How Did This Happen?

And who bears responsibility?

Back in June, when I became convinced that Donald Trump would beat the odds and win the election, I started thinking about the people, events and decisions that brought us to the point where millions of Americans appeared dead-set on supporting, some with near religious passion, a mentally unstable, morally bankrupt, manifestly incompetent convicted felon, who had been impeached twice and indicted four times, and who routinely demonized people and threatened his political opponents with what we now call stochastic violence. Because I’m 65-years-old and have written about national politics for nearly 25 years, I had some notions, some theories, and many opinions, simply for having lived and paid attention long enough.

What follows isn’t a sourced, scholarly, or comprehensive analysis, it’s more impressionistic, what I can recall from my life experiences, and what strike me as the important stepping stones on the winding path from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, from a 1980s conservative icon to an authoritarian felon in 2024. What and who is behind what looks like a political realignment? Learned people might disagree or point to other actors and events, legislative outcomes, policies and causes, but here are my cliff notes. 

Winner-Take-All Economics:

I’m talking here about the ideology, the thinking and justification, for slashing taxes for the wealthy and corporations, granting corporations regulatory “relief”, and drastically eroding the collective power of labor unions that began during the Carter Administration and gathered critical mass under Ronald Reagan. The 1980s were a time of frenzied corporate mergers and takeovers, plant closings, calls for efficiency and competitiveness with global rivals like Japan, who at the time were eating America’s lunch in the auto and other industries. The 1987 movie “Wall Street” by Oliver Stone captures the era, and the ethos of Gordon Gecko -- slick, ruthless, corrupt -- applies to modern day oligarchs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. 

Label it neoliberalism or trickle-down economics, but the idea was that if the creative capacity and daring of America’s business-class, its great and mighty titans of industry, was unshackled from government oversight and interference and excessive taxation, prosperity would follow and flow like a massive stream that would inevitably lift all boats. 

Of course it failed to lift all boats, but it succeeded in spectacular fashion in lifting a relative few into sumptuous super-deluxe luxury yachts, into mansions and castles all over the world, some with their own social media platforms and space agencies. One reason so many Americans are angry and disillusioned, and thereby susceptible to a demagogic message of grievance and resentment, is because a massive transfer of wealth has occurred over the past half century, from bottom to top. 

And guess what? It has been a bipartisan project so successful that we blame each other rather than the perpetrators.

Decade after decade, the idea that the Market knew best was hammered into our brains. For all intents and purposes the Market was as infallible as the Christian God, ordained to become the organizing principle for every facet of life, from commerce to health care to higher education, and even the operations of the armed services as we saw with the use of private mercenary firms during the War on Terror. Put more simply: Market = Good, Government = Bad. Therefore, everything that supported the public commons should be, and in many ways was, commodified and monetized, turned over to private economic actors, shrewd investors (those mystical job creators and risk takers we celebrate, our Billionaire Class), wielding spreadsheets and cold-hearted cost-benefit analysis. This fundamental idea set the stage and the tone for decades of privatization of services once performed by not-for-profit entities, as well as wholesale offshoring of the country’s manufacturing capacity. Bigger was always better, more efficient, and the monopolies and concentration of wealth and power that predictably arose were not a cause for concern as long as consumers benefited. Or so said Robert Bork, who wrote a seminal book about anti-trust regulation.

Case in Point: When I say the dictates of the Market dominate our lives I mean its logic and ethos and sacrosanct place in our imagination. Consider the inflation we experienced after the pandemic shut down swaths of the economy, and government subsidies in the form of cash payments and tax credits expired. When the cost of food and gas and other necessities spiked, who did average people and most of the media blame? Joe Biden and the Democrats. Why didn’t we question whether or not the price increases were the result of gouging on the part of the half dozen or so corporations that dominate every significant sector of the economy, from banking, insurance, health care, streaming services, cellular providers, airlines and internet service providers, to the corporations that dominate agriculture and the grocery business? Except on the far left, which nobody pays attention to, there was nary a squeak about this. 

