A Repeat Of The Tea Party Isn't Enough-We Need A Revolution To Counter The Trump Regime

Like most every other disaster throughout history, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The Democratic elite had just committed perhaps the worst affront to democracy this country has ever seen by stealing the presidency from Bernie Sanders, and the Sanders supporters, who'd grown more than numerous enough to decide the election, were largely convinced that if Clinton could do this and get away with it, she could no longer claim the title of the lesser evil. Indeed, the rigging of the 2016 Democratic primaries, and the disturbing McCarthyite tactics that establishment Democrats launched after this rigging was revealed, have made it so that I personally find Hillary and Friends just as frightening as the Trump regime.

A big mistake many of my fellow anti-Clintonist progressives made, though, was becoming so eager to get rid of Clinton that they'd taken to talking down the threat of the alternative. "As bad as Trump is," wrote the otherwise always spot-on leftist blogger Michael E Sparks in his breakup letter to the Democratic Party, "he would just spin his wheels for four years. Both Republicans and Democrats would vote down everything he tried to do. The insiders hate him. He has no government experience. He can’t navigate it. He would just be a four-year Jon Stewart punchline." Those exact sentiments were expressed by a great deal of other former Sanders supporters, me included; how bad could Trump really be, we reasoned, given the facts mentioned above?

I'll get to exactly why this view of Trump is not accurate in a second, but the reason I think so many on the anti-Clinton left dismissed the notion that Trump posed much of a threat had to do with something I call the Tea Party Fantasy. When Trump got in, a lot of progressives believed, the left would do in 2017 what the right did in 2009 and easily overwhelm the new regime, along with the establishment of one of the major parties, with a years-long festival of grassroots political action. And so far things have for the most part lived up those expectations, with the fierce progressive backlash having likely ruined the GOP's hopes of repealing or even reforming Obamacare while the power structure of the neoliberal Democrats gets chipped away at more and more every month. At this rate, you'd think, by the time the Tea Party of the left is finished, Trump and Friends will be pretty much irrelevant as president-elect Bernie Sanders prepares to take office as the leader of the now corporatism-free Democratic Party.

The hard truth, though, is that our task is far bigger than staging an inverse repeat of the Tea Party. Because this is not 2009, and Donald Trump is not Barack Obama.

Consider these words, as written by the staunch anti-Clinton leftist Chris Hedges shortly after the election:

We await the crisis. It could be economic. It could be a terrorist attack within the United States. It could be widespread devastation caused by global warming. It could be nationwide unrest as the death spiral of the American empire intensifies. It could be another defeat in our endless and futile wars. The crisis is coming. And when it arrives it will be seized upon by the corporate state, nominally led by a clueless real estate developer, to impose martial law and formalize the end of American democracy.

When we look back on this sad, pathetic period in American history we will ask the questions all who have slid into despotism ask. Why were we asleep? How did we allow this to happen? Why didn’t we see it coming? Why didn’t we resist?

The specter he anticipates is one that anyone can objectively see coming, but that many of my fellow left-wing opponents of the Democratic establishment still refuse to acknowledge can happen because of their attachment to the Tea Party Fantasy: during Trump's term, perhaps sometime very soon, there will inevitably be a major crisis, most likely, I think, in the form of a terrorist attack. And as we saw almost sixteen years ago with the case of the dystopia portrayed in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, such an event can easily lead to extremely violent and authoritarian behavior on the part of the government. Especially when that government is headed by the likes of the Bush or Trump administrations.

And seeing as the Bush team looks warm and fuzzy compared to the current regime, this time the aftermath of the attack will no doubt be horrifying on a level that Americans have never been forced to confront. Trump himself may not be competent enough to create an autocracy, and he and his administration may be for now reviled by the vast majority of Americans including most in Congress, the Senate, the media, and the Deep State, but terrorist attacks have ways of shaking things up. Immediately after this event, Trump's approval ratings will no doubt go way, way up merely because of his position as the commander of a nation in crisis, and frazzled as he'll be, his far smarter and ideologically committed top aides will see to it that he wastes no time in taking some very big actions. As most of the House, the Senate, the press, and the public becomes compliant towards the president, his egoistic and domineering personality will partner with the terrifying cunning of behind-the-throne rulers like Mike Pence and Steve Bannon to bring about an exponential expansion of executive power and the irrelevance of laws saying that power can be challenged. And by the time the following period of wild military ventures, mass arrests of any perceived dissenters, and expanded corporate power makes most people again turn against the regime, it will be too late. As Chris Hedges says, the pretense of democracy will be ended, and fighting back will be virtually impossible.

