these results prove that the Democratic Party is now basically dead.

I assumed that it would be able to hold on for a little bit longer after 2016, believing, like most others, that Democrats would win the White House and the Senate. But for better or for worse, Election Day demonstrated that the political environment has been rendered uninhabitable for the party's brand.

The brand I'm talking about is centrism. Or, to put it less politely, a political strategy which is based on promising to fix the system while working to uphold it. Democrats have practiced this cynical tactic for decades, and for a while they thrived under it, but a political structure that's built on empty promises is bound to decay over time, and November 8, 2016 can be considered the day it finally grew too weak to stand.

The first signs of the Democrats' transformation into a disguised tool of the status quo came in the years between the 1968 and 1972 election cycles, when the former supporters of George McGovern worked to reform the party. Though the Democratic Party under the McGovern coalition was more anti-war and pro-civil rights than the one before it, this new version of the Democrats had left behind many of the economically populist values that the party had previously represented in order to appeal to the types of young, socially liberal members of the professional class which would dominate the Democratic base for the next several decades.

Perhaps this pivot was necessary, as it made Democrats into a valuable ally of marginalized groups and advocates of peace, but it had come at a price. In 1972, many working class whites who had used to make up the party's base realigned with the Republican Party, costing Democrats the election. This cleared the way for Jimmy Carter, the logical conclusion of the anti-worker Democratic standard that the party had adopted, to appear in 1976.

It was no coincidence that income inequality, long on the decline, then began to climb upward in the late 70's. Carter took on an elite-oriented approach to economics that none of his recent predecessors, Democratic or Republican, had come close to embracing, enacting deregulations, neglecting infrastructure and social spending, and failing to invest in jobs. Though most see Clinton as the first neoliberal Democratic president, the party had gone in that direction long before the 90's.

The Democrats' corruption has only gotten worse since then, with the party being responsible for the Wall street deregulations, anti-worker trade deals, cuts to the social safety net, and other policies which have driven economic inequality to levels unprecedented in American history. Therefore, it's no wonder that Republicans have been able to get working class whites solidly on their side since 1972, and it should certainly come as no shock that Trump was able to so successfully utilize this anger against the economic order which Democrats represent.

New Yorker writer George Packer, in an article about the disillusionment so many economically insecure people are feeling towards the Democratic Party, assesses the mindset of the early 70's McGovern Democrats as they decided to re-route their party's direction away from economic populism: "The class rhetoric of the New Deal sounded out of date, and the problems it addressed appeared to have been solved by the wide prosperity of the postwar years." This exposes the irony of the situation; the Democrats of four decades ago, forgetful of the reason their party had shifted towards economic populism during the 1930's and 40's (hint: extreme wealth inequality), saw no problem with pivoting towards big business and setting society on the same track that had led it into the great economic and political disasters of the 20th century.

And now, with the ascension of fascism which the modern era of extreme inequality has produced having triumphed in the United States, Democrats are facing the ugly consequences of their mistakes. The coalition of economically privileged liberals which defined the Democratic Party in the late 20th century now lies in ruins, with most of them having either become poorer in the last several decades or died off to be replaced by their less well-off millennial children. And because of the failure of Hillary Clinton and other establishment Democrats to address the economic concerns of their new base, Democratic voter turnout was low in this election, which may well have been the cause of the party's losses. In other words, the center didn't hold this year, and it without a doubt won't hold in 2018 or 2020 either.

However, as I said, this collapse of the center doesn't mean that it's now free game for the reactionary right. In spite of these election results, the left is very much in the majority, and the only reason this year wasn't a victory for progressivism is that there's been no viable option for progressives to unite around; Bernie Sanders, who would have beaten Trump were he the nominee, had his campaign sabotaged by Democratic officials, and Jill Stein, who would have been able to do the same if she'd had the opportunity, was held back by the fact that Greens are (for now) a minor party.

Indeed, I would say that Trump and Friends got lucky this time; the left, which was caught off guard in 2016, will have far better opportunities to mobilize and win in future elections. As Trump's presidency couples with the new financial crisis that will happen within the next few years to intensify the public's anger towards the political and economic establishment, progressives will have an enormous opening, with the vast portion of the electorate which desires positive social change being compelled to take action. And since many anti-Trump Republicans are likely to realign with the Democratic Party in the coming years (a trend which has already started), the possibility of reforming Democrats into an instrument for progressive change looks like it's bound to become increasingly remote, making the prospect of building a viable third party for the left in the near future very much doable.

But regardless of which party becomes the home of the progressive movement during these next four years, I'm more confident than not that it will succeed. Because as Robert Reich put it in an Election Night Facebook post:

It's an awful night, terrible news. If Trump becomes the next president, as seems likely, we're in for an awful ride.

But it's also an opportunity.

The American power structure -- both in the Democratic and in the Republican parties -- has been dealt a severe blow. Bernie Sanders was correct: The moneyed interests rigged our political-economic system against most Americans. And now the backlash has begun.

It was always going to be a contest between authoritarian populism and progressive populism, eventually. For now, authoritarian populism has won. That's the real meaning of Donald Trump. But if we are united and smart and disciplined, progressive populism will triumph, because it's humane.

Do not give up the fight. The real fight has just begun.

Like the ideological center, the Democratic Party went down in flames last night. Now we need to build something better in its smoldering ruins.