Generations of people in this country have literally been indoctrinated to blame the government before we blame the capitalists. I’m not saying that government services are always better any more than I’m claiming that all corporations are inherently evil, but profit is a powerful motive and it should be abundantly clear by now that profits earned are rarely shared evenly. If we allowed it to, the government could play a balancing role, act as a provider of last resort, or at least a provider of a minimum safety net for those victimized by capitalism’s excesses. 

Of course, that would be socialism, which is only extended to the wealthy, not the poor or needy. 

Bill Clinton and the New Democrats:

You hear it in the postmortems of the recent election, the circular firing squad demanding to know what went wrong, similar to what happened after Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. Indeed, what’s wrong with the Democrats? I wrote about this in April (link below) when I mused about the weakness of the Democratic party’s messaging and its appeal to a broad electoral base. This isn’t a new problem, it has a long history, traceable to Jimmy Carter when he began pushing for deregulation (the commercial airline industry among the first) that became a frenzy under Reagan and was continued by Bill Clinton. Clinton or “Slick Willie” as we called him back then, was one of the first to advocate that Democrats move in a more corporate, capital-friendly direction, catering to the needs and interests of corporations and wealthy individuals rather than the working class that had long been the party’s traditional base. Why, asked Clinton, shouldn’t Democrats compete for political contributions from the Capitalist Class? Screw Big Labor, go for Big Money. NAFTA was one result of this shift in direction, a corporate-friendly trade agreement that accelerated the decimation of American manufacturing and labor unions, which were already losing ground after the Reagan years, and turned the Democratic Party in the direction of Wall Street bankers, and later, Big Tech. 

https://open.substack.com/pub/briantanguay/p/democrats-must-tell-a-better-story?r=adj3d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web,

Americans have long forgotten that it was Bill Clinton’s administrations that really cozied up to the financial titans and gave full-throated support to “modernization” of the banking and finance industry, giving the Big Boys of Capital the tools to create money out of thin air with their collateralized debt obligations and other opaque schemes. The elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act, a New Deal banking reform, happened under Clinton. About a decade later, the financial gurus gave us the Great Meltdown of 2008-2010, the subprime mortgage debacle, when millions of Americans lost the foundation of their wealth: homes and retirement savings. Many never recovered, though the Big Banks -- deemed, you may remember, Too Big to Fail -- made out just fine, their balance sheets restored, even improved, courtesy of American taxpayers. Who remembers the Troubled Asset Relief Program and its no-strings-attached giveaways to Wall Street, passed by Congress with bipartisan support and almost no debate? 

We also forget that Clinton and the Democrats gave us the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the basic platform for the digital revolution that was then coming into sight. The birth of the Internet gave rise to massive changes in the economy and labor, and spawned social media platforms which over time contributed to the erosion of the traditional mass media, broadcast television and print newspapers; tech titans like Google, Apple, and Amazon, offer wonders of convenience but the wonders came at a cost  many people have seen or experienced in decimated small towns, on boarded-up and empty mainstreets, and in low-paying jobs with no benefits. 

A fine book about this time period is The Great American Stickup by Robert Scheer.

Newt Gingrich:

I would be remiss to castigate Bill Clinton and the Democrats without mentioning Newt Gingrich, not because Gingrich was a man of great distinction, he never was and isn’t, but because he modeled a way of being for the modern Republican Party, a scorched Earth, take-no-prisoners opposition to any legislation proposed by Democrats, with the exception of increases in military spending and tax cuts for wealthy people and corporations. Gingrich showed the GOP how to say No, No, and No again, and to do so with defiant belligerence. Newt’s contribution to making “compromise” a dirty word shouldn’t go unmentioned. 

