Hartmann Report

How Divisions and Complacency Allow Authoritarianism to Flourish… President Biden told the nation, "American democracy is under attack … [by the] former president of the United States…" I wrote about this years ago when Trump was trying to overthrow our government, and it's time to talk again about what an American authoritarian government would look like. Because over the next two months we may — depending on how Americans react to the changes in our form of government Trump has planned — very rapidly slide into a form of fascism much like the old Confederacy in the 1840-1860 era. Like the old Confederacy, it could feature political violence and threats of violence, rigged elections, and single-party rule combined with a corrupt oligarchy that finances the politicians. And, like the old Confederacy, it could try to destroy the historic democracy of the United States of America, only this time in 2025 and the three following years. The word "fascism" gets thrown around a lot, but most Americans have no idea what it would look like or how it would actually play out.

The road ahead could lead to dictatorship or renewed liberty, as the American people confront the corrosive power of wealth in politics… Oligarchy is a form of government where the richest people in a country have captured its political system (or even filled it with themselves) and use that control to direct much of the government's efforts to increasing their own wealth and power. We'll soon again have a billionaire president — helped to power by the richest billionaire on the planet — with his election campaign funded in large part by at least $2 billion in direct, reported donations from roughly 150 billionaire families. It appears that the other roughly 350 billionaires who openly funded Trump in 2020 chose, this time, to instead donate to "dark money" SuperPACs created by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court with Citizens United that don't list their donors or, in many cases, even report their expenditures. With an estimated $15 billion spent on this 2024 election, their expenditures probably dwarf the ones we know about (and collectively they carpet-bombed Americans in often-deceptive political advertising).

Most Americans, when they hear the name Viktor Yushchenko, vaguely remember a Ukrainian politician lying in a hospital bed with a severely disfigured face, the result of poisoning with a deadly form of dioxin, the toxic ingredient in Agent Orange. But it was exit polls that got him there. Exit polls are polls taken outside of voting stations or polling places, where people who have already voted are questioned as they’re leaving. They’re considered far more accurate than other types of pre- or post-election polling because they don’t rely on people answering their phones, returning a mailed inquiry, or asserting that they intend to vote when they may well not. In a clean election environment, it’s safe to assume that nearly 100 percent of the people polled actually voted, and history shows that such polls are typically (outside the United States) accurate to within a fraction of a point, or a point or two at most, depending on how many people are polled.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — I'll be on C-SPAN this Sunday morning at 9:15 am ET — Is changing the Democratic Party the way to remake our Democracy? — In an authoritarian regime it's important to cow and control the news, and here we go. — Speaking of authoritarianism, Texas Republicans want to outlaw websites that discuss how to get an abortion. — Sarah Hurst's Russia Report on Tulsi Gabbard will make your toes curl. — Blueprint of destruction: Is Trump following Orbán's and Putin's road to power? — Former Trump administration officials who turned on him are preparing to flee the country. — Are Republicans coming for healthcare for both retired and working people? — State-level authoritarians fall in line with Trump. — Hunter in a Farmer's World Alert: Thom Hartmann Finds Himself Right in the Middle of the ADHD Debate — Wisdom School Alert: Can We Slow Down Time?

From the Founders' Vision to the Billionaire Takeover of Democracy Alexander Hamilton thought he (and the others who wrote the Constitution) had it all figured out. He and his colleagues never imagined that a group of billionaires would spend 43 years and billions of dollars to seize the US Supreme Court, which would then legalize political bribery. They never conceived of a foreign billionaire family coming to American and building a nationwide media ecosystem that was capable of convincing Americans that up was down, wrong was right, and a convicted fraudster and rapist would be a noble president. They would've laughed at you if you told them that the richest man in the world would come from apartheid South Africa to hook up with a grifter billionaire to become co-president.

It's time to name the enemy and wage a real fight for the middle class… If my hypothesis from yesterday — that Democrats best way to win elections and regain political power is to engage in class warfare against the GOP and the billionaires that fund it — the immediate question is, "How?" The last century has seen two presidents engage in class warfare in a big and direct way that not only won them multiple elections but also altered the electoral map of America: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. There are multiple lessons to learn from both.

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.