Image by Darren Halstead.
As the Trump administration bulls into its second year, we await a movement that will aggressively challenge and potentially replace it. What we have now is a promising prelude to one in the guise of the anti-ICE protests and the No Kings rallies (Bernie Sanders’ Fighting Oligarchy tour was an influential catalyst). These are essentially pop-up, short-lived events, snuffed by the Epstein files but recharged by the Iran War. They’ve been piecemeal, limited strains of agitation until now, but this could change if the anti-war forces continue to strengthen. Even then, though, they’ll need to combine forces and expand to build the kind of lasting, pro-activist organization that will drive real change. And they’ll also have to shed the anti-Trump obsession in play since Trump was first elected.
Though there is certainly no firm correspondence between the Democratic Party and these valued protesters, the noise from these agitated strains recycles much of the rhetoric and tactics that have dogged it since Trump was first elected. There are obviously a wealth of reasons to reject Trump. But the leadership crisis in the Democratic Party that helped Trump win in 2024 persists. The anti-Trump obsession has smothered the sorely needed attention to what is necessary to replace him.
Led by Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic Party floundered on who to target in the 2024 election, finally deciding that it didn’t need the working class to win. Aside from the provocative cultural issues, which clearly separated it from the Republicans, the Democrats could barely distinguish themselves from them economically, firmly indebted to Wall Street and the neo-liberal agenda. The loss of the working class sealed their defeat (Now Jeffries is full of support for the working class but refused to endorse Zohran Mamdani for Mayor of New York City until just before the election, clearly a meek last resort).
The anti-Trump obsession is reflected in the abolish ICE fixation. The rhetorical and activist level of energy evident in the protests would seem to suggest that the number of deportations and detentions during the past months of the Trump administration have been strikingly high. But the data reveal that Barack Obama deported and detained significantly more bodies than Donald Trump. And in 2024, Joe Biden deported and detained more than Donald Trump has during any year as president.
How do we explain the relative protest calm during the Democratic administrations compared to the recent months of the Trump administration?
The number of sanctuary cities is surely a factor. These legally designated zones welcome immigrants and migrants who are potential targets of ICE, along with activists who help in crafting strategies of resistance. These zones have grown substantially since the years of the Obama administration (they actually predate it, the post-9/11 backlash against “foreigners,” especially those from Muslim countries, spawning the first installment). There were approximately 40 such jurisdictions in 2009, very early in the Obama administration, over 300 by 2016 and just over a thousand by May 2025.
With significantly fewer sanctuary cities, Obama faced little organized resistance. But there was also a reluctance to criticize his actions and policies, especially early in his tenure, because he was the first African-American president and he possessed liberal credentials to boot. His history and identity, crafted with consummate skill by select media, conveyed a sense of inclusiveness and humanity. Reactions to his policies of deportation and detention, though more severe than those under the current Trump administration, were muted. The greater presence of sanctuary cities, however, can’t explain the severity of ICE’s tactics in Minneapolis and elsewhere which must be rooted out.
Trump’s ascendance to the presidency in 2016 spawned waves of resistance from the remnants of the liberal coalition and a spike in sanctuary cities. His anti-migrant position (with respect to countries located in the Global South, that is), was well known. Plus, if Obama was the Deporter in Chief, Trump was surely the Bloviator in Chief. His rhetoric was inflammatory and racist, creating the perception that his policies were more threatening than Obama’s. He was an easy target for those who had little sympathy for a reactionary. The “fake news” took him to task.
The “invasion” of migrants during the Biden ascendancy clearly tested the patience of American citizens, giving conservatives beholden to Trump an issue that would vault him back into the White House. For most of Biden’s time in office, migrants crossed the border in huge numbers relatively unchecked. A significant number of these were asylum seekers. The Biden administration reversed the Trump policy in play during his first term which kept the seekers of asylum in Mexico while their cases were being adjudicated. It wasn’t until the resistance to “open borders” among a sizable majority of citizens reached a virtual breaking point that the Biden administration shifted gears. In 2024, it succumbed to this pressure and outperformed Trump. But this proceeded with little protest against ICE itself or its tactics which were muted significantly by the lack of pressure from sanctuary cities.