We Can't Let Hillary Clinton Spoil This Election

It was almost sixteen years ago, on November 7, 2000, that Al Gore spoiled the 2000 election.

Though Ralph Nader's supporters urged those in Gore's camp to be pragmatic, reminding them that voting for a major party candidate in most states would be pointless and that building the Green Party was important for advancing progressive goals, but too many of them wouldn't listen. Though Nader had enough support to receive 5% of the vote, which would have given the Greens increased ballot access and federal matching funds in the next election, thanks to Gore he lost that opportunity. Democrats have since tried to deny this mistake, falsely accusing the Greens of swinging the election to Bush, but they just can't escape it; because of the unnecessary number of people who voted for Gore in 2000, the country has paid a terrible price.

Thankfully, though, Americans have a chance not to repeat that mistake in 2016.

To be clear, I do not want Donald trump to win any more than I wish George W. Bush had become president. Bush was by far less competent and responsible than Gore, and in the case of Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump, that difference is of course magnified a hundredfold. You just can't expect to admit an erratic, overtly tyrannical figure like Trump into the center of the republic's power structure without there being possibly fatal consequences for its future.

But as a great deal of people have become aware of since 2000, the other option isn't much better. While Trump denies climate change, Clinton's approach to addressing it is not at all adequate. While the prospect of having Trump make foreign policy decisions seriously introduces the possibility of a third world war, Clinton's plans for handling the situation in Syria could very well have similar consequences. While Trump's presence on the world stage and economic ideas would likely lead to an economic collapse, Clinton's pro-Wall Street policies would result in a repeat of the 2008 banking crisis. While Trump's proposals for cutting taxes on the wealthy would hurt the middle-class, Clinton's neoliberal stances on many other economic issues would increase inequality as well. Both are in service of big business and the military-industrial complex, both are opposed to reforming the system in a positive way, and while Hillary may be safer, both will take us on a dangerous path.

And if we again choose to give into the demands of the lesser evil because we're told it's the only way to stop the greater evil, evil will win either way.

You may or may not agree with my assessment that stopping Trump is the most important thing, but in the majority of cases, voting for Hillary Clinton will not be necessary to do so. The rules of the Electoral College make it so that the outcomes of presidential elections are determined by how many electoral votes, not popular votes, a candidate gets, which means that in all the forty or so non-swing states, voting third party will not pose any risk of swinging the election. In other words, unless you live in a battleground state, you should ignore anyone who tells you that a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Trump.

This brings us to another tactic the Clinton camp is using to discourage people from voting Green: spreading the notion that there aren't enough Stein supporters to make a 5% vote share for her possible. While the online polls that show Stein having as much support as the major party candidates are of course completely unreliable, so are the conventional polls that put her around 2%; as I made the case for in a past article, mainstream surveys too often under-sample groups like young people and independents or involve asking participants questions which make them less likely to answer that they support third parties.

Additional evidence that Stein in fact has more support than is being reported comes from how 12% of independents, 13% of former Bernie Sanders supporters, and 16% of young people support her. These are all major chunks of the electorate, and if a poll were conducted which represented them adequately, I think it would very likely find that Stein has the backing of 5% or more of the electorate.

Sadly, this by no means guarantees that the Greens will receive that much of the vote two days from now. Nader had enough support to get him 5% of it as well, but many of those who wanted to vote for him were swayed by the Democratic spin that doing so would help Bush in every case. And barring something unprecedented, it looks like Democrats are about to spoil another election.

Except that's where the main point of this article comes in: something unprecedented is in fact at work.

This is not the same country it was sixteen years ago. Back then, politicians like Al Gore and the Clintons could promise to overturn the economic and political status quo, do everything they could to uphold it, and still rely on the loyalty of their base. But naturally, this dynamic could not survive for much longer; throughout the third millennium, the irresponsibility and greed of America's leaders has done too much harm for the pubic to ignore, and something in the political environment has shifted.

Since 2000, the leaders of both major parties have subverted the constitution and turned America into a surveillance state. They've made the world more dangerous and wasted trillions of dollars by engaging in a campaign of endless war. They've driven up economic inequality to historic levels by giving into the wishes of their wealthy donors. And most consequentially, they've caused the atmosphere's carbon levels to reach what may well be the breaking point for the future of climate stability. Thankfully, though, the injustice and danger of the situation that these decisions have created is only matched by the drive that the public has to change things for the better.

As was the case sixteen years ago, the polls show that the majority of Americans want to solve the problems mentioned above. What's different now is that they've grown so big that the public has become compelled to seek out alternatives to the established political paradigm. In recent years, populist sentiments in both America and abroad have reached a boiling point, with voters in much of the industrial world taking serious action to challenge the broken political and economic system. Though this revolt has too often taken a reactionary rather than progressive form, with the rise of demagogic figures like Donald Trump and Marine La Pen, the political climate has nonetheless become dramatically more favorable to leaders like Jill Stein since the beginning of the century.

Already, there are many signs that the Greens are in a better position than ever to pull off an upset. The party's ballot access is higher this year than in any previous election cycle, and as I've iterated throughout this article, their support is at a level not seen in a long time. Andrea Merida, co-chair of the Green Party of Colorado, has described these and other positive signs as "a mandate for the Green Party." And she's not the only Green leader expressing hope; Jill Stein published an op-ed recently which treated a 5% vote share for the Greens as a serious possibility and compared the position her party is currently in to where the Republican Party was in 1854.