No, Trump is not 2017's equivalent of 2009 Obama. The latter, like the Democratic Party, was prone to tepid liberal moderation and capitulation towards his political opponents, something Trump and Friends are the antithesis of. And the supporters of this president are driven not by the reassuring fuzziness of "hope and change" but by bitterly paranoid hatred and fear. Even before the coming 9/11 event, these facts have been chillingly demonstrated on multiple occasions, such as that of the victory salute a prominent group of neo-Nazis gave for Trump in November which provoked a disturbingly tepid response from the Trump team, and the Trump rally last month that a witness describes as having included a "horrifying" amount of zeal, nationalism, and "demonic activity."

Trump's administration may look like the politically fragile product of a "straw man" candidacy whose power is severely limited by the government's checks and balances, but as will soon be made apparent to all, it's a fascist time bomb that will go off as soon as the next big attack happens. It has a powerful enough movement behind it, it has a path to greatly increased influence, and all it has to do is wait. Michael Sparks himself seems to suspect it, having lately taken to comparing Trump with Hitler. And more than ever, he has some good reasons to justify doing so, what with the Trump administration having recently signed an executive order that in many ways dismantles various aspects of government, including the state, educational, and justice departments, so as to consolidate authority to the executive branch.

So what do we do? The bad news is that in many ways, the opportunity to avoid the course towards this insane future ended when Bernie Sanders was cheated out of the nomination. The good news is that to soften the fascist blow awaiting us, all we have to do is ramp up what we're already doing: getting involved in the political process.

We must firmly draw the line between the Sanders coalition's movement and the so-called resistance movement of the Democratic establishment, the latter of which, in addition to serving as a public relations tool for corporate Democrats, is run by people whose political brand makes them inherently unable to truly resist a fascist. We must talk to all of our generally non-political friends, relatives and neighbors about the gravity of the situation so as to make the percentage of Americans who have become more politically involved in the face of Trump go from its current 25% to more than twice that. We must redouble our commitment to donating to anti/Trump and/or anti-neoliberal Democrat organizations, participating in and/or organizing protests and strikes, signing petitions, contacting political leaders, and simply spreading information that increases awareness of the threat at hand. A good opportunity to do so is the "Berniecrats' Day of Action" that I'm organizing, which takes place on March 25, the one-year anniversary of the moment a bird so upliftingly visited Bernie Sanders at one of his rallies.

"Now is the time not to cooperate," writes Chris Hedges in his blueprint for revolt. "Now is the time to shut down the systems of power. Now is the time to resist. It is our last chance. The fanatics are moving with lightning speed. So should we." To do so will take more than following in the footsteps of the Tea Partiers; this will require the creation of a movement whose success has no parallel.

For Democratic Elites, "The Resistance" Isn't About Saving The Country-It's About War

We all knew it was coming. The buildup to it had been happening for months-years, in fact, if you counted the whole history of this drama. But when the inevitable did at last appear, it felt no less shocking and appalling than in any other case for the fairly small minority of Americans who disapproved of it. On March 4, 2021, the new president has announced the U.S. is now planning to send forces into Russia.

Some have seen this coming for a lot longer than others. For many on the far left and the far right-who, it turns out, have a lot more in common than it would appear-expectations of something like this happening have been experienced for as long as four-and-a-half years ago, when establishment Democrats started doing to their opponents what Republicans used to do to them and went on a relentless Red-baiting campaign. In this case, the Red Scare was based on the still unsubstantiated claim that Putin's hackers gave WikiLeaks the DNC emails. From there on things only got crazier.

