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neoliberalism
The Worst Political Decision Since Nixon Taped Himself Committing Crimes
How the Democrats handed Trump the election on a bitcoin-plated platter—and most still don't think they did anything wrong.
Apr 01, 2025
Each day the Democrats are outraged about another outrage coming from Trump and his enablers—stomping on immigrants, undermining the courts, attacking Canada, claiming Ukraine started the war, violating campus free speech, destroying the EPA, firing forest rangers—and on and on and on.
But why the surprise? Did anyone doubt that Trump would act on his anger and his resentment, and then follow through executing the detailed plans laid out in Project 2025? Did anyone believe he would turn the other cheek at those who tried to impeach him and send him to jail? Surely every single elected Democrat knew that Trump’s election would be a disaster for everything the party claimed to stand for.
Nevertheless, the Democrats handed Trump the election on a bitcoin-plated platter. They stuck with Biden—make that sucked up to Biden—until it was too late to run primaries and find the strongest Democratic candidate. (I’m not saying Kamala Harris necessarily was the weakest one, but four years earlier she flunked out before the first presidential primary. Just saying.)
Why the hell did they do that?
I’m no political genius, but nearing Biden’s 81st birthday, in November of 2023, I begged him not to run again. It was clear to me, based on polling, his lack of energy, and my own intuition, that he had no business running again.
I was alone, but not entirely so. Obama’s campaign maestro, David Axelrod was pounded for suggesting Biden wasn’t the best candidate. That so successfully quelled any dissent that it wasn’t until six months later (July 2, 2024) that Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) became the first sitting Democratic congressman to ask Biden to withdraw. Profiles in courage, the Democrats were not, including all the governors lining up for 2028.
If I could see the trainwreck coming why couldn’t the Democrats?
I think I know why. They didn’t get upset about it because they were blinded by power and wealth.
Biden represented power. You cross him and you lose access to that power even while his grip on reality is diminishing. You become a target for party loyalists, and risk losing credibility in the party if you call for him to step down. You become an outsider. Even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) didn’t want to lose their influence over Biden’s pro-worker agenda as they continued to support his candidacy until the bitter end.
The Democrats today are imploding, and that’s exactly what they deserve. They blew it.
The attraction to wealth is an even bigger problem. Far too many Democrats are enamored by the rich and famous. They went to school with them. They lean on them for campaign funds. They plan to join them when they leave public office. The wizards on Wall Street and in corporate America form the class they see themselves as part of, or in the class they aspire to.
It is not a coincidence, therefore, that the Democratic Party has become the representatives of the managerial class. Too many party members with working-class roots tore them out long ago.
Many probably discounted their worries about Trump, thinking that the rich and powerful would tame him. Because that’s where the Democratic Party thinks real power lies. The financial class wouldn’t let Trump wreck the economy, would it? Surely, the corporate class wouldn’t back down on DEI programs or forgo their access to inexpensive immigrant labor. The wealthiest Democratic law firms aren’t going to cave, right? Wouldn’t the elites prevent Trump’s excesses the way they did last time? Hmmm.
Along the way, most Democrats lost their anger. They lost their fight. They lost their connection to the working people who have seen their way of life crushed after 40 years of neoliberalism. Which is why many modern Democrats found it easy to cavalierly go along with the worst political decision since Nixon taped himself committing crimes during the Watergate scandal. (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers for why working people abandoned the Democrats, and visa vera.)
Along the way, most Democrats lost their anger. They lost their fight. They lost their connection to the working people who have seen their way of life crushed after 40 years of neoliberalism.
Biden clearly did not have the capacity to run again. The Democrats knew that even before he proved it to the world during his disastrous June 2024 debate with Trump. But they didn’t care enough to oppose his decision, publicly, where it would matter. He told his advisors during the 2020 race that he wouldn’t run for a second term, he would be 82 years old by his second inauguration, but the party refused to hold him to it when he changed his mind.