So long story short, this is the first election cycle ever where Greens have the potential to break through the obstacles which have been put up against them and other third parties, and we must take advantage of that. If you are not in a swing state, I highly recommend you vote for Jill Stein, and if you are and still plan to do so, my own opinion shouldn't stop you. Because as Democrats like to say, we must not forget what happened in 2000.

The 2016 Election Is The Only Thing Holding The Two-Party System Together

In a past article, I once made a (seemingly) shocking prediction: that in the near future, the combined number of people who affiliate with the Republican and Democratic parties will make up less than half of the electorate. The reasons I give for believing this duopoly-imperiling event is on its way have to do with the fact that according to a January Gallup poll, combined Democratic and Republican identification is at 55%, and because the events of this election have left so many people alienated with the two major parties, that percentage is bound to soon drop below fifty.

However, as I recently discovered, Gallup takes their party affiliation poll a lot more frequently than I assumed, and when I looked at the most recent survey (taken in September), to my dismay I found that the combined number of Democrats and Republicans had since gone up to 59%.

How could this be, I thought. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the most disliked (and probably the easiest to dislike) presidential nominees in history. About half of both Republicans and Democrats wish that someone else were their party's nominee. Trump is driving evangelicals, women, and Latinos away from the Republican Party, while Clinton is alienating the most important part of the Democratic Party's base-progressives. These ideological rifts within the two major parties are just the latest and most dramatic in the massive decline of support that they've both been experiencing for the last several years, and there's evidently no reason to think that that trend will start to reverse. To say that Democratic and Republican membership has respectively went from 29 and 26 percent to 32 and 27 percent since the beginning of the year seems to defy all logic, or at least prove that Americans are far too intrenched in party loyalty for the two-party system to end anytime soon.

The current party affiliation polls notwithstanding, though, Democrats and Republicans are in just as bad shape as intuition would have it.

When looking at the long-term history of Gallup's party affiliation polls, one notices an intriguing phenomena: identification in the two major parties always reaches a high point around the time of presidential elections. In 2012, the poll that put independents at 33%-by far that year's lowest estimation of independents-was taken days before the election. In 2008, the poll that put independents at 32%-a notably low number for that year as well-was taken in late October. And in 2004, the two polls in a row that put independents at 27%-down from 40% at the beginning of the year-were taken in the weeks before Election Day. I know these examples are far from conclusive evidence, but they seem proof enough to me that as elections approach, people tend to coalesce around the party that they prefer will win.

Just as the support for third party candidates always drops approaching election day while many of their former backers get behind the major party candidate that they're the least dissatisfied with, the same appears to be true for party affiliation. This theory of mine seems to be further supported in how during the primary season this year, loyalty to the two major parties began to drop with Republicans making up 25% of the electorate in April and Democrats making up 28% of it in May. And since then, after things have switched into the next phase of the campaign, the polls have generally shown a higher amount of "support" for the Democratic and Republican parties. The lack of sincerity among many of the 59% of Americans who say they side with the two major parties is betrayed in how, at the same time, 57% of Americans say they think a third major party is needed.

And when the piece of partisan glue which is the 2016 election becomes irrelevant on November 9, there will be nothing to stop that 57% of the population from acting on their wishes and changing the party system.

After the election is over and the nation's partisanship has returned to a sane level, the majority of Americans who are dissatisfied with the major parties will have an opportunity to defy them. Regardless of whether Trump or Clinton wins, Trumpism and Clintonism will retain their control over the agendas of the Republican and Democratic parties throughout the foreseeable future, and that will not sit well with most Americans. The ideological split between traditional Republicans and those in Trump's camp will likely continue to grow, quite possibly resulting in a sudden success for the Liberitarian Party or something similar to it in future elections. Meanwhile, the divide on the Democratic side between those who embrace neoliberalism and those who want to fight it (which I think is hurting Democrats more than the right's ideological split is hurting Republicans) could very well result in the rise of a populist party like the Greens.

If you think such a shift isn't realistic, keep in mind that the main factor behind the current split within the two parties, wherein most of the Republican base now embraces Trumpism and most of the Democratic base now rejects Clintonism, is the now historic amount of economic inequality which has appeared because of the pro-big business policies that the Republican and Democratic establishments have supported for the past four decades. And as the trend of growing economic inopportunity continues throughout the next four years, with Obama's likely successor Hillary Clinton presiding over an ongoing assault on the middle class and a new financial crisis, populist sentiments on both the left and the right will only become more intense, making the creation of a four-party system by 2020 a serious possibility.

So in the meantime, Democratic and Republican insiders should enjoy the increased amount of support for their parties while they still can.

Waking Up From Our Neoliberal Nightmare

On November 9, after Hillary Clinton is likely elected, those who I suspect will be celebrating the most are not the millions of people in the lower and middle classes that largely voted for her out of fear of Donald Trump-it will be the heads of Wall Street, corporate America, and the rest of the economic and political establishment, who are eager to see their empire keep smoothly humming along. Because while both candidates can of course be relied upon to help the interests of big business, Trump's annoying habit of disrupting markets by simply being a major presence on the national stage makes Clinton Wall Street's favored option.