The recent excesses of ICE distort its nominal mission to fairly minister justice in accord with the country’s legacy of welcoming a diversity of the planet’s beings searching for a better life. It must be remembered that the stream of migrants coming to the US in recent years have come from countries—Venezuela, Cuba, and Guatemala, mainly—that have been decimated by repressive sanctions. This legacy does not concur with punishing victims.
But the refrain to abolish ICE smacks of the same sentiments that fed the “de-fund the police” movement that surfaced in response to the George Floyd killing in 2020. Were ICE to be eliminated, we’d be back in the Biden years with “open borders,” a policy that set the arriving migrants at odds with the country’s perennially deprived citizens over resources, health care and education especially (I’ll return to the issue of resources later). This war persists.
Similarly, with the actual “defund the police” movement, the decreasing presence of police on the streets victimized many of the people they were designed to protect. And in subsequent years we’ve witnessed excessive speeding on the highways and streets due to this withdrawal, resulting in numerous unfortunate deaths. New types of property crimes have also emerged, such as “smash-and-grab” burglaries that exploit glitches in policing routines. The dearth of resources in the hands of the police has led to a policy that prioritizes the investigation of major crimes to the detriment of the common, everyday ones that most people are impacted by.
We need radical reform of ICE and all policing authorities!
What’s replaced badly needed discussions to reset the agenda for the Democratic Party that will capture the voters who either didn’t vote at all in the 2024 election or flipped to the Republicans is the inflammatory attention to limited issues like the fact—or feeling, actually—that we’re now living in, or soon will be, a fascist system that has supposedly gripped the country under this Republican administration. Or that Donald Trump is a King or at least on the way to becoming one. These two issues comprise the substance of what constitutes the resistance to the drift of the Trump administration. They are clearly interconnected, focused on the dangers of increasing authoritarian control.
Fascism. Well, Trump’s bombing of Iran within a few days of delivering his State of the Union address, a performance that assured us by default what his poll numbers projected, that his domestic policies were failing, conjures the fascist scenario in George Orwell’s 1984 where the ruling elite manufactures wars against other nations to defer attention from its brutal impoverishment of those below (The sales of this book spiked with Trump’s ascendance). If this war continues long enough and the authoritarian controls that sustain conflicts of this nature seed, they may be difficult to extract once normality returns. The name change from the Department of Defense to the Department of War signaled that an Orwellian military hegemony might be on the horizon. And the leader of this renamed bureau, Pete Hegseth, through his words, appearance, and gestures, conjures imagery from the Nazi archives.
Trump’s menacing expression, offhanded comments about the holocaust, humiliating bluster, and obsession to eliminate Antifa, the activist organization committed to extricating all facets of fascist culture and society, make his bypass of legalities, arrogance toward Congress, and volume of executive orders all the more threatening. His overall behavioral bent has likely spawned a series of Kanye Wests.
And there’s an epidemic of meanness unleashed in the society, evident even before Trump. People seem conditioned to mistreat each other, surely due in part to the corporatization of everyday life that has squelched so many democratic initiatives and structures and fomented forms of resentment. It is so cool to be mean. So it’s no surprise that the Trump team’s nostalgia for better times includes the Roman Empire, identifying with its hardened autocratic males and not those who were democratically inclined from the Roman Republic.
In terms of policies, the “Big Beautiful Bill” crystallized meanness. It has further disenfranchised many more of the lower and middle classes through budget cuts that restrict access to the IRS, the courts, and consumer protections, among others. The Nazis structured their system similarly to increase their power over the masses. This bill’s elimination of subsidies for healthcare has effectively murdered people.
These symptoms are a dire warning for sure, especially the imaging and inflammatory rhetoric. But the large-scale reorganization of society that the Nazis manufactured is at bay for the moment.
The masked ICE guards in Minneapolis may look and feel like storm troopers, and their behaviors need to be eliminated, but ultimately their egregious excesses were pushed back by protesters and responsible authorities were sacked. The very presence of protesters in such large numbers around the country constitutes one of many countervailing forces against further challenges to democracy. Hopefully, crackdowns on the right to protest will not surface in the future.
Authoritarianism for sure. Its ascendance was already noticeable in Trump’s first term but especially now with the Republican capture of the three branches of government. On the presidential level, the number of Trump’s executive orders tell the story. Since he took office a little over a year ago, he has signed nearly three times as many as Biden did in his full four years, many of them legally questionable.