The Democrats today are imploding, and that’s exactly what they deserve. They blew it. They can’t be reformed into a working-class party, because that’s not who they are or what they want to be. From my perspective, reforming them is an utter waste of time and energy, an exercise in window dressing and spin. Instead, we need a new party, an Independence Party that comes with the slogan: The billionaires have two parties, we need one of our own!
Stop with the Spoiler Argument
All I hear from friend and foe is that third parties are impossible in America, that they only serve as spoilers and can never succeed.
Ralph Nader’s run, they tell me, elected Bush. We can argue about whether that’s true, it might be, but there’s very little argument against the idea that Biden’s run in 2024 elected Trump—for the second time!
So, we start with identifiable targets. There is nothing to spoil if we concentrate on running independent working-class candidates in one-party Congressional districts of which there are many!
In 2022, five out of every six races were decided by more than 10 percentage points, according to FairVote.org. One out of every 13 races went entirely uncontested! These districts are where the battle should be joined. The call for a new Independence Party is a call for a vibrant second party, not a third!
Dan Osborn, a former local labor leader, was surprisingly competitive in the 2024 Senate race in Nebraska, running against an unopposed Republican and far ahead of Kamala Harris. Bernie Sanders always runs as an independent as well, and he has now come out urging others to do the same.
The need for a new party could never be clearer. The time could never be more urgent.
There’s a hunger out there for something new, but it will take courage and guts to create it. That can only happen when key labor unions decide to do what their membership has been telling them to do for a generation – get away from the corporate Democrats!
Private sector unions, diminished as they may be, are still the seat of worker power in the U.S. And they can galvanize the working class around an agenda that enhances the well-being of all working people. They are key to building a new political formation that protects us all from Wall Street-driven job destruction.
The need for a new party could never be clearer. The time could never be more urgent. The opportunity is there staring us in the face, if only we have the nerve to grab it.
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Nostalgia Won't Lead the US Out of the Trump Mire
The anomie and gloom that characterize the public mood as fascism threatens to attain consolidation and crush all dissent cannot be remedied by backward steps into the immediate neoliberal system that gave rise to Trump in the first place.
Mar 30, 2025
George Packer recently wrote an Atlantic piece that cleverly situated the Trump regime within a familiar Orwellian framework.
According to Packer, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), and other slavish Trump sycophants have become comically ridiculous (Packer references Henri Bergson's theory of comedy) in direct proportion to their ability to absurdly and mechanically mimic President Donald Trump's perspective with the same rhetorical mannerisms that they had employed mere months ago to argue the exact opposite point of view. "Without missing a beat" they once spoke skillfully on behalf of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and now (in robotic fashion) they laud Russian President Vladimir Putin. They are stooges of the moment, laughable figures right out of the pages of 1984.
As Packer sees it, the old order of American NATO alliances had "made the past eight decades uniquely stable and prosperous in modern history." In his view the U.S. descent into realms of Orwellian mendacity originates with the antics of Trump and his lapdogs. Packer does not trace the U.S. embrace of dystopian culture to, say, renaming the U.S. military juggernaut the Department of Defense—an example of Orwellian deception far more confusing than playing a game of musical chairs with global alliances.
The schism between liberals and progressives hinges on whether or not one views Trump as an aberration, or a preordained end point of systemic failure.
Packer's calculus proposes that the danger of Trump stems from his power to humiliate and control his underlings in such a fashion that only he retains the ability to speak his mind, while all of the lesser accoutrements of the MAGA-sphere are reduced to being mechanized puppets.
I worry that many mainstream liberal pundits have made fascism into a Trump-centric formula—liberals like Packer betray nostalgia for past glories of American democracy and the world order that the U.S. largely controlled after WW II, and dominated almost completely after the Soviet fall. Like most instances of political nostalgia, this view depends on a myopic distortion. The uniquely prosperous and stable eight decades that Packer lauds were eight decades of war, regime change, colonial extraction, and—notably—eight decades of gathering extinction, environmental degradation, and skewed wealth.