And so, as most Americans give themselves a (largely unenthusiastic) pat on the back for vanquishing Trump and getting a woman into the White House, things go back to business-as-usual. The president-elect and the other representatives of the corporate state can get started on planning the latest series of wars, anti-worker trade deals, corporate tax cuts, and other policies which will further the interests of the super-rich. For most people, the fact that Trump has been avoided will ultimately come as little comfort; either way, the 2016 election will be yet another defeat for those who are being hurt by the unrestrained model of capitalism that most countries have embraced for the last four decades or so, and a victory for those who benefit from this economic system, whose relatively little-known but important to understand name is neoliberalism.

This term, though not to be confused with capitalism, can be considered the logical conclusion of it; whereas capitalism merely allows private corporations to be the chief players in the economy, neoliberalism takes things many steps further by saying that corporations and the wealthy have more rights than ordinary people. Another way to describe it is an economic system which is based purely on competition. In a neoliberal society, if anyone gets ahead or falls behind in the economic game, the rules are essentially re-written to favor the winner and punish the loser.

Anis Shivani assesses how neoliberalism, which originated as a term in the 20th century and was more or less implemented for the first time during that period, is different from past economic systems that have favored elites in his brilliant article This Is Our Neoliberal Nightmare: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, And Why The Market and the Wealthy Win Every Time:

Neoliberalism has been more successful than most past ideologies in redefining subjectivity, in making people alter their sense of themselves, their personhood, their identities, their hopes and expectations and dreams and idealizations. Classical liberalism was successful too, for two and a half centuries, in people’s self-definition, although communism and fascism succeeded less well in realizing the “new man.”

It cannot be emphasized enough that neoliberalism is not classical liberalism, or a return to a purer version of it, as is commonly misunderstood; it is a new thing, because the market, for one thing, is not at all free and untethered and dynamic in the sense that classical liberalism idealized it. Neoliberalism presumes a strong state, working only for the benefit of the wealthy, and as such it has little pretence to neutrality and universality, unlike the classical liberal state.

I would go so far as to say that neoliberalism is the final completion of capitalism’s long-nascent project, in that the desire to transform everything—every object, every living thing, every fact on the planet—in its image had not been realized to the same extent by any preceding ideology. Neoliberalism happens to be the ideology—unlike the three major forerunners in the last 250 years—that has the fortune of coinciding with technological change on a scale that makes its complete penetration into every realm of being a possibility for the first time in human history.

Perhaps it's this aspect of neoliberalism, wherein corporations and the state work together to concentrate power and resources, that has made it so that inequality is now higher than it's ever been in American history. And according to Shivani, it can only get worse from here. "Neoliberalism has its end-game in sight," he writes, "letting inequality continue to escalate past the crash point (meaning the point where the economy works for most people), past any tolerable degradation of the planet (which is being reconceptualized in the shape of the market)."

In this piece, I'm going to discuss why I believe the future will in fact be the opposite of what he describes.

The reasoning behind Shivani's prediction (which he admits is only speculative) of a long-term victory for the corporate state is that neoliberalism, it seems to him, is too powerful an ideology for people to turn against. The economic elite, by getting so many in the lower classes to buy into neoliberalism's philosophy of profit at any cost, has essentially persuaded much of the public to surrender to its oppressors. In a culture that puts individual gain above all else and considers things like human beings and the environment to be commodities, it can become easy for those who are being left behind in the neoliberal system to rationalize its existence.

What I feel Shivani doesn't sufficiently take into account is the fact that, for the most part, such a culture does not exist in America.

The most recent Gallup poll on income inequality shows that only 31% of Americans do not think wealth should be more equally distributed. Another survey from Gallup shows just 21% of Americans think the rich pay their fair amount in taxes, while 15% think they pay too much. So is the case with virtually every other issue, from the idea of universal health care to ending the wars to raising the minimum wage to reforming campaign finance; the majority of Americans, in spite of the neoliberal propaganda that elites have tried to sell to them for so many years, know which kinds of policies benefit them.

But perhaps as Shivani was also meaning to point out, the surveys notwithstanding, the public has yet to stage a serious effort to overthrow the neoliberal order. Americans have believed in things like redistributing the wealth and raising taxes on the wealthy for about as long as neoliberalism was the dominant system, and yet no successful effort to challenge it has materialized.

I addressed this seemingly discouraging fact in my previous article, wherein I argued that because the current levels of economic inequality so closely resemble that of past unequal eras, which were followed by populist uprisings that brought inequality back down, our society is on the cusp of just such a revolt. This somewhat outdated chart (inequality has gotten worse since 2013) illustrates my point:

It's hard to look at that picture and not think that a turning point is near.

However, that piece mainly focused on the effects that I believe this coming period of class revolt will have on electoral politics. And as everyone should know when attempting to bring about true systemic change, this is just one aspect of the larger movements that will need to take place within society before meaningful improvement occurs.

Even the political future that income inequality has led me to believe will be realized in the next several years, wherein America's two corporate parties are overtaken by a populist party, is not enough; due to Republican gerrymandering, America's liberal party, be it the Democrats or the Greens, will have zero chance of taking the House until 2030. We can't wait until then to try to make Washington work for the people; in addition to electing Greens to high positions in government, we'll need to persuade the Republicans who will control congress for the next decade-and-a-half to stop helping their wealthy donors. And in this article, which can be considered a follow-up to my last one, I'll discuss how that is completely doable.

