The people of the US are starting to wake up and push back on Trump’s authoritarian aspirations. Marjory Taylor Green is making noises against the loss of health insurance premium subsidies and cuts to medicare. Is this the Republican tide about to break? Maybe not, but Democrats are showing newfound strength, even though it now looks like the government will open without concessions.

First, on that point: there’s a lot of anger about the 8 Dem senators who seem to have thrown in the towel and “snatched defeat…” yada-yada. But I think it’s not a bad thing…after all, the Dems were holding out to save the Repubs from themselves. Same play as giving The Donald a chance to put his name on a check that he and his party fought against. It’s because the Democrats care about providing good government whereas the Republicans are interested only in government for the rich, while seeming to be looking out for the little guy. Now, the Democrats have forced Republicans to show their true priorities, and Democrats should run hard in every district to win the vote of the MAGA faithful who have cast their vote for Trump (and also, in some cases, for Bernie) in order to smash the system that has failed them. It is time for the message that Democrats stand for a government for the people.

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Trump got this far because of wide perception that the system has failed the people. It has.

The last 40 years have seen a bipartisan effort to establish an anti-progressive system of taxation and capitalist consolidation that has created the most radical income and wealth disparity since the Guilded Age of the 1890s—perhaps even worse. At a time when 0.1% of the population controls 30% of the country’s wealth and 63% of the US adult population is living paycheck-to-paycheck, we are literally living in a neo-feudal era of lords and serfs. The effect of the BBB (budget busting bill) will be (if it stands) to exacerbate and vulcanize this condition for decades to come. It will spell the end of the American Era.

This is further evidence that we have run the course of the previous New Deal cycle of American history, and we are on the threshold of a new re-imagining of the American Experiment. The vandalization of the institutions of the US administration will require us to take a thorough inventory of social, economic, and cultural structures and decide, as a community, what kind of a country we wish to live in.

Will the purpose of our government be A) to serve the interests of the People, or B) to enable the elite to live and do as they please?

This has always been the fundamental argument since the Constitution was first hammered out, and the government shut-down debate has established which party is on each side. Democrats need to start talking to the “Little MAGA” with the respect that they deserve. It won’t be easy, because these folk have swallowed the idea that the Democratic Party brand is toxic. Just the way the Tea Party folk fought against “Obama Care” while giving enthusiastic support for each detail of the package, so must Democratic Party candidates speak everywhere in a language that matches the values of those who have felt betrayed. Republicans appeal to them in a language of grievance against others whose culture may differ, but whose economic interests align. Democrats must speak in a language that addresses the grievance while unifying the tribes with common interest.

Consider further that convulsions of technology and AI promise to shift more and more of the production of the elements of human sustenance away from human participation. We receive the means of acquiring (i.e., money) the necessities of sustenance (i.e., food, clothing, shelter) by participating in the production of these necessities—by working in the economy to produce these goods and services. As efficiencies of production of these products increases to the extreme, fewer and fewer people will be engaged in production of them…thus fewer and fewer people will be actually plugged into the economy in a productive way.

This tendency will push further the imbalance described in the prior discussion of the Baumol Effect.

It is not enough for Democrats to push back on the harms of Donald Trump’s presidency; he was elected to rip everything up! Democrats must compose and propose a new New Deal, or Contract With America, or Green New Deal, or whatever it should be called. It must be a new story behind which all Americans can unite (as they did behind FDR’s New Deal) to enact and propel the country forward through the next 80 years of a more fully realized multi-cultural egalitarian democracy.

It is either 80 years of that, or 80 years (or forever) of oppression, failure, and downfall.