The Congress’s actions are mostly in lockstep with Trump’s designs, but both houses are controlled by Republicans, giving them the authority to comfortably pass the “Big Beautiful Bill” with its list of changes that have been favored ever since the Goldwater defeat in 1964 and the rise of the new right. The Machiavellian mojo that delivered and defended this bill insulted the majority of Americans, especially the poor and marginalized. It even shut down the government instead of considering a compromise over sizable cuts to Obamacare (ACA). There were also substantial cuts to Medicaid and other programs servicing the poor and marginalized, along with the burden of increased taxes on this segment of the population. This brutality was authorized by a party that owns the government and faces little opposition from the Democratic Party, which caved to its demands and ended the shutdown. Its overtures to nationalize elections (possibly even to cancel them) are especially unsettling, as are the arbitrary redistricting moves around the country and the voter suppression measures.
And, aside from the recent Supreme Court decision that handed Trump a defeat regarding the tariffs, its conservative majority has strongly supported Trump.
A weak Democratic Party opened the gates for the Republican Party in 2024, and they haven’t made inroads since, as suggested above (if the consequences of the Iran War become especially dire, this may change by the midterms). It has yet to craft an identity sufficient to entice independent voters and those who crossed over to the Republicans (many now MAGA diehards). They’ll likely not be convinced by the fascism claims. The state of the Democratic Party in this run-up recalls how Hitler’s National Socialist Party rose from the weakness of Weimar liberalism, its early 1930s equivalent in Germany.
Given this authoritarian drift, the No Kings rallies are encouraging. They draw attention to Trump’s transgressions for sure along with a litany of other urgent issues the country is facing, as the most recent event demonstrated. But again, the real King is a swatch of vested interests sustaining the Republican consensus. If Trump the candidate for King were removed, we’d be rid of the pompously polar head of the monster, but its toxic organs would likely continue to pacify these same interests through a consortium of Kingly clones dedicated to survival.
There’s no question that these events and the protests against ICE are catalysts for keeping the issues that matter alive for a cross-section of citizens (and it’s revealing that such a diversity of issues is represented at these events). But success at replacing this consensus will need to develop an organization that weaves the diversity of issues into a coalition which can identify the causes of this current dysfunction and design a plan to expose and root them out. What enabled this consensus to succeed in the first place? What can be done to erase it?
The Republican consensus didn’t emerge when Trump was first elected. Identifying fundamental causes must begin with a look at how we got here. Barry Goldwater’s break with the Republican consensus of the mid-1960s enabled the rise of the new and more radical right. The agenda that Goldwater fancied remained just that as the liberalism of the Democratic Party marked the decade. It was the conservative turn of the mid-to-late 70s, especially the Republican capture of Congress in 1978, that prepped the political ground for Ronald Reagan’s ascendance and his institutionalizing of this agenda. The seeding of these gains for some thirty-five years has shaped the consciousness about what is politically acceptable.
The Reagan revolution jettisoned the vestiges of Keynesian economics, especially its support for fiscal buffers to ameliorate the deficiencies of monetarism, and canonized the Milton Friedman/Friedrich Von Hayek formalization of Adam Smith’s economic liberalism, stripping it of a moral/social conscience. This theory claimed that once capital flowed freely among the elite, the increased profitability from its efficient placement would filter down to the rest of society. It effectively became the arbiter of value for the whole. The public sector, the avowed enemy of wealth creation, had to be pared back. The private sector, where wealth is consummated, had to be expanded. Privatization became the engine of progress. It fostered the idea that all goods and services should be subject to the market, commodified, so that the owners of capital could seek ever new profit sources. The owners pushed the idea that a free market delivers the best options, but many of these players virtually control their markets. The public sector was targeted. Privatizing what was once under the purview of governments was another source, but this was also about efficiency, paring away waste and eliminating welfare. The public sector fostered laziness and extracted subsidies from hard working taxpayers, they claimed. The corporatization of education and healthcare we live with now has been an unfortunate result.
One of the most damaging elements of this agenda was the industry-deregulation mania of the 1980s, especially the severe weakening of antitrust enforcement we owe to the aforementioned rightward turn. Though spawned from Republican policies that, predictably, sold the notion of increased prosperity for all if government would simply let the corporations do what is necessary to fatten the bottom line, the Clinton and Obama administrations went with the drift (the Biden years witnessed a revival in enforcement). Mergers and acquisitions reaped great benefits for Wall Street, but they led to downsizing, which translated into the loss of good jobs and the weakening of unions, actions that exacerbated the already widening inequality gap.
