We're losing because we don't even aim to win, or say what it would mean to win. When we do that, we CAN win.

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Huge numbers of people wanted Bernie Sanders to be president but the people with real power used it to nip that dream in the bud, didn't they?

Huge numbers of people wanted Donald Trump to be president because they believed he would make life better for ordinary people, but his cabinet is filled with billionaires like himself who have no intention of doing that, do they?

Life could, and should, be much better for ordinary people in the United States than it is. Why isn't it? People who have to work for a living until they retire (if they're even able to ever do that) and who, unlike the upper class, can't live in luxury without working have been on a treadmill of defeat for hundreds of years.

We have waged heroic struggles to abolish slavery and Jim Crow, to win the 8 Hour Day and the right to form a labor union, and to end unjust wars. Our labor militancy scared FDR and his class into giving us a New Deal in the 1930s. But what has it gotten us?

- Social Security and Unemployment Compensation that means abject poverty for many and is in danger of being cut by efforts to privatize it;

- Labor unions that are notoriously undemocratic with top leaders in cahoots with management;

- The New Jim Crow of racist prison incarceration and a racist War on Drugs designed to stigmatize blacks and Hispanics as criminal races;

- Decent paying jobs outsourced or automated so that now both parents have to work and we can hardly remember "the good old days" when (for some, at least) a single 8 hour job was enough to support a "middle class" family;

- More unjust wars and a "poverty draft" that manipulates young people into enlisting to kill innocent people abroad and then come home traumatized and suicidal;

- Schools that use standardized tests designed to fail the poorest children and persuade them that they are too dumb or lazy to even deserve a decent-paying job;

- Health care insurance that is increasingly difficult to afford unless one gets a policy that hardly pays for anything.

We sometimes win a raise in the minimum wage here or there, but what happens? The employers hire fewer people. We may make college more affordable, but then what? We end up feeling lucky to get an unpaid internship.

We're losing the fight against the billionaire class that runs the nation. How come?

The reason we're losing is because we haven't even explicitly aimed to win. We haven't yet figured out what it even MEANS to win.

Because we cannot even articulate what we are for, what we mean by winning, we fail to inspire people to join us in fighting for it. On the contrary, our silence about what we are for plays right into the hands of the billionaire class, the ruling class.

The ruling class has spent many decades propagandizing the idea that any attempt to make society genuinely equal and democratic will only make things worse. It tells us that if you want equality that's Communism. And what happens under Communism? Nearly all of us have been given George Orwell's Animal Farm to read in school, because it tells us (as summarized by Cliff Notes) what happens: "Life for all the animals (except the pigs) is harsh. Eventually, the pigs begin walking on their hind legs and take on many other qualities of their former human oppressors. The Seven Commandments are reduced to a single law: 'All Animals Are Equal / But Some Are More Equal Than Others.'"

The obvious anti-democratic reality of the Soviet Union and of present day Communist China only helps the ruling class portray as crazy or stupid the very idea of aiming to make our society fundamentally equal and democratic.

The ruling class fills the airwaves and newspapers with arguments for the notion that as bad as things are, any fundamental change will only make things worse. We're told that the rich produce jobs and anything that makes them less rich will only result in fewer jobs. We're told that the rich give to philanthropy to make our lives better and we don't want to end that, do we? We're told that genuine democracy might not really be such a good idea after all because haven't you heard about the Milgram psychology experiment that showed how ordinary people will administer horrible electrical shocks to people just because an authority tells them to, and this shows that people will blindly follow a demagogue; better to have trusted members of the upper class actually in control of things, no? [All these things we're told are false, by the way.]

The ruling class propaganda has us convinced that if we start talking about changing society fundamentally we will be rejected by the general public. We are thus afraid to identify the dictatorship of the rich as the problem. Instead we "play it safe" by identifying mere symptoms as the root problem: insufficiently strict campaign finance laws, excessively high college tuition, racist policing, lobbyists in Congress, failure to obey the Constitution, wrong person in the Oval Office, etc. We do this even though we know that addressing these symptoms is like putting a band-aid on cancer because in our society in which money is power, the people with billions of dollars have the power, and can use it to get around any law that may be passed and any politician who may be elected.