A good case study to use in this guide to reversing inequality in the 21st century is the last period of major economic unfairness, which took place in the 20th century. This era, whose levels of income disparity can be observed in the chart above, indeed required factors much bigger than electoral politics to make it end. After more than a half-century of increasing economic exploitation under the proto-neoliberal ideology of classical liberalism, the economy fell apart. The Great Depression, which, like many other economic collapses, was caused by economic inequality, can be considered the "rock bottom" that this debt-dependent, economically concentrated society needed to turn itself around.

It's no coincidence that income inequality in the 20th century peaked in 1928, the year before the crisis started. Peter Turchin explains how the aftermath of the recession led to redistribution in his essay Return Of The Oppressed:

The US elites entered into an unwritten compact with the working classes. This implicit contract included the promise that the fruits of economic growth would be distributed more equitably among both workers and owners. In return, the fundamentals of the political-economic system would not be challenged (no revolution). The deal allowed the lower and upper classes to co-operate in solving the challenges facing the American Republic — overcoming the Great Depression, winning the Second World War, and countering the Soviet threat during the Cold War.

The really notable thing about this change of attitudes among the country's leaders, though, is how it didn't take an overthrow of the political establishment to change how the government worked.

During that time, both parties, as is the case now, were in service of big business. The representatives of neither party were willing to challenge the centers of power, with Franklin Roosevelt being no exception. At the time of Roosevelt's first presidential campaign in 1932, he was in fact a fiscal conservative who was funded by Wall Street and considered a balanced budget to be more important than helping the American people in their greatest time of need. As the populist anger of the public loomed ever larger during his term, though, he and the rest of the Washington establishment decided to change their economic approach, enacting the New Deal policies that brought down income inequality and began a thirty-year period where keynesianism was the dominant ideology in American politics.

But then, of course, came society's new and latest descent into inequality. Starting with Jimmy Carter's pro-big business policies, neoliberalism became the driving force in the actions of most government officials, eventually leading to the sad state of affairs that we're in today.

What remains to be seen, though, is exactly what the fall of neoliberalism will look like. The events that brought about the downfall of classical liberalism are set to repeat themselves soon, with a possibly Great Depression-level economic collapse sure to take place sometime within the next president's first term. Due to the unwillingness of government officials to meaningfully reform the country's banking system after the 2008 crash, along with the many other factors that make the global economy unsustainable (income inequality being a notable player), the continuation of the status quo that Hillary Clinton's presidency will bring is certain to result in a breakdown of the fragile, largely illusory economic order that elites have constructed.

"The potential for wrecking markets and currencies around the world is extreme at this moment," wrote James Kunstler last month, who thinks that this crash will happen quite soon. "It may only be a matter of whether it happens before or after the election. Then we’ll see what happens when financial institutions can’t trust each other. Trade stops. Economies crumble. Pretenses evaporate. If it gets bad enough, the shelves of the supermarkets go bare in three days and you’re living in a permanent hurricane disaster without the wind and rain. Believe me, that will be bad enough."

What Kunstler thinks things will look like in the aftermath of the (somewhat dramatized) scenario that he describes is similarly pessimistic: "Hillary, if elected, will not get to play FDR-2. Rather, she’ll be stuck in the role of Hoover, the Return, presiding over a freight elevator of an economy with a broken cable. Expect problems with the US dollar. Expect 'emergency' actions. Expect the unintended consequences of those actions."

That may well be the case. But given how the public is sure to react to this disaster, I believe major governmental reforms will result from it as well. After the collapse occurs, the economically populist movements that we've witnessed in the past several years such as Occupy Wall Street and Democracy Spring will likely experience massive reboots, with hundreds of millions of people across the country from all sides of the political spectrum coming together in opposition to the destructive and tremendously unfair economic system. This revolt, in addition to resulting in the rise of a populist third party, will force the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties to comply with the demands of their base, with President Clinton and the other corporatists in Washington suddenly taking on a less neoliberal approach to governing amid overwhelming public pressure. At least to an extent, and not by choice, Hillary may get to "play FDR-2" after all.

Of course, such dramatic changes in the right direction will not come easily or quickly, and that will create additional problems. Economic inequality tends to lead to the rise of fascist regimes, and Trump's campaign only represents the beginning of what will happen to American politics as faith in established institutions and  the ideological "center" continues to erode in the coming years; reactionary populism is bound to succeed in future elections in addition to progressive populism, and the next time the political demons that neoliberalism has summoned have an opportunity to come out, they will have a much better chance to win than has been the case in 2016.

"There must be many others out there like myself wondering who will emerge from the rubble?" writes Kunstler regarding the person who's waiting in the wings to fill the role of Trump's ideological heir four years from now. "I suspect it will be someone we haven’t heard of before, just as Bonaparte was unheard of in France in 1792."

Thankfully, though, as Peter Turchin concludes in his essay, such a fate for our society, wherein the public reacts to income inequality by blowing up the system rather than changing it, is entirely avoidable:

Our society, like all previous complex societies, is on a rollercoaster. Impersonal social forces bring us to the top; then comes the inevitable plunge. But the descent is not inevitable. Ours is the first society that can perceive how those forces operate, even if dimly. This means that we can avoid the worst — perhaps by switching to a less harrowing track, perhaps by redesigning the rollercoaster altogether.

