Time for a real opposition party

Rushing to embrace a Nazi never ends well!

Welcome to a Monday night edition of Progress Report.

Well, Americans did it: the world’s most obvious crook and inveterate scumbag is officially back in the Oval Office. The dumbest possible outcome, made possible by the most hapless possible opposition. That and what I suspect is a nationwide case of brain fog; maybe Trump was well-served by the way he mishandled Covid after all.

This edition of the newsletter probably won’t be the pick-me-up you need, but it should help you understand the scope of the problems we face while also offering some hope that better days are possible — if people are willing to demand more instead of cowering.

Big news roundup will follow in the next edition.

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Time for a real opposition party

I never doubted that Donald Trump could win a return to the White House. The man is a corpulent cockroach with a toxic charisma that runs counter to every traditional notion of American politics and public opinion. He escaped responsibility for the insurrection, the humiliating raids on Mar-a-Lago’s bathrooms only made him stronger, and his open loathsomeness and greed stirs an admiration in so many people. In short, Donald Trump is the perfect kind of awful for this country.

Yet in the days leading to the MAGA re-occupation, I found myself somewhat surprised by how bleak things look and how little energy there seems to be in pushing back on the dark forces encircling us. The same goes for so much of the press, which has already greeted some of Trump’s most nakedly corrupt and unconstitutional actions and ambitions as if they were legitimate choices that my only run up against technical complications.

Executive orders continue to roll out tonight, one more malicious than the next, taking aim at trans people (trying to erase them), green energy (no more windmills on federal land), tariffs (Mexico and Canada will be hit with 25% levies on Feb. 1st), the death penalty (more of it), prescription drug prices (raising them), and travel (bringing back the Muslim travel ban is on the docket). Trump’s pardoning of 1500 people who tried to overthrow the federal government is the only order that I’ve seen met with any real condemnation tonight.

Here’s the NY Times today on Trump’s plan to use executive order to “end birthright citizenship” for the children of undocumented immigrants, a key tenet of the 14th amendment and thus something that cannot be negated with the mere stroke of a bully’s pen.

It won’t just be hard, it will be utterly impossible for Trump to end birthright citizenship without the kind of cooperation that the Supreme Court, for as extreme and partisan as it’s been, just does not seem like it would make. Maybe the Times’s headline was tongue-in-cheek, but much of the DC bubble media produced similar perfunctory headlines and comments on Twitter about the order.

Every time something that extraordinary is treated as just another political maneuver, it becomes more likely that not only that particular madness will come to fruition, more will follow. Unfortunately, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post is not helping matters, looking the other way at fellow ultra-billionaire Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, which will of course be met with zero consequences due to AIPAC and ADL’s far-right capture.

The concern isn’t that the Times and Post have such enormous readerships and direct sway over voters that everything they publish moves the needle one way or another. To the contrary, the more legacy news one consumed last year, the more likely they were to have voted for Kamala Harris. The issue is that these outlets set the tone for the media writ large and have outsized influence over lawmakers, which is entirely why people like Bezos purchase money-losing newspapers. It’s certainly not because they value the free press — if that even exists in a few years.

In a new briefing document, the German ambassador to the US predicts calamity on this front, suggesting that Trump will strip the media of its independence and hand “co-governing” powers to the tech industry. The behavior of the billionaires and corporations that own America’s largest newspapers and TV broadcasters, motivated by their own separate financial interests, make such projections impossible to ignore.

Silicon Valley’s most entitled billionaires, sensitive middle-aged nerds with messiah complexes because they invented new ways to pay for online porn, have pledged fealty to Trump and are weaponizing the nation’s most important media platforms to support right-wing politicians and their armies of incels.

TikTok, the one social media platform that leaned progressive, engaged in perhaps the silliest yet most effective form of pandering yet: shutting itself down early in spite of zero real threat to its operation and posting a groveling message to Trump, preemptively grateful for a promised intervention that would restore the freedom to follow the invisible hand of the black box algorithm.

Here’s the CEO of TikTok at the inauguration today, by the way:

Democrats acted with their typical short-sighted panic this summer, taking the lead on banning the country’s most popular app and setting up the public drubbing, but the weekend’s charade was so transparently overwrought and phony that it felt like an old silent movie or a professional wrestling story arc. The fact that ByteDance had the audacity and felt the necessity to go through with it anyway, and that the media covered with such breathlessness, walking right into the trap, should be deeply concerning.

Time to wake up

As bad as things are, the moment would feel considerably less bleak if the same ding dongs who have been wrong about literally everything for the past 25 years — the politicians, the consultants, the columnists — weren’t still de facto in charge of the Democratic Party.

Trump and his unique coalition of militia extremists, narcissist weasel billionaires, manifest destiny jerkoffs, neo-Nazi perverts, and right-wing think tank libertarians are poised to continue their dismantling of American democracy and civil society, but history tells us that they won’t be in power forever, or even all that long.

Democrats have regularly found themselves in the wilderness over the past 40 years, experiencing the political equivalent of the long night of the soul, only to be given another chance by a public recoiling at Republican overreach and elite collusion. And each and every time, they have responded with vastly inadequate leaders who kowtowed to corporate executives, eagerly embraced restrictive institutions, and relied on social liberalism to obscure technocratic incrementalism.

Given how much harm Trump aims to cause, there is no doubt that Democrats will once again retake the majority. But that’ll just be a blip if the party has not replaced the people who deceived the nation about Joe Biden’s mental state and viability, the lawmakers who rushed to embrace Elon Musk even though his Nazi sympathies were abundantly clear, and the self-interested power players who have settled on blaming the “woke” for the party’s steep decline.

Reams of surveys since the election have found that such professional diagnosis really couldn’t be further from the truth, and that the public simply sees the Democratic Party as too responsive to corporate interests and not working and middle class Americans. The latest, from Data for Progress, finds Democratic-leaning independents breaking even on the question of whether the party cares more or less about working and middle class families:

Even solid Democrats are on the fence over whether the party has become more supportive of wealthy corporations and individuals over the last number of years.

I harp on these points over and over again not out of animosity or partisan contrarianism, but because there are still plenty of Democratic lawmakers who are diligently working to sellout constituents in pursuit of donor cash and warped priorities. The fight over the minimum wage and paid sick leave in Michigan, which I reported on yesterday, is a perfect example, but hardly the only one.

Now that Trump is back in office, stripping the country for parts after milking his own supporters for billions, there needs to be a real opposition party. A party that will go to the mat for the 36 million poor and working class people who are at risk of losing their health care if Trump and the GOP impose work requirements on Medicaid, the millions of citizens who will find themselves in legal limbo because of how their parents arrived in this country, and the tens of millions of workers who stand to lose their rights in kangaroo labor courts (federal employees are already in grave danger).

There are some good signs, at least at the state level.

Earlier today, a House committee in Washington State voted to advance the highly anticipated rent stabilization bill.

Tomorrow, there will be a hearing on the Colorado Worker Protection Act at the state capitol in Denver, while other new progressive bills, like a uniform ban on price-gouging, are beginning to crop up with good chances of passing.

New legislation in Nevada and New York would severely limit corporate and private equity ownership of single-family homes.

Some of this is wonky, but it’s also the sign of lawmakers serious about making life better and fighting the corporate power that crushes people on a daily basis. There could not be a better or more important contrast to an administration stocked with and funded by the richest people alive.

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