“Progress is our most important product.” R. Reagan, GE, 1950s
THE NEXT 250TH: A New Patriotism based on Democracy not Piracy
“Progress is our most important product.” R. Reagan, GE, 1950s
It seems like progressive patriots are still stuck in the rut of responding 1x1 to Trump’s daily outrages – from a failed war to a botched pool renovation – even as he tries to kidnap this week’s Semiquincentiennal. Yet there’s no modern Tom Paine – at least not until presidential aspirants speak up post-Fall – with a unifying theory-of-the-case to renew an unpopular Democratic party. Not for enactment now but in case a Blue Backlash provides it with a working majority.
Here’s one possible framework…in case:
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The best way to end Trump’s ongoing Ice Age is a strategy of victories with vision in 2026 and 2028.
Over the next two years, Democrats should be explaining the difference between Democracy and Piracy and then pioneering better policies for all our families and not just Trump’s.
I. CORRUPTION vs COMMUNITY
Calling Trump “corrupt” is true but trivialized. We need almost a new language to describe how one person and one party are openly exploiting public office for private profit while blaming woke, workers, minorities…or some hated “Other.”
But to be fair, let’s credit TeamTrump with a sense of humor by running against “woke” when their guy can’t stay awake in meetings. And two cheers to J.D. Vance for admitting that his administration has produced such a scandal fatigue that Watergate today would be a one day story.
To the contrary, Jon Ossoff’s phrase “The Epstein Class” IS a memorable new formulation to describe a privileged elite who care far more about their gilded ballrooms, selfish tax breaks, predatory coverups, special interest superpacs, emolumental self-dealing and eagerness to plaster POTUS’s name on buildings, passports, even currency. When “the buck stops,” Truman’s adage may have Trump’s face on it.
Presumably, disgust with smug greed will rise alongside rising gas and grocery prices…and as TeamTrump morphs into a giant Trojan Horse painted red, white & blue on the outside while inside are trillions in cash at their disposal.
That betrays our exceptional history. The Declaration’s revolutionary premise of treating people as citizens not subjects – which we rightly celebrate this year – continues to inspire us and people around the world. Not the Law of the Jungle but the Rule-of-Law since America is built on the big idea that all-of-us-know-more-than-any-of-us.
Yet now comes a dangerous extremism that tries to turn virtues like empathy, equality, compassion, fairness, justice, even government itself into four-letter words. These reactionary radicals fail to understand Bill Clinton’s axiom that “you can’t love your country but hate her government” and that real patriotism means progress for all, not piracy for a few.
Let’s at least use their very expensive stress test to detect and repair the cracks in our constitutional democracy to return to the very purpose of self-government, which Lincoln best defined as early as 1854: “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community whatever they need to have…but cannot do in their separate and individual capacities.”
By that standard, it’s Democrats who embody the “Party of Lincoln,” not Republicans who keep trying to divide us by race, region, religion and gender. When did “Loathe Thy Neighbor” become a Christian value?
II. THE CORNERSTONES OF TRUTH & TRUST
America believes not in strongmen but a strong democracy built on truth and trust.
First, Democracy assumes clashing opinions but consensus on basic facts – like hotter temperatures melting glaciers and now baking Europe – in order to enact the best laws. Second, we’re connected by a web of
mutual obligations, as Dr. King put it, that assume faith in each other – so that I pay my taxes knowing that you pay yours.
True, politicians of all stripes can overstate, mislead, tell white lies or even big ones to win power. And no, Democrats are far from perfect. But we’re in an entirely different dimension when Washington Post fact-checkers documented over 30,000 lies and falsehoods told by Trump in only his first term.
Averaging 22 falsehoods a day is a level of bad faith similar to the most diabolical dictators in history. Since he cheats in golf, business, marriage and math, only a credulous cult can take anything he says at face value.
Compare that to when ex-Secretary of State Dean Acheson went to Paris to brief President DeGaulle on Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba. As he took out documents to make that case, DeGaulle waved him off, “The word of the President is enough,” he said.
Is there a foreign leader who’d say that now about our chief executive – a human monkey wrench daily throwing himself at some perceived enemy?
This level of dishonesty and distrust would be awful in a family member, neighbor or co-worker but is a calamity in a head of state who also embraces authoritarian rule. Author Sisella Bok explained why some commentators refer to our country as “post-truth”: “Imagine a society where no word or gesture could ever be counted on. Questions asked, answers given, information exchanged – all would be worthless.”
Everyone understands the cliche: “A fish rots from the head down.” Serial corruption – combined with malevolence, incompetence and arrogance – add up to a five-alarm National Emergency.