We can either see Trump as a fracture in time, a great misfortune, a lightning bolt from hell intent on destroying a formerly beneficent arrangement of policies and alliances, or we can alternatively see Trump as a representation of American values—a mirror of the culture we created. The schism between liberals and progressives hinges on whether or not one views Trump as an aberration, or a preordained end point of systemic failure.
By the same token we might raise a skeptical eye at Packer's revisionist assessment of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his passive discomfort as an extra in the theatrical meeting with Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Zelenskyy:
He sat mute throughout the Oval Office blowup while his principles almost visibly escaped his body, causing it to sink deeper into the yellow sofa. Having made his name in the Senate as a passionate defender of democracy and adversary of authoritarianism, he must have suffered more than others from the inner contortions demanded by the new party line—they were written on his unhappy face.
I have far more curiosity about the inner contortions that George Packer employed to rehabilitate Marco Rubio—a stick figure neocon with predictable views on corporately inflicted climate overheating (he doesn't believe in it), gun control (he doesn't believe in it), and abortion (he doesn't believe in it). The one thing that Rubio believes in with undeterred passion is war, and this, in Packer's view, makes him a "passionate defender of democracy and adversary of authoritarianism." Apparently, Rubio's enthusiasm for giving the authoritarian genocidaire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a blank check for all the bombs of his dreams has no effect on Packer's assessment.
Rubio's constricted body language during the Trump-Zelenskyy showdown seemingly provides Packer with the pretext to assume that Republican capitulation to Trump conceals, in at least some instances, an internal moral crisis. It may be that Rubio had some sort of confused hiccup, a moment of puzzlement, as the story line shifted on a dime, or it may be that Rubio recoiled at his passive role, his mandate to be a mute walk-on in a drama that might have been more persuasive had he been excluded.
Packer gives himself license to fantasize about the allegedly tortured inner life of sycophants, and that troubles me. If we overly humanize Trump's henchmen and speculatively envision them as ambivalent victims of Trump's alleged mystical powers, we miss the seriousness of our predicament. U.S. politicians have been morally castrated as a matter of structural design, for, at least the eight decades of my lifetime. Trump can't be blamed for the vacuous surrender to corporate schemes that U.S. politicians dependably perform. Give Trump credit for exploiting the soulless dregs that he has surrounded himself with, but he did not drain the humanity from Marco Rubio. The moral desert that comprises the center of the former Florida senator resulted from a drought that long preceded Trump.
I believe that we have two real choices—capitulation or revolution.
Packer concludes his piece by asserting that the public view of the Russian-Ukraine conflict has not followed the narrative plot that Republican politicians newly embrace. The public still reviles Putin, and two-thirds of Americans (according to polls that Packer cites) want to continue to arm Ukraine. In Packer's view, America's public approval for arming Ukraine "might be America's last best hope." This misses the larger issue—how did the U.S. become a rapidly consolidating fascist country with politicians (centrist Democrats, neocons, libertarians, MAGA loyalists), all playing their preassigned bit parts?
The true masters of the system, the military industrialists and the corporate profiteers, lose nothing if the U.S. shifts alliances. The public support for Ukraine is little more than a lingering reflection of recent media perspectives. The public is always at the mercy of mass media and corporate control of information. In a country that has spent more money on military spending than the nine leading global competitors combined, the U.S. public still fails to react with alarm. Militaristic propaganda is at the heart of public control, and there are not even vestiges of antiwar passion detectable within the congressional body.
The anomie and gloom that characterize the public mood as fascism threatens to attain consolidation and crush all dissent cannot be remedied by backward steps into the immediate neoliberal system that gave rise to Trump in the first place.
A proposed withdrawal into the recent past of former President Joe Biden, or even former President Barack Obama (if it were even possible to do so—it isn't), condemns the public to accept a retreat into familiar safety—a set of governmental policies that the late David Graeber attributed to "dead zones of the imagination."