We don't ever identify what, exactly, is wrong with our current society, in the sense of what is the root cause of our always losing. It's a taboo subject. And yet almost everybody (not just we but the general public) knows what the root problem is: we live under a dictatorship of the rich--the billionaire plutocracy.

What the General Public ACTUALLY Believes

Since we all hear the ruling class propaganda day in and day out, we assume that most people believe it. After all, you never hear or see anybody in the mass (or alternative) media express the egalitarian revolutionary opinion that we should remove the rich from power to have real--not fake--democracy with no rich and no poor, do you? The ruling class controls the media, including Democracy Now! and the other so-called "alternative" media, and it censors the expression of any such egalitarian revolutionary aspiration. Naturally, we just assume that nobody except a tiny minority has this egalitarian revolutionary aspiration.

But the fact is that the vast majority of Americans DO have this egalitarian revolutionary aspiration, and they will tell you so if you ask them, which is what you can see me doing with random people on the streets of Boston in this video (with no cherry picking!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95b3SmBYwfU . Almost everybody (91%), when asked if it is a good idea or a bad idea to "Remove the rich from power, have real--not fake--democracy with no rich and no poor" says it is a good (or a great!) idea. You can do the same thing to see for yourself what ordinary people really feel about egalitarian revolution; to see how to make it easier for you to do this, just go to https://www.pdrboston.org/why-wear-a-pdr-button .

How Can We WIN?

The way to win is, first, AIM to win: build a movement that knows what it MEANS to win, so that it can explain to the general public what it is FOR, and how this is totally different from Communism and how it can really make things much better despite all the lies to the contrary in the ruling class propaganda.

What DOES it Mean to Win?

Egalitarianism is what it means to win. Egalitarianism is about a) making the economy one based on equality as described introductorily at https://www.pdrboston.org/what-is-an-egalitarian-economy and b) making the government genuinely democratic as described introductorily at https://www.pdrboston.org/genuine-democracy-what-is-it . Egalitarianism is how to prevent class inequality so that ordinary people are no longer treated like dirt and always losing in a struggle against a ruling upper class.

Perhaps, dear reader, you have a different idea about what it means to win. Fine. Express it! Don't keep it a secret. We need a massive conversation--of millions of people--about what it means to win. Until now that conversation has been suppressed by our fear that if we say publicly what we think it means to really win then the general public will reject us as crazy or stupid.

We have to see that this fear of the general public is based on a Big Lie about the public that the ruling class has worked very hard to make us believe. Indeed, spreading this Big Lie about the public being opposed to egalitarian revolution is the #1 strategy of the ruling class for staying in power. It knows that it matters not if people hate the ruling class; what matters is that people think that it is futile to try to remove the ruling class from power (because only a hopelessly tiny and hence impotent minority even wants to do that.)

As long as people with egalitarian revolutionary aspirations are convinced they are a hopelessly small minority, they won't even try to remove the rich from power. This is exactly what the ruling class counts on. And as long as the ruling class keeps us convinced of this Big Lie, we will remain on the treadmill of defeat, losing and losing and losing. It's time to change and start winning! When we do this, we will actually be able to remove the rich from power, the way that is described at https://www.pdrboston.org/how-we-can-remove-the-rich-from-power .

Authors Website: https://www.pdrboston.org

Authors Bio:

I am the editor of www.PDRBoston.org and www.NewDemocracyWorld.org, the author of No Rich and No Poor: The Populist Goal We CAN and Must Win, Divide and Rule: The "Left vs. Right" Trap, The People as Enemy: The Leaders' Hidden Agenda in World War II, the co-author of On the Public Agenda, a (now retired) Senior Research Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health with many medical journal publications about HIV treatment clinical trials, a veteran of the 1960's anti-Vietnam War movement, father of three boys and resident of Boston, Massachusetts, USA.