Corporate & Social Media:

American media has been in decline for decades, a victim of technological change, but also a deliberate reordering of the rules that govern media ownership (see above, think Disney), allowing billionaires, and massive media conglomerates to buy and operate entire media networks for their own profit and purposes. Cable TV, Rush Limbaugh & Right Wing radio, Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting -- the right’s echo chamber didn’t come about by happenstance. It’s now possible to convince 50% of the population that we live in two different nations, one Blue and one Red. The Red one is under siege from gay and trans people, uppity women and culture warriors, climate scolds, intellectuals, and, of course, hordes of brown and black and other people rampaging across the southern border by the millions, taking and raping, raping and taking. 

Red nation is under constant threat by people who hate God and love abortion. 

Blue nation has biases and prejudices and conceits of its own.  

I thought corporate media had reached its nadir back in 2002 and 2003 when editors and opinion writers led the cheers for the invasion of Iraq. The landscape is many times worse today, and what we’ve witnessed from the corporate-controlled press in the Age of Trump is malpractice at scale. CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Fox most of all, normalized Trump’s norm-shattering madness, sane-washed it time and again. The media consistently gave Trump a free pass to be outrageous and lawless, while at the same time demanding Joe Biden and Kamala Harris be flawless. How many stories did we see about Joe Biden’s physical frailty, his verbal gaffes, and cognitive decline? And how many about Trump, who was worse by an order of magnitude? 

Bottom line: Trump is good for business, for clicks, for drawing eyeballs to screens. Corporate media can’t quit him. 

George W. Bush and The Neocons:

I like the word “counterfactual” because it allows us to speculate on what might not have happened. I have always held a special disdain for George W. Bush, born of the fact that he was installed in the White House by the US Supreme Court in 2000, an actual “stolen” election. If this hadn’t happened, would John Roberts and Samuel Alito have been elevated to the Supreme Court? Would we have launched the global War on Terror after the 9/11 terrorist attacks? Would we have adopted the draconian Patriot Act and created the sprawling Department of Homeland Security? Would an Al Gore administration have invaded and occupied Iraq on bogus, manufactured pretenses? Unless you lived through the Bush and Uncle Dick Cheney years, it may be hard to grasp just what a fuck-up Dubya really was and how much actual damage he inflicted on the nation and the Middle East. Today, of course, Dubya spends his retirement on his Texas ranch where he paints pretty pictures, watercolors and such, and enjoys a friendship with Michelle Obama. Dubya’s partner in the Iraq invasion, Britain’s Tony Blair, is now an extremely wealthy man. No accountability on either side of the pond. 

Another important development during Dubya’s reign involves the Christian Right, the folks against legal abortion and same-sex marriage and equal rights for women, who believe that America was created as a country for white Christians. After many youthful mishaps, Dubya found the Lord -- found him with all the fervor of a convert -- and he opened doors in Washington for many Christian warriors to stride through, where many of them remain. Mike Pence was one. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is definitely one. Project 2025 is riddled with Christian nationalist ideas. 

Few people remember that none of the architects of the Iraq debacle, in my opinion the greatest strategic and moral blunder in our history, were held accountable -- not for the torture and deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, not for the billions of dollars the Pentagon never bothered to account for, not for one damn thing. Dubya and Uncle Dick skated, Condi Rice and Douglas Feith walked away unscathed, and many others went on to join think tanks or become pundits on cable TV. Just as the bankers who gave us the Great Recession paid no penalty, neither did these folks; is it any wonder that average citizens despise Washington DC “elites” and distrust the government? Accountability, you must understand, is for the little people. 

But Dubya’s lasting achievement was his appointment of John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and Samuel Alito as an Associate Justice. These appointments paid off handsomely for the reliable continuance of minority (conservative & white) rule. Consider what the Roberts Court has wrought over the past two decades on voting rights, money in politics, corporate regulation, gun laws, and reproductive rights. More recently, look at the favorable rulings and delays the court gave Donald Trump. It’s not accidental. Don’t look at the elements in isolation, rather see where they connect or intersect, and where symbiosis occurs. Roberts may claim to be a non-biased jurist, but he’s actually a conservative political operative pretending to act as a judge; he’s a partisan. Roberts even gave the next president absolute immunity for “official” acts, basically license to break, subvert or ignore whatever law he wants. 

