Swanson: To a 2026 of Not Fighting Over Crumbs

To a 2026 of Not Fighting Over Crumbs

Leave a Comment / December 26, 2025

Every single person in the United States, from those who’ve been most harmed to those who’ve been most privileged, would be better off if we had a normal government that put even a moderate effort into universally improving everyone’s lives. If we had a government that took trillions of dollars away from the war machine and the untaxed oligarchs and provided as a matter of basic rights for all

• economic welfare,
• education, preschool through college,
• healthcare,
• a clean and sustainable environment, and
• public transit,

then nobody would ever be denied an education or a job for any reason of hateful idiocy. Why should they be when we’re absolutely rolling in wealth? We could obviously do a much better job of fighting over the crumbs we’ve got, with more context and nuance, but why should we, and how dare we? We need to be putting everything we’ve got into trying to preserve a habitable planet for our children, not fighting over crumbs.

That perfectly true statement is almost meaningless to someone who’s been wrongly imprisoned or denied housing or traumatized by racist police or prevented by cost from providing healthcare for a loved one. Those fortunate enough to not find the preservation of the environment, or the abolition of war, or the taxing of billionaires meaningless need, I think, to work at understanding how badly we are divided and conquered. A huge segment of the U.S. population is being trained to support racism, sexism, xenophobia, and all varieties of bigotry, while another huge segment of the population seems to think it would be joining in the same hideous beliefs if it were to admit that white men have ever had anything unfair done to them or grown their bitterness in any sort of realworld soil.

Young white U.S. male support for fascism is not excusable, sensible . . . or unpredictable. Discrimination against young white males that predictably leads to fascism is not a justification for, or the equivalent of, anything. Nor is it imaginary. In the United States we have an enduring legacy of slavery and white supremacy, persistent racist police and vigilante killings, a rising tide of traditional bigotry, and also discrimination against white men. Millions of words would never suffice to detail the full complexity of the mess we’re in or to properly rank and compare the vast variety of injustices. No solution other than deeply addressing each injustice, and not even that, would satisfy all.

But we would care less about the distribution of the crumbs if we were to take the whole loaf of bread away from sociopathic billionaires and weapons dealers.

Dumping so much of our wealth into the war machine is key to generating the xenophobia and nationalism that allow us to think in terms of a struggle for crumbs internationally. But we don’t need to accept those terms either. The world has plenty of wealth for all. That indisputable fact is also very hard to grasp through the flood of nationalistic propaganda from all sides and in the face of extreme inequality nearby.

We’re not helped by corporate media, with its normalization of war and corruption, and its solemn debates over how Democrats should rebrand themselves in order to better pretend to give a damn. I think Zohran Mamdani’s dad had a good point when he said that his son was elected mayor of New York because he promised to actually improve people’s lives and because he refused to support a genocide — which allowed people to know he was an honest person who really meant that he would work to improve people’s lives. That combination is almost unheard of in Washington D.C.; and almost unmentionable is the more direct connection between ending wars and improving lives. Unless we end the wars, we will not be able to improve the lives of the people being killed or of the people paying for the killing.

Here’s to a strategic new year, moving the money from war to peace, Medicare for all, green energy, free college, fast rail, guaranteed basic income, and ending fascism by improving the lives of every single person.

 https://davidswanson.org/to-a-2026-of-not-fighting-over-crumbs/