Rob in Vermont’s post on today’s DK page regarding election post-mortems is a very good and thoughtful post. It made some important points about tactical and strategic errors made by the Democratic Party and its progressive allies in backing VP Kamala Harris for POTUS last year. Rob’s post inspired me to respond with my own thoughts regarding major gaps in pro-democracy assessments of why the Democrats lost the 2024 presidential race.
IMO, Mango Mussolini didn’t accomplish his improbable electoral victories—in 2016 and 2024)—by himself. It took an army of RW political zealots, media hacks, and billions in corporate dark money to land this con artist and sexual predator in the White House—twice.
tRump has a feral instinct for self-preservation through the use of race-and gender-based divide-and-conquer rhetoric and tactics. He is also a sometimes-charismatic con artist. However, he is no political strategist; nor is he interested in actually governing this country. The oligarchs and theofascist political leaders behind tRump’s rise to power will gladly run and loot our federal government while letting him entertain and distract us. In fact, they did this during his first term as POTUS.
tRump’s secret weapon is the 50-year campaign that this country’s oligarch class has waged on American democracy with the help of an authoritarian religious right movement. These anti-democratic allies have combined to co-opt and corrupt federal and state courts and legislatures, including Congress and SCOTUS. Their game plan for the American oligarch counterrevolution was laid out in a memo written by the late Lewis Powell in 1971. His opus, Confidential Memorandum: Attack on American Free Enterprise System, laid the foundation for the corporate takeover of American democracy. President Richard Nixon rewarded Mr. Powell for his efforts by appointing him to SCOTUS in 1971.
The real political genius behind the oligarchs’ takeover of our federal government is not Mango Mussolini. It is the American president who appointed Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court. That president, Richard Nixon, was also the author of the white supremacist Southern Strategy that helped the Republican Party to flip the South starting in 1980.
IOW, racism and xenophobia—coded as resistance to “political correctness,” “identity politics,” and “wokeism”—have driven America’s state and national politics since 1980. tRump is the fruit, not the root, of America’s sociopathic white nationalist/religious right movement.
The oligarchs have acquired and weakened the ability of legacy news media icons like the WaPo and LA Times to warn their readers about the corporate takeover of the US government. The oligarchs and their theofascist allies have also built a modern, think-tank-driven media ecosystem designed to push RW propaganda and misinformation 24/7 for 52 weeks a year. That media ecosystem includes corrupted and shrunken social media platforms like Facebook and X(Twitter). Even TikTok is vulnerable because of its ownership by a Chinese oligarch with ties to the Chinese government—not to mention the national security issues that ownership raises.
President Biden’s January 15th farewell address sounded a clear alarm about the corporate/oligarch takeover of American democracy. His labeling of this authoritarian movement as a new tech industrial complex echoed President Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the threat of a rising military industrial complex to American democracy.
The Democratic Party and its progressive allies must build a progressive,grassroots-based media/think tank ecosystem that can effectively counter the RW narrative of fear-based cruelty and domination. This work must be done as the Dems mount an effective 50-state/12-months-a-year campaign to reclaim the White House, Congress, and SCOTUS.
We must collectively build the road to a truly democratic America as we travel it. That may sound like “Mission Impossible” and will indeed be very difficult. However, we have several examples of progressive US social movements that have accomplished this feat despite determined, well-financed opposition. Those movements include the anti-slavery abolitionists, the modern labor movement, the civil/human rights movement, and the environmental movement. At their most effective, these movements have all been grassroots-based.
It’s time for all of us to reclaim and rebuild our American democracy. Let’s agitate, educate, and organize our communities to build the future that we want for our children and their descendants.
No one is going to save American democracy from oligarch-financed theofascism but We the People. President Biden made this point perfectly clear at the conclusion of his January 15th farewell address.
GOTV in 2026 and 2028. Aluta Continua!