In any case, though, the neoliberal paradigm's chances of surviving the next five or ten years is the same as the chance a car will continue traveling upward after it's reached the top of a hill. Those who have been left behind by neoliberalism already want it replaced by something better, and while economic meltdown appears to be the only thing that can motivate them to take sufficient action, it will all be worthwhile in the long run.

Green Party's Lithuania Victory May Foreshadow A Similar Event In The US

Ballots being cast in this month's Lithuanian parliamentary election.

Chances are if you're reading this, you don't often follow Lithuanian politics. But if you do, you've recently seen something interesting take place: on Sunday the 9th, Lithuania's Peasants and Green Party, despite its candidates generally trailing in the polls, won 20 out of the 70 available parliamentary seats during that day's election.

Because several parties were competing with them (a common phenomenon in democracies other than the United States), this means that they've taken the most seats in Lithuania's parliament. And though they're still behind in the polls ahead of the second phase of the elections, which will take place on October 23, this could mean that they'll defy the odds again and take control of the country's government.

This comes as good news for the Lithuanian Greens' American counterparts.

Though I've only begun to look into the country that I'm talking about (oh, now I see it on the map...it's that one between Russia and Poland), I can report that there are striking similarities between the factors behind these election results and the situation in the United States.

Let's flash back to the Great Recession, which, for Lithuania, began in 2009. In response to it, the country's government, headed by the center-right Homeland Union Party, passed austerity measures that drove up poverty by raising taxes while at the same time cutting public services. Though to be fair, such actions were necessary at the time to save Lithuania from a debt crisis, their consequences for the poor and the middle-class were made apparent by how the Homeland Union was voted out of power in the 2012 elections because of growing populist sentiments.

But for many Lithuanian voters in 2016, the policies of the newly elected Social Democratic Party have not been enough as the recession's effects continue to be widely felt. And so two days ago, the Peasants and Green Party's promises of more radical reforms to the economy contrary to Social Democrats' center-left approach won over undecided voters and earned it a possible position as the new ruling party of Lithuania.

This story has a lot of parallels to what's happened in the U.S. since the start of the recession. After the 2008 financial crisis, which President Bush shared much of the blame for, Republicans were voted out in 2006 and 2008 because of this and other failures to protect peace, the environment, and the economy.

However, since then, Democrats have proven to not be much better, with the Obama Administration's efforts to revive the economy being insufficient, its health care bill failing to address the health care crisis, its trade deals hurting American workers and the environment, and its wars wasting enormous amounts of tax money. As a result, income inequality has continued to increase at about the same rate regardless of whether a Democrat or a Republican is president. Worst of all has been the unwillingness of both Republicans and Democrats to keep the financial sector under control, with their support of the Wall Street bailouts and their failure to break up the big banks having created the factors for another economic crash.

And just like in Lithuania, Americans are increasingly showing a commitment to overthrowing the neoliberal order that both of its most established parties represent. This is reflected in the campaign of Bernie Sanders, which, had it not been derailed by widespread voter suppression and electoral fraud, would have made it so that a self-described democratic socialist is well on his way to becoming the next U.S. president.

Because Sanders' run can be considered a last-ditch effort to reform the Democratic Party into something genuinely populist, the movement that it represented will most likely find a new home in the same place where Lithuania's leftist movement has: an alternative party which isn't tethered to corporate capitalism. Already, the Green Party of the U.S. is experiencing a major surge in support, with its 2016 presidential nominee Jill Stein (and also, perhaps, the dozens of other Greens running for the House and the Senate) on track to receive a lot more of the vote on November 8 than most polls estimate. And given the recent ideological fractures in America's party system, it's entirely possible that in the next several election cycles we'll see the rise of a third party that's capable of reforming America's economic system, which, by default, will likely be the Greens.

Sadly, the response to the worldwide trend in income inequality hasn't always taken such positive forms. Lithuania is unique in how it's one of the few democracies that has yet to see neo-fascist demagogues gain prominence in its government because of the economic hardships that its citizens are experiencing, with the neoliberal policies that so many countries have adopted in the last few decades producing a trend towards reactionary, far-right politics.

Right next to it in Poland, for example, representatives of such movements have gained control of the parliament, with their cracking down of civil liberties accompanying the nationalist culture that their presence has created. In the UK, June's Brexit vote may only be a foreshadowing of the victories that the country's burgeoning hard-right movements have the potential for winning in the next few years. And in the United States, though the current manifestation of this global movement Donald Trump is on his way to losing, four more years of the status-quo centrism that his opponent Hillary Clinton represents could very well result in the rise of something far more sinister in 2020.

These events resemble the vision of the future conjured by author Peter Moore who, after the 2008 financial crisis, wrote an account of what the future of global politics might look like if the current economic paradigm persisted. This paragraph, written in the context of some mentions of nationalist demagoguery being prevalent in the new political environment, indicates where he believes such trends would lead:

The new president might have better heeded his predecessor’s first, prudent steps toward silencing political opposition in time of national emergency. Instead, his glasnost-like policies met with that idea’s same ruinous results. A gesture of openness to the frivolous American media was only met with the usual anarchic outcries for still more information. Overtures of friendship toward leaders of the opposition faction in the Congress, such as Senators McConnell, Bond, and Cornyn, and Representatives Boehner and Hoekstra, were viewed as signs of weakness, and merely solicited further demands for power-sharing. It will seem strange today to many in Asia, or even in the “Failed World” of the West—where nation after nation has of late moved away from the constraints of the multiparty state—that such individuals were not summarily charged with high treason. But such were the logical endpoints of American-style “democracy.”