III. WHEN LAWMAKERS ARE LAWBREAKERS
When it comes to federal law enforcement, prior administrations would ask – what does a law require and is there probable cause to believe it’s been violated? Anyone surprised that a twice-impeached and convicted felon instead embraces two different tests – what can I get away with and how can I screw Democrats and enrich Republicans?
Dictator Don treats justice as a joke. But it’s not funny when cases against big corporate donors are dropped or pardoned. It’s not funny when prosecutions are fabricated to “shame and shame” rivals, in the actual words of one top DOJ official. It’s not funny when you shout “Law & Order” while creating a police state suppressing 1st amendment rights.
Fortunately, we have an independent judiciary that still largely refuses to enable their corruption. For In a record number of reversals, scores of federal judges – Democrat and Republican alike – have said “ENOUGH!”... stopping the desecration of the Kennedy Center, ending deportations without due process, shutting down Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz, rejecting efforts to throw out state mail-in ballots and not allowing this blond monarch to steal Congress’s power-of-the-purse. As Reagan-appointed Judge Mark Wolf (District Court, Boston) put it shortly after his retirement, reflecting the scathing words of many of them, “What Nixon did occasionally and covertly, knowing it was illegal or improper, Trump now does routinely and overtly.”
Recent journalists and scholars - like Andrew Weissman, Carol Loennig, Barbara McQuade, Melissa Murray and Haberman/Swan – reveal an Administration resembling a crime syndicate run by a mob boss.
IV. LOST OPPORTUNITIES & DISASTROUS IMPACTS
By squandering time and effort on his obsessions with Greenland, windmills, showerheads and the Reflecting Pool – plus manic 40 tweet nights – Trump lacks enough hours in a day to fulfill his actual oath to “faithfully execute the law”...and has no sense of consequence about the lethal impacts he daily inflicts.
*The head of his own Covid Task Force estimated that 300,000 to 700,000 Americans needlessly died due to #47’s pronouncement that it would miraculously “just disappear.”
*Musk’s chain-saw cuts to USAID, according to Lancet, will cause up to 2 million infant deaths in Africa and is now hampering our response to a dire outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
*Then there’s the voluminous incompetence, from an Education Secretary referring to A. I. as “A1” (like the steak sauce) to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool turning algae green after a no-bid contract was given to a big donor to a war he lied himself into and is now trying to lie himself out of.
Voters want affordable health care and housing far more than bread and circuses on the White House lawn. Or to quote philosopher John McEnroe, “You Cannot be Serious!”
Opposing parties and candidates naturally end up considering each other awful. Ok. But America has never previously seen a POTUS called the “worst president” by an association of political scientists…and “mentally disturbed” in a public letter by 200 mental health experts due to their “duty to inform”...and “the most flawed person” I ever met by Gen. John Kelly, his own chief-of-staff…and “fascist to the core” by his Joint Chiefs Chairman, Gen. Mark DeMilly.
V. PRESCRIPTIONS FOR PROGRESS: Looking Up not Back
Yet the core strategy in the upcoming national elections is not merely Trump as an GOP albatross but the North Star of Progress -- that “no one’s smart enough to be a pessimist.”
That’s how the party of FDR, JFK, LBJ, Clinton, Obama were able to create Social Security, Unemployment Compensation, Medicare and Medicaid, the G.I. bill, Wagner Act, civil rights laws, cleaner air and water, safer workplaces, a two-thirds reduction in auto deaths per mile driven, the Americans with Disabilities Act and Freedom of Information Act.
So Democrats should again “throw our hat over the wall of space,” in President Kennedy’s metaphor, because real patriotism is not framed by stale Left-Right arguments but the difference between focusing on the past or the future.
Consider three big initial goals: Affordability, War & Diplomacy, Democracy & Law
*Affordability.The populist movement of the late 1890s was about “liberty and groceries.” Here we go again.
Republicans can pretend that reciting the word “deregulation” is a serious economic approach and that denying price hikes will fool people who shop…as declining Trump polls and GOP prospects.show.
It should surprise no one that Broligarchs were awarded the best seats at Trump’s indoor Inauguration since they bought his re-election fair-and square. But while Trumponomics is designed by fossil fools who focus on protecting the remaining 70,000 jobs in coal production (less than work nationwide for McDonalds), rival China is investing heavily in solar and last year installed more robots than the rest of the world combined.
Based on FDR’s classic insight in 1944 that “individual freedom cannot exist without economic security,” the next Administration and Congress should:
Increase both the federal minimum wage (static for 17 years) and Social Security payments to get closer to a living wage; restore Obamacare subsidies so millions don’t lose their health insurance; aggressively enforce antitrust law to outlaw monopolies; invest heavily in human capital in the dramatically shifting world economy; shrink gross income and wealth inequalities by enacting a tax code at least as progressive as the ones under Reagan and Obama, as well as by a small national billionaires net wealth tax.
