Measuring the Death of the Dream The destruction of the American Dream isn’t just an abstraction; it’s measurable. (See Chart 9.1) In 1980 when Reagan was elected president, at the peak of the American Dream, fully two-thirds of American families were in the middle class. A single income could support a family, buy a house, take an annual vacation, send the kids to college, and even retire with dignity. Today, only 43 to 47 percent of Americans qualify as middle class (depending on whose numbers and what criteria you use). And it takes two full-time incomes today to achieve what a single union job gave a family in 1980.

The goal isn't to prove Anthony Fauci lied. It's to convince Americans that the racist decisions that cost hundreds of thousands of lives were somebody else's fault… Republicans went totally nutso on Dr. Anthony Fauci this week, trying to catch him with a perjury trap before the US Senate. They called him names, citied lies and pseudoscience, and attacked his integrity. He withstood asinine statements like Josh Hawley, in an extraordinary bit of projection, saying: “You became a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar! You’ve done more to harm science than anybody in my lifetime!” Throughout it all, he retained his composure and refused to take any of their bait. But the larger story here is what these white supremacist MAGA Republicans were trying to cover up with this deflection strategy.

The uniforms have changed. The technology has evolved. But the mission remains the same: protect power through fear and intimidation… “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.” —President Woodrow Wilson, who screened the Klan recruiting film “Birth of a Nation” in the White House Trump and the GOP are desperate to hang onto the oligarchy they’ve created, particularly in the face of the upcoming elections. Increasingly — as oligarchies usually do when they decide it’s acceptable to use violence to hang onto power — they’re turning to hate, fear, and terror as their tools. To this end, Trump and his lickspittles are reinventing the old Confederate slave patrols in modern form. Most recently, ICE has begun violently force-feeding and catheterizing people in ICE concentration camps when they protest conditions or the absence of due process by going on hunger strikes.

From FEMA relief to clean energy funding, government resources are becoming political weapons, creating the kind of regional resentment that has shattered nations before… Trump is now officially allocating federal resources based on whether people voted for or against him: any other president in recent history would’ve been impeached for this. One of the most visible differences between authoritarian and democratic governance is how the government treats parts of the country based on their politics.