I like to think of it this way: Dubya gave us Roberts and Alito, and this duo, along with Clarence Thomas (the ultimate DEI appointment), was the tip of the spear that produced the Citizens United decision in 2010 that allows unlimited, unaccountable money to corrupt the political system. They begat the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2012, which had protected minority groups, primarily Black voters in southern states, from being targeted with a range of tried and true tactics to prevent them from voting; begat an perverse interpretation of the Second Amendment that mocks any concerns for public safety, and basically tells the American people that we must accept mass shootings and wanton gun violence; begat the overturning of Roe vs Wade, stripping a Constitutional right from women that had stood for half a century; begat a corrupt court where sitting justices accept lavish gifts from allies, like Clarence Thomas and his pal, billionaire Harlan Crow. Outright corruption. 

Talk about a radical court. 

But you can’t tell the Supreme Court story without mentioning Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, or Senator Mitch McConnell, and this is where you see a connection between the dark money allowed by Citizens United, and the conservative capture of the Court, a supermajority of six justices built over the course of decades and the appointments of two men who didn’t win the popular vote, Dubya and Trump. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett all have ties with the Federalist Society. Leonard Leo is the Supreme Court king maker, but also a key architect of the conservative takeover of the federal judiciary. Case in point, Aileen M. Cannon, vetted for ideological acceptability and put forward for nomination by Leo and the Federalist Society, appointed by Trump, and who shortly thereafter dismissed on spurious grounds the Espionage Act case against Donald Trump. 

Service rendered. 

Leonard Leo, working in tandem with Mitch McConnell, one of the great legislative wrecking-balls in the history of the US Senate, was wildly successful in seeding the federal courts with hundreds of ideologues. McConnell played his role in that effort, and also famously stymied President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland. And we should recall that McConnell rammed the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett through in the final days of Trump’s first term. Mitch should burn in the fires of Hell, but he won’t. 

My overall point is that we can trace the origin of many of our current problems to Dubya. 

William Barr:

William Barr must be recognized for all the interference and blocking and dissembling he did on behalf of Trump. The devout Dough Boy was very busy during his run as Attorney General. His greatest trick was to queer the Mueller report (Robert Mueller, the prosecutor who investigated Trump’s shakedown of the Ukrainian president) by portraying it as an exoneration, completely ignoring the ten or more clear instances when Trump obstructed justice. Under the absurd rules -- internal rules, not law -- the Department of Justice adheres to regarding the prosecution of sitting presidents, Trump got a pass while in office, but the case could have been reactivated and prosecuted when Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, took the helm. In what will be seen as a missed opportunity and an act of cowardice, Garland declined to do so, allowing all the revelations in Mueller’s report to slide into the memory hole. 

More about Garland momentarily. 

Kevin McCarthy:

McCarthy earns mention because as the leader of House Republicans after January 6, he had a clear opportunity to turn the GOP away from Trump, and at first he did so, but then, sensing the direction of the political breeze, flipped and trotted down to Mar-A-Lago to kneel before Trump. Until he was ousted by his own caucus, McCarthy undermined the House Select Committee investigating the insurrection, and performed the black-is-white gaslighting at which he was so adept. A true political coward. 

Merrick Garland:

When students and scholars of this dark time look back, or seek a definition of cowardice, a photograph of Merrick Garland should pop up. Not only did Garland pass on indicting Trump for the crimes he committed with regard to Ukraine, he dallied and dithered and dodged and ducked prosecuting Trump for the January 6 attack on the Capitol. For nearly two years Garland bent over backwards to avoid appearing partisan, and by the time the AG located his spine and appointed Jack Smith as Special Prosecutor, it was too late. Garland’s timidity played right into Trump’s strategy of delay, delay, delay, and appeal, appeal, appeal. Jack Smith never had a chance. He ran headlong into a corrupt judge in Florida -- the aforementioned Aileen Cannon -- and smack into the radical Supreme Court in the DC case. Now, of course, both prosecutions will be scuttled. 