Graeber noted that:
…revolutionary moments always seem to be followed by an outpouring of social, artistic, and intellectual creativity. Normally unequal structures of imaginative identification are disrupted; everyone is experimenting with trying to see the world from unfamiliar points of view; everyone feels not only the right, but usually the immediate practical need to recreate and reimagine everything around them.
A true resistance to fascism would involve something more powerful than fatuous dreams about an idealized past. After all, superficial fantasies about the virtues of the past are Trump's shtick. I believe that we have two real choices—capitulation or revolution. The option of stepping meekly into the immediate past, as Packer proposes, will excite almost no one. This is a time—taking inspiration from David Graeber—for recreation and reimagining.
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Fighting the Neoliberal-Fascist Coup by Trump and Musk
Time is short during a fascist takeover attempt. And Trump and Musk are moving at breakneck speed. The stakes could not be higher.
Mar 20, 2025
At what junctures do Elon Musk and Donald Trump, each proceeding from a distinctive starting point, forge a new and hyper-dangerous coalition? Well, the Afrikaner refugee joins an extreme version of neoliberalism to a fascist drive to state takeover, and the fascist orange man, who demands unfettered state power and loves tariffs, nonetheless caters to neoliberal drives to concentrate wealth, income, and power even more extremely at the highest reaches of society. Together, they pursue what is best called oligopolistic fascism.
What's more, while both may have once believed the old Friedrich Hayek story of how market deregulation secures a robust economy of steady growth, each displays active signs today of no longer believing the very ideology he pedals. Musk does so through his project of planetary escapism and his obsession with driving Inspector Generals from governmental institutions; Trump does so through his constant lies and belligerent demonization of vulnerable people who disagree with him. Indeed, each contains within himself a minor voice sliding into the major voice of the other. They both now believe that the old order that has sustained their extreme privileges can now only be protected by fascist means.
So, let's define our terms a bit more closely. Neoliberalism was a market theory, most prominently developed by Friedrich Hayek in the 1960s and 1970s as a series of rejoinders to a Keynesian model of growth and social welfare. Neoliberalism promised rapid and sustained economic growth, if the state would radically reduce regulation of private corporations, subsidize them whenever needed, severely limit the power of labor unions, create a court system committed to neoliberal jurisprudence, and, most importantly (and too often less noted by critics), install a national ideology of regular individuals committed to a market regime--a national ideology saturating schools, unions, churches, the government, the media, think tanks, and universities.
In this ideology each individual and institution sees itself as first and foremost a participant and beneficiary of a privately owned market economy. Hayek himself emphasized these themes in his neoliberal social philosophy, a social philosophy that included an economic theory but extended well beyond it to include all other social and state institutions. This all found elaborate expression, for instance, in his 1970 book Rules and Order. In it he emphasizes how the Supreme Court must set rules beyond the powers of legislative revision to nurture the sinews of a neoliberal economy. And he says a neoliberal ideology "may well be something whose widespread acceptance is the indispensable condition for most of the particular things we strive for." (Rules of Order, p. 58). He knew that minority groups who refused or could not imbibe this ideology had to be controlled by other means. A neoliberal regime along Hayek’s lines, then, is one in which the prison population grows.
In fact the neoliberal order in the United States, supported actively by neoliberal Supreme Court justices, has pushed previously unheard of wealth concentrations to the top of the social hierarchy; supported a unitary President; increased economic insecurity for workers, the poor and mid-level professionals; encouraged hi-tech, super-rich bros to pour vast amounts of money into right wing electoral campaigns; restricted state efforts to fend off climate change and help the poor; and supported media gaslighting to deny the contributions a neoliberal economy makes to accelerating climate wreckage and periodic crises. You can take the 2008 economic meltdown, during the G. W. Bush administration, to be a notable instance of the latter.
