Ship of Fools: What Trump Teaches

That kind of leadership will never come from the committed-to-capitalism Democratic Party (yes, including Elizabeth Warren).

Of course, we will not get all of these things at once, but getting even one would be a major reversal of fortune--a step, finally, in the right direction. Let's take the one example of single-payer healthcare. You couldn't ask for a better issue. Obamacare is collapsing on its own deceptive contradictions, and Trump and the Republicans are promising to "replace" it. But the only thing you can replace it with that won't be worse is a single-payer system. This is not that hard to explain. Medicare, an enormously popular program, is right there as an example. Indeed, the fight for single-payer is going will be the way to prevent the privatization of Medicare.

There can be no left progressive movement of any worth in the Untied States that doesn't start fighting right now for a single-payer, universal coverage health insurance program, And no movement that's managed by Hillary and the "Never, ever" Democrats will do that. That's why progressives and leftists should spend zero minutes fretting over who will become Soros and Saban's next towel boy or girl at the DNC. Ignore them, and just wage the damn fight.

The second lesson that Trump has shoved our face into is more sobering: The left has failed. As Reed puts it, again: " The crucial tasks for a committed left in the United States now are to admit that no politically effective force exists and to begin trying to create one." For the reasons cited above and many others, the left in America is a political non-entity. When the Libertarians, led by Mr. "Who's Aleppo?" win three times the vote of Jill Stein and the Greens, it's telling us something about the extensive hold of capitalist ideology. It's that thing I hear when my working-class Latino Facebook friend and my renowned female doctor in one of the nation's premier medical research facilities, both tell me they voted for Trump because: "He's a businessman, and he knows how to create the jobs. He tells it like it is." That's the pop-culture, Apprentice-Shark Tank flavor of capitalist ideology that helped to elect Trump, and that we are a long way from overcoming.

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