Remember that the economy Biden turned over to Trump was “the envy of the world,” according to The Economist. Now it’s the worst of crony corporatism when three men have as much wealth as half of all American workers. Time to produce fewer trillionaires and more thousandaires.
*War & Diplomacy. The failure of Peace-through-Strength sloganeering is shown by the tragic waste in Iran of at least $132 billion, according to Moody’s Analytics. It’s hard to see how energetic diplomacy could do worse. Obama certainly understood Churchill’s preference for “jaw jaw, not war war” when he negotiated his successful Iranian nuclear deal without killing 170 schoolchildren.
Instead, by announcing that he makes major foreign policy decisions “based on my gut” – perhaps like his tweet on Easter Sunday 2026, “Open the fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards!” – Trump has isolated America in an interconnected world where it’s good to have friends dealing with cross-border crises like wars, climate violence, unregulated AI and unstable world markets. Nor does it help to achieve peaceful results when the Department of State loses thousands of diplomats at the same time as failing to fill a third of ambassadorial posts.
And while we narrowly avoided Trump’s blood-thirsty threat of “civilizational annihilation,” that very utterance in an instant irreparably diminished respect for an America throughout the world built up over two centuries of good will as a “City on a Hill.”
Trump is increasingly resembling Orson Wells, embittered and alone in his palatial Xanadu at the end of Citizen Kane.
*Democracy & Law. Some political consultants have fretted that talking about how to repair our broken Democracy is too esoteric to sway voters. But that accepts the autocratic arrogance that they’re too stupid to ever see through Trump’s incessant gaslighting and lying.
Democrats instead believe that majority rule based on fair elections is the best path to better health, lower prices, less economic inequality and a cleaner climate. But that can’t happen with Citizens United legalizing bribery, gerry-mandering assuring minority rule, Pardons based on money not mercy, a weaponized DOJ run by AG Donald Trump, an Electoral College converting losers into winners and a reactionary SCOTUS inventing precedents like a Unitary Presidency and Originalism to return us to the 1700s monarchy we defeated.
(Indeed, It’s the excesses of the Roberts Six that now require consideration even of term-limits or new justices to re-balance the Court so that a recidivist like Trump doesn’t corrupt it for another half century.)
Smart leaders understand the seminal issue for the next two years and two decades is not Capitalism or Democracy – free markets or state-run socialism – but that capitalism and democracy are two sides of the same coin of America. Each needs and reinforces the other. Capitalism without rules is theft and democracy without markets can be impoverishing.
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The enduring obstacles above will require new long-term laws if not constitutional amendments to change, for good. Those in turn require not only new leaders but citizen activists like the heroes of Minneapolis and No Kings Days, as earlier labor, environmental and civil rights laws emerged from civic action. But there are two short-term exigencies that must be quickly and simultaneously dealt with by the 120th Congress and 48th President:
^first, defuse Trumpian time bombs set to go off, like prohibiting tax audits on the First Family for past tax transgressions, unloading the pharaonic Qatari ‘Air Force One’, stopping or tearing down his monumental white elephants and evicting regulatory commissioners who are dismantling the very health/safety agencies they sit on.
^second, arrive at a unifying theme after the divide-and-conquer approach of Trumpism. “Progress” is one. Another was suggested by columnist Tom Friedman when he elevated the concept of “Brotherhood” as used in “America the Beautiful.” That is, an update of E Pluribus Unum.
^third, to answer that question “so what’s the big idea?” will need a nonpartisan equivalent of Nelson Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to demand accountability for the damage done. MAGA liars who thought they could merely become the loyal opposition will have to learn that their disloyalty to our fundamental principles have disqualified them from assuming the comity of prior eras.
Such a Presidentially created entity would both plan how to prosecute or exile Trumpers who exonerated themselves and renounce obvious historical lies so that later administrations don’t use them to justify a repeat performance. In a spirit not of vengeance but justice, Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon need not apply. One slow-motion fascist coup in our last century is plenty.
No one is omniscient enough to know whether this clean-up and renewal will take years or even decades. But it has to start this Fall when millions of voters have the clearest choice in history — between Heritage Americans and Horizon Americans. Either we;
^tolerate more lying, hyperbole, corruption, racism, misogyny, homophobia, indecency, intolerance, political violence, death threats to judges…as well as purchased politicians, nasty narcissists, xenophobic nativists, science- and climate-denying theologians, history-altering and blood-and-soil authoritarians; or
^embrace the pursuit of a “more perfect union,” which is our foundational creed.
Happy Birthday America. The choice is ours.
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