As the Wall Street Journal noted, in a headline Tuesday, "After Push on Taxes, Republicans Line Up Welfare Revamp Next." Trump signaled this shift in his appearance last week in Missouri at a campaign-style rally for the tax bill, which included a vicious denunciation of those who need social programs to survive in an attempt to pit low-paid workers against low-income welfare recipients in a race to the bottom.
"I know people that work three jobs and they live next to somebody who doesn't work at all," he declared. "And the person who is not working at all and has no intention of working at all is making more money and doing better than the person that's working his and her ass off... So we're going to go into welfare reform."
The Democratic Party offers no alternative to this reactionary, ultra-right populism, because, like the Republicans, it is a political servant of the financial elite. The Democrats will offer different political rhetoric, with appeals to identity politics and even, in the form of Bernie Sanders, a claim to defend working people against the "millionaires and billionaires."
But the Democratic Party also supports a major reduction in the corporate tax rate, the centerpiece of the Trump-Republican plan. Democratic-controlled state governments, as in California and New York, have pursued austerity policies just as ruthlessly as their Republican counterparts. And the Obama administration, in eight years in office, presided over the greatest transfer of wealth from the working class to the financial aristocracy in history. It is that experience that disillusioned millions of working people with the Democrats and created the conditions for the victory of Trump in 2016.
It is up to the working class to carry out an independent political struggle to defend public education and all basic social services, jobs, decent living standards and democratic rights. This requires a political break with the capitalist two-party system and the building of an independent party of the working class, based on a socialist program.
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