U.S. Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed speaks to supporters and the media during a campaign rally in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., August 2, 2026. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook
Do we stand on the edge of a grand new progressive era, with good wages for all, racial and gender equality and justice, and America joining the rest of the developed world with cheap college and healthcare paid for by rational taxes on the morbidly rich? Or will Trump gleefully overthrow American democracy, finish his ongoing project of shuttering or handing to his oligarch partners-in-crime our free press, and imprisoning more of us who object?
When Mussolini put Antonio Gramsci, the founder of Italy’s Communist Party, in prison in 1927, Gramsci wrote from his prison cell that:
“[T]he old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
That interregnum is passing right now here in America, the symptoms are obvious, and change is upon us.
Two forces in American politics are similarly on a collision course today at two levels. Within the Democratic Party, it’s Clinton-era neoliberalism versus Bernie’s progressivism. In the overall political scene, it’s Trump’s and his captive GOP’s neofascism versus the entire spectrum of Democrats (both “corporate” and “progressive”) who, regardless of their differences, still embrace democracy.
The problem corporate neoliberal Democrats, the heirs to Clintonism and Obamaism, face is that a majority of Americans are now clear that it simply doesn’t work. We’re sick of partial, corporate- and billionaire-aligned solutions to large problems that should best be handed by our government as part of the commons.
— Trying to get affordable healthcare to all Americans via Obamacare, for example, is increasingly failing because the massive for-profit insurance industry it depended on is increasingly committed to squeezing every last penny out of us, regardless of how many of us die.
— Trying to lift a majority of Americans back up into their parents’ middle class lifestyle is also failing, largely because the corporate wing of the Democrats dependent on campaign contributions from giant union-hating corporations have “mysteriously” failed in their proclaimed effort to increase unionization and the minimum wage.
— Trying to give all Americans access to a college education without debt has failed because a large handful of big-bank-funded Democrats supported Bush’s bankruptcy “reform” in 2005 that outlawed using bankruptcy to discharge student debt. When Reagan came into office, roughly 80 percent of the cost of college was covered by state and federal money and college endowments; today that’s only around 20 percent; returning to 80% (and, thus, affordable college) is now a big legislative lift when our tax code is so skewed toward billionaires and massive corporations that the money for college is largely gone.
Forty-five years of the Reagan Revolution being maintained by both parties have pretty much proven that neoliberal Democratic policies won’t be enough to either stop Trump’s full-on push to convert America into a fascist state, nor will they address the very real problems most Americans are experiencing today when it comes to being able to afford everything from rent to groceries to healthcare.
Today’s generation of progressive Democrats, therefore, are taking a page from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and proposing genuinely big solutions to the massive problems that Democratic neoliberalism and Republican neofascism have produced.
And they’re winning!
This week’s primary results are just the latest indication that a progressive renaissance on par with the New Deal, or at least the Great Society, may be close to our doorstep.
While media pundits seem baffled, it’s obvious to most of the rest of us that this is being driven by our middle class collapsing from two-thirds of us when Reagan took office in 1981 to around 41 percent of us today (and now it takes two paychecks to get there, whereas a family could be safe with a single wage-earner in 1981).
Fully 60% of Americans now live paycheck-to-paycheck with virtually no savings, numbers we haven’t seen since the 1930s.
— Five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have given billionaires and massive corporations virtual control over our elections as their corrupt Citizens United decision has allowed literally billions in dark money to flood every cycle.
— Our privatized, profitized healthcare system, including the Medicare Advantage Scam, accounts (according to a recent study by Yale) for over 114,000 unnecessary American deaths every year and untold misery and loss of worker productivity.
— While racist Republicans complain that we don’t have enough white babies, young people with college debt can’t afford to buy a house, marry, raise a family, or even start a small business.
— Meanwhile, the top 1% own more wealth than the bottom 93% and one Nazi-saluting trillionaire racist owns more wealth than the entire bottom 50% of Americans, 174 million people.
Our system has been rigged by 45 years of Reagan’s and Clinton’s neoliberalism, as I document in * The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America *and
Inequality has never, ever before been this bad in America, going all the way back to the 1700s. So, no surprise, Democrats who offer real solutions are winning primaries across the country and are poised to make huge electoral gains this fall, unless Trump and his shock troops succeed in pulling off the coup they’re clearly trying to make happen.
While corporate Democrats and Republicans decry “radical,” “far left” and “democratic socialist” candidates (and a desperate Trump is calling them “communists”), opinion polling is explaining the election outcomes that are befuddling op-ed columnists and “middle of the road” candidates.
— American voters tell pollsters they believe it’s obscene that one man (Musk) could have spent $290 million to make Trump president and that roughly one out of every six dollars spent in the 2024 election ($2.6 billion) came from just 100 billionaire families, virtually all of it funding GOP candidates. They want Citizens United overturned and a return to strict campaign finance limits.
— They want healthcare that everybody has access to and everybody can afford, and the only option on the table for that is what most other advanced democracies in the world have: Medicare for All or its equivalent. Fully 90% of Democrats and 66% of all Americans want it, and want it now. We also need to take on drug prices, a battle that pharma-funded corporate Democrats and Republicans have fought against for decades.
The solution to the high prices for everything isn’t just breaking up monopolies to bring back competition and small businesses (although that’s important); it also requires people to earn enough to live.
Only 6% of the private workforce has a union representing them (it was a third of us before Reagan and the GOP declared war on unions in 1981) and the minimum wage FDR gave us as part of his New Deal is stuck at $7.25/hour when if it’d been inflation adjusted since the 1960s it’d be well over $15.
A large part of the challenge average Americans face is because of the so-called K-shaped economy; the top is wide with a handful of billionaires controlling over half our wealth and the bottom is wide because of the impoverishment of our once-thriving middle class.
The answer here is simple: return to the corporate and personal income tax rates from 1933-1981 that built the middle class and prevented the emergence of American oligarchs.
Meanwhile, climate change is literally killing us and it’s beyond obscene that Trump and his Republican toadies lie about it with a straight face just to keep the fossil fuel industry money flowing into their pockets.
Trump’s war on green energy is crippling our ability to grow industry, adding to home electric bills, and jacking up emissions, all because the industry’s fatcats took his deal and gave him millions to get elected.
Foreign wars haven’t helped us either, with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars Bush and Cheney lied us into having cost around $8 trillion (and thousands of American lives); Trump’s newest illegal war with Iran is costing us a billion a day and crippling our ability to hold off Russia’s and China’s expansionist desires.
Every single one of these issues are on the progressive agenda, whether you call it that or “democratic socialism” or just point out that it aligns with traditional Democratic Party traditions prior to the Clinton presidency.
Every 80 years, it seems, we end up with a new progressive revolution, and we’re overdue for this generation’s. Progressive Democrats are leading the way, but none of it will work unless we all engage.
Double-check your voter registration, throw a few dollars to your favorite candidates (ONLY use their campaign websites; never reply to a text message or email), and show up at your local Democratic Party to volunteer to help out.
And share genuinely progressive and educational media — including this newsletter — with everybody you know. Organized people can overcome organized money as we saw with Angie Nixon’s primary victory in Florida and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s in Michigan.
We can do this. Tag, we’re it!
You won’t find insightful analysis like this latest column from Thom Hartmann — in which the legendary journalist digs beneath the headlines to reveal the big picture — in the op-ed section of Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post or Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. This is because we all know they didn’t buy those papers to support journalism, but to decide what the narrative should be.
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