Hartmann Report

From FDR to Reagan to Trump: How the left lost its greatest power, and how to win it back… The great lesson of the election of 2024 is that, to a large extent, class has replaced race as the single most potent political dividing line. In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt took office and began a great experiment. Was it, he asked, really possible to create a society where more than half of a democratic and capitalist nation could enjoy a middle-class lifestyle? On the day of his inauguration the best estimate is that only about 15 percent of Americans had reached that economic milestone. Back at the founding of our republic, several philosophers and economists suggested it was possible for a majority-middle-class society to emerge on this continent. Adam Smith (of the 1776 Wealth of Nations fame) wrote a book Theory of Moral Sentiments arguing that if a nation were to intervene in the marketplace in "moral" ways that uplifted working class people, such a society could emerge. Thomas Paine similarly argued in Agrarian Justice for a number of progressive reforms including what today we call Social Security, a guaranteed minimum income, free public education, and the inheritance tax. But from the beginning of America until 1933 most of these dreams were unrealized.

As Homan returns to ICE, expect a brutal escalation in deportation raids, with few spared…and the rest of us will probably be next. When Trump was elected, many Americans wondered if we were in for a brutal nationwide reign of terror, or if he'd merely content himself with more tax cuts for billionaires and a repeat of his last term's personally profitable crony capitalism. While the mainstream media has treated him (for years) as if he's just another, albeit quirky, politician, others among us, as Carole Cadwalladr noted at The Power, remember that when Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines (whose constitution is modeled after ours) within a mere 6 months he was imprisoning opposition politicians, protesters, and journalists.

A strategy to win back America and stand against Trump’s takeover. All is not lost. Yet. — Blue state governors and other officials are working to “Trump proof” their states and agencies. Organizations like MoveOn and Indivisible are seeing record sign-ups, donations are flowing into groups like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, and progressive newsletters like this one are seeing unprecedented levels of new subscribers and supporters. The resistance is energized. — Trump doesn’t have as big a mandate as the media is promoting: If a mere 155,000 people in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin (out of a total 12,943,827 votes cast in those three states) had shifted their votes from R to D, Kamala Harris would be our incoming president. It’s true that voters shifted to the right in virtually every race in America, but that should be seen not as a defeat but as an opportunity — much like the one Republicans faced in 1976 and 2008 — for Democrats to reboot the party and reengage in the battle, the subject of this article. — America was birthed in resistance; we have a long tradition of fighting oppression and, to the extent Trump and his billionaire allies plan to crush “the left,” they will face fierce opposition (which has already begun). — We know what largely drove Trump’s win. As political scientist Rachel Bitecofer writes over at her brilliant Substack newsletter The Cycle, Republicans “successfully branded Democrats as out of touch elitists that care more about sex changes for prisoners than you.” We can do something about that, particularly since the suggestion that Democrats don’t care for average working people is a vicious lie. That said, the Democratic Party must come to the realization that is now dawning across Europe that the old Blair/Macron/Clinton neoliberal consensus (low taxes, free trade, open borders, weak unions) is dead. That if its reverse, progressive populism, isn’t embraced by center-left parties, rightwing populism and oligarchy will fill that void with a vengeance (like they’re seeing across Europe — and we just saw here in last week’s election).

The white men who run most of the elections in Georgia were never going to let a Black woman become governor. Or, like their colleagues in Florida, any African American. But especially Stacey Abrams, a smart (Yale Law School) young woman of color who had been a highly effective legislator in the Georgia General Assembly. There’s history here. In 1867, a total of 33 Black men were sent to the Georgia Constitutional Convention (to help write a new, post–Civil War, non-slave-state constitution for the state), where they promptly introduced provisions calling for free public school for Black children, the right of Black men to serve on juries overseeing cases involving white defendants, and doing away with debtors’ prisons in the state. None made it into the constitution.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Will Trump satisfy his voters? How quickly will he fail them? — The extreme hateful Trump supporters are out calling for “rape squads” and violence...we all need to be careful — Where will Trump begin his mass deportations? Who will push back and how? — Some rays of light through the darkness — Is this really who we are? — The Green Party screws it up again. — Crazy Alert! Ted Cruz’s daughter winces big time… — Hunter in a Farmer’s World Alert: When Labels Cut Deeper than the Difference: The Story of Bill — Wisdom School Alert: Imagination Rehab: Reverse Learning to Break Mental Blocks

Biden's real economic reforms were drowned out by the powerful lure of Trump's promises... We just elected a guy who's fine with the planet melting down, kids getting shot in school, insurance companies going back to denying coverage for preexisting conditions, and wants to weaponize the federal government in a way dictators do. What happened? Democrats thought the 2024 election would be all about Donald Trump's embrace of fascism and the future of our democracy. And abortion.

By torching the regulatory state, Trump and Musk pave the way for America's elite to plunder… Donald Trump is preparing to crash the American economy. He intends to do it by tearing up vital parts of our American government. He may even hire Elon Musk to pull it off. And from his point of view, this is not going to be a bad thing. The farther the economy crashes, the greater the buying opportunity for billionaires. It all has to do with something called the administrative state.

Bought politicians, and a court on their side—they’ve seized control... When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” — Frédéric Bastiat, Economic sophisms, 2nd series (1848) We just watched the final fulfillment of a 50 year plan. Louis Powell laid it out in 1971, and every step along the way Republicans have follow it. It was a plan to turn America over to the richest men and the largest corporations. It was a plan to replace democracy with oligarchy. A large handful of America’s richest people invested billions in this plan, and its tax breaks and fossil fuel subsidies have made them trillions. More will soon come to them. As any advertising executive can tell you, with enough money and enough advertising — particularly if you are willing to lie — you can sell anybody pretty much anything.

Because we don't have a right to vote, America's billionaires and the GOP are preventing Democrats from voting… Over four thousand Pennsylvania residents who live overseas just had their right to vote challenged by a group using data from a billionaire-funded outfit. As Sam Levine wrote for The Guardian: "So far officials in Bucks, Lancaster, Lehigh, York, Cumberland, Dauphin, Beaver, Centre, and Lycoming county have all received challenges, said Andy Hoover, an ACLU spokesman." Many of America's rightwing/neofascist billionaires don't want you to vote. And they've funded extraordinary efforts across multiple states to put that desire into law.

America is the only developed country in the world that's allowed an unaccountable, unelected Supreme Court to hand its political system over to its richest citizens… The biggest lesson Americans learned this election year is that billionaires basically own half of our political process. In the seven most tightly contested Senate races, billionaire spending on Republican candidates outpaces that on Democratic ones by seven-to-one. This is not how a democracy is supposed to work. The "demos" in democracy means "the people." Democracies are supposed to fulfill the will of the people; add the protections for minority groups a republic provides and you have what the Founders called "republican democracy" and we refer to as a democratic republic.