By mid-winter, Obama was spending the last weeks of his term using the at that point religiously accepted "Russia hacked the election" narrative to push sanctions onto Russia while the beloved gang of late-night liberal comedians made really ha-ha funny jokes about taking this feud with Russia further. By spring 2017, top Democrats were blatantly saying they wanted war with Russia, a development that was shortly followed by NATO allies starting to express similar sentiments. As the Russia rhetoric coming from establishment Democrats, anti-Trump neocons, and Deep State officials grew more and more unhinged, so did the conspiracy theories they used to justify it. When the great economic crash of 2017 happened, many of the leaders in the pre-war effort tried to deflect attention from the fact that the crisis was largely the fault of Obama by claiming it was the result of Putin's trying to "sabotage the American economy." By the time much of the pro-Trump fervor following the terrorist attack of 2017 died down, some of them even tried to link the attack to Putin. All the way through, much of the American population accepted this 21st century Cold War propaganda, and the theoretical war's supporters only grew going into the 2020 election.

Hillary Clinton's victory over Trump in 2020 was as narrow and unexpected as her defeat had been in 2016. Having become the Democratic nominee only because of the massive voter suppression and electoral fraud perpetrated by pro-Clinton primary election officials as had been the case in 2016, she'd always appeared to be an even weaker candidate than she'd been the last time around. The one factor behind her coming-from-behind victory, it seemed, was the fact that she and her supporters had run the most rabidly McCarthyite campaign imaginable, which motivated the at that point solid majority who wanted war with Russia to come to the polls. And now, after a month-and-a-half of president Clinton laying the final foundations for this war with sanctions and quiet deployments of NATO forces close to Russia, she's finally done what we've all come to quietly expect. Americans may not have much money these days, or much more time where oil is easily accessible, or hope for a stable climate, but at least they now have an entertaining show to watch.

Dystopian essay concluded. I'm of course not saying this is exactly how I think the next four years will unfold, or that Hillary Clinton will be the one to usher the war in if it does happen (though that's a real possibility), or that things won't go completely the other way. But I am saying that as the members of the Deep State, the Democratic leadership, and the corporate media continue to assess their priorities for the Trump era, this is certainly the kind of future that they intend to bring about. And the so-called resistance movement is their most valuable tool for realizing that future.

We'd all like to think the current dynamic is a contest between the Trump regime and the Trump regime's noble, rightly unified opposition. If that were the case, things would be simple for those who want to avert the nation's slouch into fascism at the hands of Trump and Friends; all we'd have to do is get behind the Resistance movement, and everything would be fine. The complex truth, though, is that there's currently a quiet effort to divert the energy of the anti-Trump movement into something that could very well ultimately create something just as dangerous as a Trump Reich: a full scale war between Russia and the United States.

Anyone who's been paying much attention to the recent actions of the non-Trump forces within the American centers of power can tell they're preparing for a new war with Russia. Half the country believed Russia and the U.S. were heading for conflict in Gallup's latest poll on the matter, and that survey was taken a full year ago, before the breakout of this "Russia hacked the election" business. If that poll were taken now, well above 50% would no doubt think war with Russia is coming, and a significant faction among them would likely approve of this. All of what I said in the second and third paragraphs of this piece preceding the mention of a 2017 economic crash is true, with those in the coalition that's formed between establishment Democrats, Deep State officials, and much of the major media amid the rise of Trump having been engaging in an unsettling campaign of Red baiting. And this campaign resembles an all-out war effort more all the time. Such a war would be very profitable for these forces, both financially and politically, and they're going to be spending these next three-and-a-half years exploiting every bit of the public's righteous anti-Trump sentiment with the goal of building support for this project.

The propaganda they've employed in the effort to do so has been both frightening and amusing. They've created something of a buffer to protect their supporters from finding out their true motives by often strongly implying that any news sources outside of the corporate media's neoliberal Democrat echo chamber are run by Kremlin operatives. They've used every means reality provides them to try to draw a link between the Democratic establishment's opponents and Russia. They've in some cases, like the one pictured above, gotten rank-and-file individuals to become outraged at their baseless McCarthyite claims instead of the real problems our country is facing.