The easing of bank regulations in the late 1990s led to speculation in property and contributed substantially to the 2008-9 financial crisis where millions of borrowers suffered financial reversals from foreclosures (often due to usurious loan rates). But the victims were blamed and the banks were bailed out. This in turn enabled the beneficiaries of these rewards to grab bargain-sale properties and flip them for future gains. Financial downturns foster fortunes. This also exacerbated the already widening inequality gap.
During this same period—the late years of the Clinton administration—the oil industry underwent a massive consolidation wave where super-sized companies gobbled up much of the competition. An oligopoly market resulted where excess prices were eventually passed onto consumers. This helps us understand how and why this industry in crisis after crisis gouges consumers with high prices at will, despite evidence that they didn’t have to.
The industry’s profits during the pandemic quadrupled. And since fuel, especially diesel, is what greases the transportation circuits that deliver goods and services, inflation skyrocketed. At this moment we’re witnessing the same result. Within a matter of hours when the Iran War began, the industry jacked up prices, expecting us to believe that their costs had risen overnight when ample reserves already exist. Four years of reserves to be exact. Plus, the US is an exporter of oil. The damage to society is irreparable. Why does the industry pass on the total cost to consumers? Why can’t it be patriotic! Inflation hits those at the bottom of the economic ladder the hardest, those without assets and the power to pass the costs onto someone else, especially through the rise in interest rates for credit cards, mortgages, and many other things needed for survival. Top-down, authoritarian, neo-liberal power creates victims. The effect of profiteering is the further widening of the inequality gap.
It’s notable that some European countries have begun investigations into profiteering over the oil crisis and even rolled out programs to support their victims. It reveals the persistence of a moral social conscience, a Keynesian residue, that counters the falsity of market purity. Why should people be forced to take a hit on their resources or credit because an elite or committee of elites made an arbitrary decision to satisfy a power whim or vested interests? They have no control over what these power brokers do. Immune from prosecution, they’re free to extract wealth from those who barely have any.
The amassing of wealth from the entrenchment of the neo-liberal machine over the years has been put to good use in funding lobbyists and PACs and new media organizations that manage the consent necessary to keep the rewards flowing. This accumulation of influence has secured a sufficient number of judges, representatives, and players to ensconce the ideology that this wealth has been created by the elite exclusively, and therefore, they should have more power in shaping elections. The gist of the Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision in 2010. This case effectively monetized freedom of speech, giving the elite the power to shape elections with virtually unlimited funds and “dark money,” and overturning campaign finance laws in place since the post-Watergate reforms. And it spiked the number of billionaires.
With a neo-liberal machine awash in an ever-expanding trove of conspicuous wealth, the interests that are vested in it will inevitably find ways to exert influence over people’s lives. The real tragedy here is that capital, unchecked by countervailing benevolence, expands exponentially, creating ever more distance between these interests and these ever more weakened lives. This is indeed a threat to democracy.
The statistics are striking. Just a few years after neo-liberalism became the prevailing economic doctrine by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, the inequality gap has spiked. The top one percent owned roughly twenty three percent of total household wealth in the mid-1970s. Today, it owns nearly thirty one percent of total household wealth. Its wealth, roughly $55.8 trillion, is equivalent to the wealth held by the bottom 90% of households.
The claim that market purity monetarism filters down the wealth created by the super wealthy to this bottom ninety percent has been roundly refuted by numerous studies, but it remains firmly lodged in the minds of people who want to believe in the ever more elusive piece of the American Dream. The mythology that wealth increases through the wits of the elite is drowned by the fact that the people must bear the expenses for the mushrooming of new yachts.
A protest movement that can succeed in producing real change must remove this disease and reverse its effects.