Of course, such a dark turn of events is anything but inevitable. The lowbrow appeal of Trumpism can be countered with the leftist radicalism offered by Sanders and the Greens, and if Americans build the Green Party into something viable by 2020-a task less daunting than it sounds-we'll easily be able to defeat the neo-fascists. For those in countries not dominated by two irredeemably corporatist parties, the necessary mission will be to make the already established leftist parties strong enough to fight the gathering political demons. But if these efforts fail, at least moving to Lithuania will still be an option.

Democrats Share As Much Of The Blame As Republicans Do For Trump's Rise

As Donald Trump's campaign appears to be collapsing, with the weeks-long period of him refraining from doing anything politically self-destructive that allowed him to nearly take the lead in national polls ahead of September's presidential debate now over, Democrats can once again bask in the comfort of having such a weak opponent.

It's in times like these that Democrats can also take Trump's nomination as a means to feel superior to Republicans. There are many internet memes which include things like a picture of a laughing President Obama saying, "And then my successful, scandal-free administration pissed them off so much, they actually lost their minds and nominated Donald Trump for president!" The real Obama's take on why Trump succeeded is basically an elaborated version of that: "What is happening in this primary is just a distillation of what’s been happening inside their party for more than a decade. I mean, the reason that many of their voters are responding is because this is what’s been fed through the messages they’ve been sending for a long time — that you just make flat assertions that don’t comport with the facts. That you just deny the evidence of science. That compromise is a betrayal. That the other side isn’t simply wrong, or we just disagree, we want to take a different approach, but the other side is destroying the country, or treasonous. I mean, that’s — look it up. That’s what they’ve been saying."

His view of the race, undoubtedly shared by most other Democrats, is very much accurate. The Republican electorate's embrace of Trump can indeed be largely attributed to the reactionary rhetoric, escalated partisanship, and, frankly, anti-intellectualism of conservative figures in politics and the media over the course of the past several decades.

What Obama and Friends would rather not focus on, though, is the fact that they've played their own role in this.

The Trumpist electorate

Before I move to the main focus of this article, I'll provide some background as to who exactly Trump's supporters are.

While it would be somewhat of an overstatement to say that those responsible for Trump's nomination are generally as economically disadvantaged as, say, Bernie Sanders supporters, their judgement has certainly been influenced by financial circumstances. Though an analysis from Gallup has found that most of Trump's supporters are in fact relatively well-off economically, when income inequality is at record levels, "relatively well-off" can in itself be a relative term.

The study also shows that they tend to live in communities in which their younger, poorer neighbors tend to have a difficult time getting ahead. Because of this, and perhaps also because these older, middle-class whites recall times where there was more economic opportunity, it may well be that they're embracing Trump's bigoted but still economically populist message because they worry for the livelihoods of their children. As Washington Post writer Max Ehrenfreund observed when writing an article about the Gallup survey:

Trump supporters might not be experiencing acute economic distress, but they are living in places that lack economic opportunity for the next generation.
Rothwell [the economist who conducted the analysis] used data from Harvard economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, who studied how children born in the 1980s moved up or down the economic ladder depending on where they grew up. Children raised in places with high economic mobility, such as Boston or Pittsburgh, often surpassed their parents in socioeconomic status. Children raised in places with low economic mobility, such as Raleigh, N.C., and Indianapolis, struggled just to do as well as their parents in adulthood.
Trump was especially popular in these parts of the country.

In short, though Trump's brand of reactionary, xenophobic populism deserves no appreciation, and his economic agenda in fact does nothing to help working people (aside from his admittedly correct stance on trade), he would not have been able to get this far without having taken advantage of the public's mounting dissatisfaction with their place in the economy. This is just one part of a larger phenomenon that's appeared throughout the industrialized world in the last several years wherein demagogues like Trump are succeeding by capitalizing on people's growing economic insecurities, and misguided as Trump's followers are, it's not enough to simply write them off as products of an unenlightened facet of our culture. This is where the Democrats come in.

Reaganomics for the left

Most Americans are in agreement that the elite-oriented, neoliberal policies of the past thirty-five years or so have not helped their economic interests. But while Republicans have naturally been worse than Democrats on protecting the middle-class and helping the economy grow, the latter party certainly deserves much of the blame for getting us where we are today.

Firstly, though Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats who succeeded him in the following decades do deserve credit for their commitment to the rights of workers compared to that of the Republicans, they in fact share some responsibility for ushering in Reaganomics. Because, as Tony Wilsdon writes regarding the deeper economic effects of Roosevelt's Democratic Party:

Roosevelt was elected in November 1932, four years into the Great Depression – which was caused by the collapse of the financial speculation of the 1920s – as a fiscal conservative. Unrest was growing across the country as tens of millions of unemployed and impoverished workers were close to starvation. Determined demonstrations and strikes – including local general strikes – began to multiply, and growing numbers of workers were starting to criticize the capitalist system that had so wantonly cast them aside.