Speaking of which, these threats posed by the Trump regime-elevated militarism, increasing racial and economic inequality, climate change, expanded government authority to survey, punish, and censor citizens-are not the concern of these "resistance" leaders. All of these things have very much been perpetrated or endorsed by the Democratic Party, the Deep State, and the corporate media, and when they claim to be standing in solidarity with the cause of climate, labor, civil libertarian, and human rights activists who represent the truly productive aspect of the Resistance, it of course isn't genuine. Paul Street assesses the real problems these figures have with Trump in his piece The Deep State's Hatred Of Trump Is Not The Same As Yours:

"The establishment’s contempt for the orange-haired beast, I noted [in a past article on this subject], was different. The nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire were perfectly willing to live with most, if not all, of what the left hated about Trump. After all, I reasoned, they’d been backing or tolerating most or all of those terrible things under presidents from both major United States parties for decades. Trump, I wrote, faced ruling-class disdain because he was considered bad for transnational capital and the American empire. For the most part, the 'deep state' masters who backed Hillary Clinton did not appreciate The Donald’s blustering promises to roll back the neoliberal 'free trade' agenda in the name of the forgotten working class. The foreign policy and 'national security' establishment especially hated his criticism of Washington’s long march toward war with Russia. They did not relish the related threat Trump posed to Brand America. It is longstanding, bipartisan, U.S. ruling-class doctrine that this country is the world’s great beacon and agent of democracy, human rights, justice and freedom. American reality has never matched the doctrine, but smart rulers knew that it would be especially difficult to align those claims with a president like Trump."

Furthermore, as Counterpunch's Chris Floyd observes after criticizing the joke about war with Russia that I mentioned earlier, these figures aren't even truly at odds with Trump: "See how ha-ha funny that is? Especially from the funny ha-ha folks at SNL — who paid Trump to be the host of their show while he was conducting the most racist, hateful political campaign in modern American history. They normalized his hatred, they gave him a national platform to show he was an all-right guy with a sense of humor, no big threat, no big deal. They normalized him, lionized him, helped him reach millions of people who pay little attention to the news. Now, of course, they’re 'leading the resistance' with 'cutting-edge comedy' — Alec Baldwin puckering his lips and fawning on a shirtless Putin — and with really funny ha-ha stuff like saying Trump should totally be more like that gutsy Hitler guy and 'take on Russia.' Meanwhile, Trump and his minions and the Congressional extremists are already rolling back every law and regulation they can lay their hands on in a slavering frenzy to poison the earth, remove all restrictions on corporate rapine, strip millions of health care, roll back decades of hard-fought civil rights advances, double the military budget and build a Berlin Wall on the Mexican border. It’s a full-bore Barbarossa on the wellbeing and common good of the American people (and the world) — but who cares about that? According to the funny ha-ha guys at SNL — and practically the entire Democratic Party and the so-called liberal media — what Trump should really be doing is 'taking on Russia.'"

In short, if you think this picture is as simple as us, the military and intelligence communities, the major media, the Democratic Party, all those wonderful late-night liberal comics, and that similarly lovable George W. Bush against the Trump regime, you're being taken for a dangerous ride. As I've said before, Trump needs these figures to keep up his charade of being an admirable enemy of the establishment, and these figures need Trump to keep up their ruse of being noble protectors of a sane order. Trump, in his usual carelessness, has even blown the cover multiple times on this symbiotic relationship of theirs by tweeting last year that he would rather run against Hillary Clinton than Bernie Sanders, and then having tweeted last week that he couldn't be happier for the Republican Party now that the neoliberal Tom Perez has been appointed DNC chair. So it's a surprise that about half the left and most of the right still doesn't seem to recognize what's really going on here.

Given that, a U.S.-Russia war isn't the only kind of conflict Democratic elites want to perpetuate-they also stand to gain from a largely theatrical war between themselves and the Trumpists. The staged scuffle between Republicans and Democrats that the oligarchy until recently used to protect its interests has escalated into a war between neo-fascists and sleazy, warmongering neocons. And since the conflict between the Trumpists and the Clintonists is a lot more evenly matched than it appears, with the former camp able to gain a lot more political leverage through terrorist attacks and wars with countries other than Russia, this war could continue for a while, possibly until two election cycles from now. Because by then, the oligarchs who profit from all these wars could very well be forced to retreat into the luxury survival bunkers that many of them are creating for themselves after their half-century long quest for more collapses society as we know it.