The material deficits are striking. The “affordability” crisis has not just erupted. This meme, mocked by Trump as meaningless, diverts attention from the issue of how economic lack is structured into the neo-liberal economy. This is reflected in the off-handed “solutions” to it offered by the Democrats, all stopgap, temporary measures, the equivalent of subsidies and rebates, those sending the message that victims deserve assistance despite the taint of blame. The Biden administration’s pandemic spending spree demonstrated this. It sent millions if not billions out to a diversity of people and groups, intending to stabilize the economy and enable them to survive the crisis. It was mostly well-intended. But there was little accountability attached to the stopgap resources. A real solution to that “affordability” crisis would have created assets for the most deserving, permanent stashes of wealth that can expand throughout people’s lives (shares in a public bank, the ability to purchase property at fair rates of interest, etc.). If people own, they don’t feel like recipients of welfare or philanthropy. They’ll feel more integrated into their communities. Higher productivity results, according to Keynes, when people are included, given a greater share of the wealth they help create. This clearly extends to wages. Data from the period stretching from the end of WWII through the early 1970s documents this higher productivity rate that existed before the turn to market purity monetarism.
According to William Barber, Director of the Poor People’s Campaign founded by Martin Luther King, roughly sixty percent of the working populace lives paycheck to paycheck. This “affordability” issue can’t be resolved through temporary stopgap measures.
The wealth extracted through this market purity “revolution” alone could fund a single payer healthcare system that would cancel the need for Medicaid; a program that could assimilate more migrants and create paths for the undocumented to secure immediate citizenship; affordable college education for the lower and middle classes; resources to combat climate change and needed investment in infrastructure and green energy, to mention the most urgent issues.
While awaiting the realization of this dream, a reform of the tax system would be an encouraging initiative. One that would restore progressivity to the code, lift the burden from the lower and middle classes and make the highest earners pay their share. The tax structure we had in the post-WWII years all the way to the Reagan administration’s major overhaul would be a great template. The tax rates in effect through the Eisenhower administration—especially the income tax bracket, around 90% for the top earners until the early 1960s, roughly 70% thereafter—helped build the middle class and make serious gains in eliminating poverty. Residues of Keynesian economics, these transfers were funneled into programs that provided down payments for first-time homeowners in the 1950s; job opportunities through the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (Job Corps, Head Start); the Food Stamp Act (1964); massive federal aid for housing and education; and the Social Security Amendments of 1965 that created Medicare and Medicaid.
These changes also freed up resources for speculation and investment which led to a spike in property values and endemic homelessness. But the lost revenue from this transfer of wealth led to severe budget cuts at all levels of government, leading to the abrupt release of mental health patients and others onto the streets without prospects, compounding the homeless problem.
The progressive reform of the tax code is necessary to cease the expropriation of wealth by the billionaire class. The very existence of billionaires attests to the flaws of the neo-liberal machine. A tax on billionaires, like that proposed by Bernie Sanders and others, would be welcome but would ultimately guarantee their continued existence.
The odds that the political establishment will initiate the move to replace neo-liberalism or even overhaul it are virtually non-existent. Both the Democrats and the Republicans are vested in this machine and are funded by billionaires. The only path forward is to build a movement with sufficient strength and mass to pressure the insiders in a similar fashion as the activists during the Civil Rights Movement who forced the establishment to convert the Southern Democrats and forge legislation. SDS, a major catalyst for this conversion, mobilized masses of people in support, effectively translating its broad-based agenda, connecting the dots, making the links between action and issues. They put persistent pressure on political players through a variety of strategies, especially direct action, adapted from their work with Martin Luther King in the South.
This kind of framework is needed now to gather the at-large strains of agitation together that lack a comprehensive plan—not to mention the lack of numbers–to produce real change.
A retooling of the 2011 Occupy Movement would provide this framework. It synthesized strategies from King and SDS, and modeled the Zapatistas, the radical group that successfully challenged the propertied elite and the government in Chiapas, Mexico, during the 1980s and 1990s. Occupy brought the issue of the one percent into the protest lexicon which Bernie Sanders and other progressives championed. Its direct-action maneuvers spread beyond New York to other urban centers, and the movement seemed primed to make a major impact when a series of coordinated moves by mayors scuttled the project, treating the passioned protestors like homeless squatters. These actions were partially doomed too since they burgeoned in the cold of winter (see my A People’s Manifesto, 2017).
This framework could easily accommodate an expanded and more complex version of Bernie Sanders’ Fighting Oligarchy tour, one more fundamentally and progressively committed to replacing neo-liberalism, if it could demonstrate to the culture of the willing how this machine has managed to work—mostly invisibly—for generations.