Roosevelt saw the radicalizing labor movement and the growing influence of socialists as a potential threat to the capitalist system. He abandoned fiscal conservatism, which was only making the conditions of ordinary people worse and preventing economic recovery, and instead adopted policies based on pumping money into the economy to support demand. This approach was most famously advocated by the British economist John Meynard Keynes and such policies are often described as “Keynesian.” Sections of the ruling class opposed Roosevelt’s policies as “socialism” but, as he explained, his intent was to save the system, not undermine it.

In other words, unlike the methods that the Scandanavian countries employed around that time to fight corporate power, the policies of Roosevelt's Democratic Party didn't go far enough to curb the problems of the established economic system. This, argues Wilsdon, led to the recession of the 1970's, which gave advocates of big business an excuse to make America give up the Keynesian spending on social programs that had gone on during the past several decades. What followed, of course, was the normalization of neoliberalism in the politics of the U.S. and most other countries.

The Democrats' response to this trend, especially after having contributed in part to the factors that set it in motion, was utterly irresponsible. Rather than fighting Reaganomics, they worked to help it, with Ronald Reagan being able to get his 1981 and 1986 tax cuts through Congress despite Democrats holding a majority in the House in both cases. The same is true for Reagan's ultimately disastrous deregulation bills, all of which were approved by a Democratic Party that had drifted disturbingly far from its more populist past since the 1980 election. Walter Mondale admitted this ideological shift in his 1984 DNC speech, saying that "After we lost we didn't tell the American people that they were wrong. Instead, we began asking you what our mistakes had been." He then pointed out that the Democrats' platform now included no business taxes that "weaken our economy."

Though if you look at the history of income inequality in the U.S, embracing neoliberal policies turned out to not be such a good idea, that didn't stop the Democrats from continuing to do so. The Democratic Party of the Clintons thankfully wasn't an extension of its past enthusiasm for tax cuts, but it did introduce the Democrats to another, similarly destructive facet of neoliberalism: the violation of worker's rights, or as it's more often referred to, "free trade."

The North American Free Trade Agreement-praised by Bill Clinton after signing it as something that meant "good paying American jobs"-has since killed over 1 million jobs in the US and wrecked Mexico's economy. Clinton's implementation of the world trade organization has had similar consequences. Obama has repeated Clinton's policies on trade, with the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement of 2011 having so far destroyed more than 106,000 American jobs. And perhaps the most destructive "free trade" deal that Democrats are responsible for is been the 2011 U.S.-Panama Free Trade Agreement, which allowed thousands of wealthy individuals around the world to avoid paying hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes.

The worst, though, may be yet to come, as the Obama Administration continues to pursue the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an even more ambitious version of NAFTA which would kill jobs and consumer protections. Although the TPP has an almost zero chance of passing this year, and Obama's likely successor Hillary Clinton claims that she opposes the deal, it's almost certain that that isn't her true position on the matter.

Additionally, since their ideological transformation during the 1980's and 90's, Democrats have killed welfare, instituted Wall Street deregulations that played a large part in the 2008 financial crisis, passed a trillion dollar Wall Street bailout at the expense of taxpayers, and even narrowly given George W. Bush the majority of House votes needed to pass his disastrous 2003 tax cut bill. These and other instances of Democrats betraying their middle and working class base during the past few decades have played an important part in the enormous transfer in wealth towards the top that's occurred since the late 70's. Had Democrats been willing to sufficiently confront the problems with our economic system during its Roosevelt era, or at least have not resorted to neoliberalism during the Reagan era, it's safe to say that the economic factors which produced Trump would not have come to be.

Thankfully, they won't be able to keep doing so for much longer.

A breaking point

It's been made clear this year that as a consequence of the facts above, Clintonism-the neoliberal, politically triangulating strategy of the modern Democratic Party-has wrought its own doom by alienating working class people on both the left and and the right. Well, it's not quite dead, obviously, given Hillary Clinton's most recent poll numbers, but were she running against any of Trump's former Republican challengers, things would be very different. In this way, we can consider Donald Trump the life support for Clinton's campaign-and for Clintonism in general.

But even life support might not be able to keep Clintonism alive for much longer.

Because of the increased concentration and financialization of the economy that occurred because of the 2008 Wall Street bailout which Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and many other Senate Democrats voted for, the meager economic recovery that Obama has given us is about to go out the window. The dangerous re-wiring of the economy that the bailouts caused, wherein the big banks are now firmly in control of the world's markets, has set the stage for another financial collapse. And given the massive debt bubble that's occurred globally, along with the development of a new housing bubble and a stock market that's ripe for another crash, this catastrophic event could very well begin before the election-which, I believe, would easily give Trump the presidency as voters become dissatisfied with the Democratic Party.

Whether such a thing transpires will all depend on how the stock market behaves this next month. If the financial dike can hold until after then, Clintonism and the Democratic Party will be able to survive for a few more years, with Hillary herself making its final stand before being dislodged in the politically transformative 2020 election. Hopefully by then, given how reforming the Democratic Party into something better is pretty much impossible, we'll have seen the rise of a populist third party that takes its place. But in the meantime, as the unfortunate phenomenon which is Trumpism threatens our country in this election and will continue to threaten it in the coming years, it's important to cast the blame where it belongs: on the political establishment, Republican and Democratic.