The encouraging thing we can take out of all this is that the oligarchy-benefiting war between Republicans and Democrats has been escalated for a reason. The plutocrats are taking notice amid the populist uprisings that have appeared in the recent years, and they're desperate to divert the energy of these movements away from the direction of defeating the neoliberal order. Through determined efforts to resist the war efforts mentioned, we can unite not just the Sandersist left but pretty much all of the 99.9% around the goal of taking away the power of the corporate and deep states. We can set the country in a better direction. But to do so, we'll need to understand the war-related obstacles that are being put in front of us.

Establishment Democrats Aren't Fighting Trump Enough Because They're Essentially On His Side

It's an old stereotype that Democrats never put up as big a fight as their opponents typically do. And it's mostly accurate. Ronald Reagan was able to pass all of his tax cuts and deregulations through a Democratic Congress; Bill Clinton gave into the wishes of Republicans on many occasions; Barack Obama displayed a similar folly of caving into his political opponents all too much; and everyone remembers the tragic consequences of how most House and Senate Democrats voted for the Iraq War.

So it's no surprise that a month after I predicted most top Democrats wouldn't stand up to Donald Trump, my ability to do political forecasts has been vindicated (to mixed feelings on my part). Since then, an unacceptable amount of Senate Democrats (including the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer) have voted to confirm Trump's cabinet nominees. Among these bipartisan-endorsed leaders are Mike Pompeo, who wants to expand America's surveillance state into a database for the financial information and "lifestyle" details of U.S. citizens as well as bring back torture, as well as an array of other such extreme and/or unqualified individuals.

Why are these Democrats acting so submissively towards Trump? It likely has to do with the fact that despite all their obligatory condemnations of him, their agenda isn't very different from his.

Let's get beyond all the tough rhetoric Democrats like these have obligatorily directed towards Trump and take a good look at how they actually compare to him: first off, they're for the most part both tied in with Wall Street and corporate interests. Whereas Trump has completed the government takeover Goldman Sachs has long been inching towards by putting a great deal of executives from the bank in his cabinet, Chuck Schumer, like many other Democrats, takes massive amounts of campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs and the other major financial institutions. Whereas Trump and his cabinet display vast inclinations towards increased U.S. militarism, the president that Democrats like Schumer have so unwaveringly backed for the last eight years more or less continued the hawkishness of the Bush administration. Whereas Trump and certain members of his cabinet, as has been established, want to expand on Bush and Obama's surveillance state and bring back torture, Chuck Schumer for one has endorsed both of these things.

The list goes on and on of the grotesque similarities between the Democratic and Republican parties, and thus between establishment Democrats and the Trump administration. Both parties are owned by Wall Street and large corporations, both parties hurt nonwhites through mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, and the advancement of economic inequality, both parties serve the oil companies and weapons contractors which benefit from a bloated and over-used American military, and both parties benefit from America's compromised electoral system. So it's no surprise that they tend to work together so often.

Perhaps the eagerness Democrats have shown over these last few decades to submit to Republicans has not been out of wimpiness, but out of a calculated strategy on their part to further their hawkish, neoliberal interests. These always-willing-to-compromise Democrats have rarely stood anything to lose by helping the Republicans expand corporate rule, start wars, and confirm pro-surveillance state cabinet nominees; establishment Democrats, after all, are very much on board with these goals. And the Republicans, who profess them more openly than Democrats do, provide a handy outlet for establishment Democrats to get them passed. When Republicans propose such objectives, establishment Democrats can simply vote along with them and then use "pragmatism" or "bipartisanship" as an excuse.