Who to blame? Joe Biden. He picked the wrong man for the moment; Garland has the temperament of a judge, not a prosecutor. 

The 2024 Election:

Is it Kamala’s fault that she lost? Can we lay the blame at her feet? No. No single factor caused Harris to lose, it was a constellation of circumstances. We must first look at Joe Biden, who should have aspired, as I wrote from 2020 on, to only a single term, and announced his decision not to seek reelection a year -- or better yet -- 18 months ago. Biden was too old and frail to campaign for a second term, as was obvious to anyone paying attention and being honest. By the time Biden made the correct and necessary decision to step aside, Kamala was on the back foot, the soccer equivalent of coming on at half time two goals behind. She also wasn’t elevated to the top of the ticket through a party convention, which would have benefitted her in several ways; the fact that she was anointed by Biden may have worked against her, in some minds might have smacked of DEI, as if she wasn’t entirely qualified. Not true, but some may have doubted that she earned the nomination legitimately. 

Another factor: Kamala took control of Biden’s train, not her own. She didn’t have sufficient time to distance herself from Biden, to explain what policies she would modify or reject, not on the economy or foreign policy, and yet she still managed to run a decent campaign, but always under pressure of doing more in half the time. This is why I kept writing that she was running uphill, in high heels.

And, of course, being a Black/South Asian woman, no matter how qualified and prepared, was always a heavy weight to carry. Trump, as the fine Irish writer Fintan O’Toole noted in a recent article, used his misogynist brush to paint Harris as an evil Jezebel, the Whore of Babylon, allied with blood-thirsty immigrants from Haiti and darkest Congo. A complete lie, but some voters surely accepted it. 

And Gaza. Harris was trapped by Biden’s indefensible support of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu. If she had come out strongly against Biden’s policy, she would have been crucified for being disloyal, but by backing Biden she alienated segments of her coalition. There was no way to neatly thread this needle, but it’s not completely fair to blame Harris. US policy has been biased toward Israel for more than fifty years, and nothing our rogue ally does, no matter how abhorrent, changes the game. We support Israel unconditionally, even when Israel jams an ungrateful thumb in our eye. Netanyahu is eager to drag the US into a war against Iran, and I will not be surprised if he succeeds.

Donald Trump will not fix or even alleviate the problems facing our country. He will, however, make things much worse, particularly when it comes to preparing for climate catastrophe. I also have no doubt that he will exacerbate one issue that complicates so many problems we face, from grotesque wealth inequality to climate change to the corrosive influence of money in politics: the ascendancy of a predatory Billionaire Class, best represented by Elon Musk, who believe themselves entitled to take what they want, when they want, without being bound by law or regulation or taxation. Millions of people who voted for Trump, who put their faith in his promises to improve their lives, will not even recognize that they have been conned. Again. I wonder if Trump voters can even name an economic policy offered by Trump that might actually put more money in their pockets. Tax cuts? Those will go to the wealthiest Americans as they did in 2017. Tariffs? That will cost consumers and be felt most by those least able to afford it. What else did Trump offer other than, “it will be so great, so big, the biggest anyone has ever seen.”

When Trump fails to deliver his followers will find scapegoats -- uppity women, Democrats, the woke elite, liberals, space aliens -- whatever “enemy” Trump tells them to blame. They will never blame themselves.

And so, here we stand, beyond the crossroad where the devil waits for the unwary and the gullible. I’ll close with this quote from the novel Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie: “Politics, children: at the best of times a bad dirty business.”

Indeed.