It’s hard to know where to start. In the US at present, one member of the House of Representatives has introduced a resolution aimed at making sure the body’s first transgender member can’t use any of the public bathrooms in her new workplace.
At least two of Donald Trump’s top lieutenants – his vice president and his pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services – have previously likened him to Hitler. His pick to run the Defense Department – the second-largest employer in the world – is Pete Hegseth, a weekend TV news host whose management experience consists of three years as executive director of Veterans for Freedom and its 15 employees. His pick for Secretary of Education once kicked her husband in the balls in front of 68,000 screaming fans at WrestleMania X-Seven. His pick for director of National Intelligence has a history of cosying up to some of the world’s most brutal dictators and seems about the last person one should trust with important secrets.
The list is long and mind-numbing, and led some commentators to state that, just for fun, Trump – the self-proclaimed protector of all women – has made being accused of sexual harassment a prerequisite to joining his cabinet.
We are not, I think, a stupid nation. We have, however, twice made a choice that, if not stupid, is wildly ill-advised. Neither do I think we are a mean-spirited nation, but we are soon to find ourselves led by mean-spirited people. It sends the mind reeling that the passengers on this clown bus of potential leaders are comprehensively unqualified for the jobs they seek and seem to be universally awful people. Collectively, they span the full spectrum of human awfulness and all share one overriding quality: greed.
Because my son, a community organiser working on issues of affordable housing, tenants’ rights and homelessness, has read and thought more about this than anyone I know, I am going to crib from something he wrote. “Despite populist rhetoric, the [Maga] movement’s fundamental goal is to move money from the bottom of the economy to the top, centralising resources and control over society in the hands of a small group of corporate and political leaders. Everything they do, including the deeply worrying anti-democracy moves they make, is in service of this mission.
“They’re able to win power with an agenda that benefits such a small group of people at the expense of a large one by dividing people – who otherwise share significant economic, social and political interests – along racial and cultural lines, and weaponising people’s very real fear and anger over the deteriorating material conditions of their lives into antipathy towards the institutions that could actually make things better.”
The Republican Party has been beating this drum pretty much since the 1960s, and its efforts have successfully hollowed out the thriving middle class that was built in the post-World War II era by common-good efforts like the GI Bill, government-insured mortgages and affordable higher education, among others. Trump and his Maga-minions have turbocharged the greed machine and taken the politics of fear to an unprecedented level.
The Democratic post-mortems and handwringing are in overdrive, as the party seems to have lost its ability to speak to the working-class voters who have traditionally formed its base. Our institutions are weakened and threatened, our social safety net has huge holes in it, and we are increasingly isolated, all of which makes it easier for the greed machine to fill us with anger and fear.
My son’s work focuses on building class-based solidarity among people where they live, work and go to school. He believes that organising America’s working-class majority in local communities to build political power is the best way to eventually consign our current form of toxic capitalism to history’s trash heap.
Today, there’s considerably more fear than hope out there. But hope-fuelled action is where the road to a better tomorrow starts.
Jonathan Kronstadt is a freelance writer working in Washington, DC.