But make no mistake, this is not about those things; this is about corporate Democrats finding a sneaky way to blatantly (but not openly) bring about their true, center-right agenda. It's no coincidence that in every instance, it's been the more moderate Democrats that have gone along with Republican goals while those on the left have been the ones staunchly opposing them. Rarely, if ever, have we seen one of the neoliberal "progressives" refusing to budge when Republicans call for policies which drive up the wealth gap, destabilize the middle east, and assault civil liberties. It was Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, who has always opposed the Iraq War, Bush's Wall Street bailout, and measures like the Patriot Act and "enhanced interrogation." And it's the Sandersist wing of the Democratic Party, not the Clintonist one, which can be relied upon to protect the country from Trump's agenda.

Sarah Jones argued similarly last week in her piece The Case Against Unity:

It's not enough for Democrats to call themselves The Resistance. They must also explain what it is they're resisting. Is it simply Trump? Or is it the ideology that helped put Trump in power?

Here, Democrats should take a lesson from the left. "Movements can mobilize people to refuse, to disobey, in effect to strike," Frances Fox Piven recently wrote in The Nation. "[P]eople in motion, in movements, can throw sand in the gears of the institutions that depend on their cooperation." Fight for 15, Occupy, Black Lives Matter: They point the way forward. So, too, did last Saturday's Women’s March. In each instance, people rallied around a cause, not a person or a party. They did not turn out for politicians, they were not attracted by celebrities. They turned out because they wished to identify themselves with a specific values statement. Their actions teach us what it means to do politics—and warn us against defining politics in electoral terms alone.

The Democratic Party will continue to fail unless it understands this. The victims of its failure won't be Hillary Clinton or David Brock but vulnerable Americans whose survival depends on the party's ability to oppose Trumpism. Its left-wing critics have no choice but to reject its calls for unity. The stakes are too high to do anything else.

In other words, whenever establishment Democrats call for an end to the infighting within the left so that we can unite against Trump, they're essentially calling for unification behind the Trump government itself. In terms of both electoral and non-electoral politics, it's become clear, Sandersism represents the best chance Democrats have to defeat Trumpism.

The Only Ideology That Can Defeat Trumpism, According To Math

A long while back in American political history-which is to say, before the election of Donald Trump-Bernie Sanders supporter John Laurits wrote a piece titled The Only Candidate That Can Defeat The GOP, According To Math. In it, as you've no doubt guessed by now, he laid out the simple facts, which were that Sanders, not Clinton, was the Democratic candidate who could appeal to enough Democrats and independents to be able to win against Trump.

But to consequences yet to be fully determined, Democratic leaders chose to disregard this and other pieces of evidence that their preferred candidate was not up to the job of beating Trump, and they blocked Sanders' nomination. And now, with our political system having hit what the writer Michael E. Sparks considers to be rock bottom, the need for an effective electoral counter to Donald Trump and those who share his neo-fascist political brand is greater than ever.

So it's imperative that as Democrats and others who oppose Trumpism work to defeat it going into future elections, they don't repeat their mistake from this year.

Just as establishment Democrats continue to dismiss the possibility that Sanders would have defeated Trump, they dismiss the possibility that Sandersism has the potential to defeat Trumpism if made the standard ideology of the Democratic Party. Paul Krugman, for instance, who has ironically made passionate arguments in favor of economic populism, has lately adopted a more neoliberal attitude when responding to the idea that Democrats need to start appealing to the working class; another defender of the Democratic political status quo is Nancy Pelosi, who has said she doesn't think Democrats need a new direction because "Our values unify us and our values are about supporting America’s working families."

I'm going to make the case now, like Laurits and others tried to earlier this year, for Sandersism, not a continuiation of Clintonism, being the only way to go forward. And I'm going to start by providing the evidence of why a failure to embrace Sandersism resulted in Trump's victory.

The reason Clinton lost had nothing to do with the third party candidates or Bernie Sanders (the latter of which actually helped her get more votes), but rather a failure on the part of her and the Democratic Party to present a compelling case that they intended to help working people. Specifically, the working people who live in Rust Belt. If Clinton had won just a few more states in that region, she would have received the majority of electoral votes, but that proved to be impossible after the approach she used to this election.

