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Back in 2016, I was convinced that, had Bernie Sanders won the Democratic presidential nomination, he would have beaten Donald Trump because he would have taken some of Trump's White working-class voters. So here's my fantasy for election 2028 -- you know, the one in which Trump (the man who once threatened to be a dictator for a day) is now threatening to run again either as vice-president (and then have President Vance step aside to give him a third term) or in some other unknown but similarly unconstitutional fashion: I happen to think that, in 2028, Bernie Sanders should indeed run again, facing JD Vance or (for all we know) Donald Trump. Of course, he would be 87 years old, which, as an 80-year-old, I'm all too aware would be daunting indeed. And that's why I think his ticket should include the then-39-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as his vice-presidential candidate.
After all, the two of them have been traveling the country on a "fighting oligarchy" tour and, unlike other Democrats right now, at every stop, they're attracting "monster crowds," thousands, even tens of thousands of people. As Sanders told a crowd estimated at 36,000 in Los Angeles recently, "We are living in a moment of extraordinary danger, and how we respond to this moment will not only impact our lives but it will affect the lives of our kids and future generations. We are living in a moment where a handful of billionaires control the economic and political life of our country." And, he added, the Trump administration "is moving us rapidly toward an authoritarian form of society -- and Mr. Trump, we ain't going there."
Remind me, which other Democrats are either speaking like that or capable of calling out crowds and enthusiasm of that sort? And once victorious, given his age, he could serve perhaps a year or so in office and then turn the post over to Ocasio-Cortez, and we would be in a different country from any that Donald J. Trump and crew now imagine.
If only, of course! Yes, I'm all too aware that, given his age, that's undoubtedly a hopeless fantasy of mine. Still, let TomDispatch regular Norman Solomon, founder of the group RootsAction (dedicated to "economic fairness, equal rights for all, civil liberties, environmental protection -- and defunding endless wars"), focus on how to face an ever more dangerous Donald Trump and crew in the political years to come. Tom
What's Preventing a United Front Against the Trump Regime?
Trump Won't Change, But His Foes Must
America desperately needs a united front to restrain the wrecking ball of the Trump regime. While outraged opposition has been visible and vocal, it remains a far cry from developing a capacity to protect what's left of democracy in the United States.
With the administration in its fourth month, the magnitude of the damage underway is virtually impossible for any individual to fully grasp. But none of us need a complete picture to understand that the federal government is now in the clutches of massively cruel and antidemocratic forces that have no intention of letting go.
Donald Trump's second presidential term has already given vast power to the most virulent aspects of the nation's far-right political culture. Its flagrant goals include serving oligarchy, dismantling civil liberties, and wielding government as a weapon against academic freedom, civil rights, economic security, environmental protection, public health, workers' rights, and so much more.
The nonstop Trumpist assaults mean that ongoing noncooperation and active resistance will be essential. This is no time for what Martin Luther King, Jr., called "the paralysis of analysis." Yet the past hugely matters. Repetition compulsions within the Democratic Party, including among self-described liberals and progressives, unwittingly smoothed the path for Trump's return to power. Many of the same patterns, with undue deference to party leaders and their narrow perspectives, are now hampering the potential to create real leverage against MAGA madness.
"Fiscal Conservatism and Social Liberalism"
Today, more than three decades after the "New Democrats" triumphed when Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, an observation by Washington Post economics reporter Hobart Rowen days after that victory is still worth pondering: "Fiscal conservatism and social liberalism proved to be an effective campaign formula." While campaigning with a call for moderate public investment, Clinton offered enough assurances to business elites to gain much of their support. Once elected, he quickly filled his economic team with corporate lawyers, business-friendly politicians, lobbyists, and fixers on loan from Wall Street boardrooms.
That Democratic formula proved to be a winning one -- for Republicans. Two years after Clinton became president, the GOP gained control of both the House and Senate. Republicans maintained a House majority for the next 12 years and a Senate majority for 10 of them.
A similar pattern set in after the next Democrat moved into the White House. Taking office in January 2009 amid the Great Recession, Barack Obama continued with predecessor George W. Bush's "practice of bailing out the bankers while ignoring the anguish their toxic mortgage packages caused the rest of us," as journalist Robert Scheer pointed out. By the time Obama was most of the way through his presidency, journalist David Dayen wrote, he had enabled "the dispossession of at least 5.2 million U.S. homeowner families, the explosion of inequality, and the largest ruination of middle-class wealth in nearly a century."
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