What about fascism? Well, fascist movements seek to secure capitalist states by new means during hard times. This was true even in the most extreme instance, when Hitler in Nazi Germany protected large private industrialists as he attacked Jews, social democrats, labor unions, homosexuals, the Romani, and communists. In Mein Kampf, the Jews were defined to be the "red thread" that tied them, social democrats and communists together in one phalanx. To attack the Jews was thus to attack these other organizations and movements too. The regime was inaccurately called "National Socialism"; a closer label would be "National Capitalism," an economic regime of private profit in which a fascist state became the key definer and regulator of life.
How does a distinctive aspiration to fascism proceed today? It does so by promulgating "big lies" to mobilize hatred in its base; fostering an extreme version of white, Christian nationalism; ransacking state regulatory institutions; intimidating the media, courts, unions, localities, and universities; engaging in coups; mobilizing private militia to intimidate vulnerable elements of the populace; treating immigrants of color to be inferior and "vile" people; and joining with other autocratic states to weaken democracy and promote oligarchical rule. Indeed, today Trump treats immigrants of color and their liberal supporters to be the red threads tying all his enemies together. And he never acknowledges how the very anti-climate policies he promotes accelerate the desperate marches from South to North that he castigates so fervently.
As I previewed in a 2017 book, Aspirational Fascism, Trump has profound fascist aspirations, displayed prominently today in promulgating a battery of big lies, fostering a violent coup attempt after he lost an election, aligning with Putin in foreign policy, pardoning all those who participated in his 2021 violent coup attempt, attacking universities, insisting upon the hegemony of a unitary president who sidelines Congress, the states and (increasingly) courts, and unleashing Musk to reshape the state.
What draws Musk and Trump so closely together now?
Well, Musk shows signs of losing faith in the neoliberal ideology that informed his thinking hitherto, while continuing to deploy it strategically to clean out the federal government of officials—the "Deep State"—who could expose fraud and regulate corporate excesses. To take one instance, he has moved from an earlier stance of concern about accelerating climate wreckage to saying, even as he knows better, that climate change is real but moving at a very slow pace. Even after more extreme hurricanes, the Los Angeles wildfires, and other destructive events.
And Trump, who knew in fact that he had lost the 2020 election, has joined belligerently the project of heaping more and more wealth on the extremely wealthy at the expense of those working and middle class white nationalists who provide a key portion of his political base. The tax cut for the rich he is pushing through Congress shows that. He may well think he will not need to cater to that portion of his base so much, after he has silenced the media, universities, unions, progressive churches, and Democratic Party. He has already silenced critical Republicans and high rolling donors.
What about white working- and middle-class members of the Trump/Musk base? They have displayed signs not so much of believing all the Trumpian lies peddled to them as embracing the lies because of the ways they unsettle liberal elites on both coasts and activate racist impulses already there. Not too many Trump supporters believed the ugly story about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats. They merely loved to hear and repeat the story. That is why intense media efforts to expose Trump's lies have not penetrated the armored base. That protective armor itself was forged during a period when the democratic left had lost touch with the needs and insecurities of those constituents, while focusing only on their ugly racist and misogynist tendencies. In fact, curtailments of racism and misogyny need to be pursued in tandem with reductions in class inequality, if either agenda is to succeed. But it remains to be seen whether Democrats can learn this lesson.
Today, the neoliberal/fascist nexus is taking another turn. While it focuses white working class attention on violent immigrant deportations, it also plans to weaken Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security severely, perhaps even to destroy them. Why? To give yet another huge tax break to the superrich who also finance their campaigns. Increasing numbers of the old base are now beginning to see through this scam by the scammer they used to love. It turns out the "Deep State" contains many essential services and protections, now on the block.
The Trump/Musk team hopes to complete dismantling and then reordering the Deep State before the base catches on. Then, once the media, universities and liberal donors have been intimidated sufficiently, it will be too late to protest effectively. That is the plan.
The urgent task today is to expose this nexus and its plan at every turn, in every possible venue, and by all democratic means necessary, from publicity to protest to electoral mobilization. For time is short during a fascist takeover attempt. And Trump and Musk are moving at breakneck speed. The stakes could not be higher, nor the urgency more acute.
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