The people who decided the outcome of those races, exit polls indicate, regarded economic issues, especially trade, as highly important. And when presented with Clinton vs Trump, a consequential number of them understandably went with the latter. Clinton, despite having branded herself earlier in the race as pro-worker on trade, was hard to trust on the issue for many people due to her history of supporting neoliberal trade deals, the fact that she had since appointed a Trans-Pacific Partnership advocate to be the head of her transition team, and how her campaign received massive donations from corporate executives who stood to benefit from the TPP. All of this evidently cost her the election in what Michael Moore calls a "Rust Belt Brexit."

Another way Clintonism proved to be an ineffective strategy for the Democrats this year was that it depressed voter turnout. As Moore has also noted, the demographics made it so that Hillary Clinton always easily had enough support to win, but due to her unwillingness to appeal to the Democratic base, not enough people showed up to make it happen. 

The low Democratic voter turnout this year which cost Clinton the election for the most part did not occur because of Republican voter suppression efforts, and the reasons for this fact are easy to guess. Even after the victory of Clinton's extremely unpopular opponent, polls continue to show around 55% of Americans view her negatively, and in a stunning demonstration of how suspicious Americans are of her, one poll from earlier this year found that 68% view her as untrustworthy compared to 43% for Donald Trump. The same survey also showed just 38% would be proud to have her as president, compared to Trump's 39%.

And the reason for this does not have to do with decades of Republican smears on her as she has alleged. Polls have shown that most Americans know how to sift through the false accusations that have been leveled against Clinton, indicating their dislike for Clinton has more to do with the fact that they disagree with her on many important issues.

Just 29% of Americans think that trade deals like NAFTA have benefited the country, 78% want an end to Citizens United and money in politics, 62% are in favor of breaking up too-big-to-fail banks, 58% support a federally funded universal health care system, 63% prefer a $15 minimum wage, and on the list goes of ways in which vast majority of the public wants to end the neoliberal paradigm and make the economy work for everyone. But given Hillary Clinton's corporate campaign donations and her open opposition to many of these goals, it's clear that she was not the right option for those who hold such views, and as a result, she's been proven unable to win a national election.

It's this same problem that has gotten the Democratic Party into its current crisis. Despite Pelosi's assertions to the contrary, for the past forty years the party's values have mainly involved supporting corporations and the super rich rather than working families, and just like Hillary, they've failed politically because of this. It's no coincidence that the Democrats' gradual decline throughout the last few decades has happened at the same time as the party has pivoted to the interests of big business, with the Democratic leadership's abandonment of their base having made them lose most of the white working class (along with some of the nonwhite working class).

And once again, the Democratic Party has suffered a similar fate to that of Hillary Clinton due to its shift towards neoliberalism, with Democrats now holding as few elected offices as they did in the 1920's. This is due to a failure on their part to sufficiently motivate their base to show up at the polls. And if the party continues to try to appeal mainly to the quarter or so of the electorate which supports neoliberal policies, their decline will only continue.

However, if the efforts of Bernie Sanders and others succeed, the Democratic Party can yet become an institution which advances both identity politics and economic populism (which, contrary to the narrative of the corporate media, are not mutually exclusive approaches) and assume the role of the dynamic political tool needed to fight Trump's agenda. And should the Democrats remain a party of the economic elite, it will be replaced by an alternative organization, be it the Green Party or something else.

But electoral politics isn't the only political aspect wherein Trump's opposition will need Sandersism to succeed. Should a major crisis develop during Trump's term, he and his administration will likely try to use it as an excuse to gain bipartisan support for a series of authoritarian and hawkish measures they'll surely push for in response to it. And if the main opposition that they face consists of Clintonist Democrats like Chuck Schumer, who aims to act as Trump's ally, a forceful response from progressives will be absent and enormous damage will be done to global stability, the rights of working people, and America's constitutional liberties.

In short, if the left wants to have any success, it will stop letting its leaders pivot to "moderates" and "the center" and have them appeal to the majority of the Americans, who  support the ideals and values of Sandersism. Lack of a major Sandersist presence in the 2016 general election resulted in the victory of a tyrant, and lack of a major Sandersist presence afterwords will result in a victory for that tyrant's agenda.

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.

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.