Don't Fear The "S-Word" - It Just Means An Affordable Life For Everyone

The following is part of an excellent post by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report: 

On Tuesday night, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party got a message it would prefer to pretend it didn’t hear. In New York, Mamdani-backed progressives swept the congressional primaries, ousting two sitting Democratic congressmen and taking an open seat in a single evening. . . .

The corporate press and just about every Republican in the country will tell you these candidates are “socialists,” and they’ll spit the word the way you’d say “arsonist.” A little history clears the fog.

When a young public defender in upper Manhattan or a state assemblywoman in Brooklyn calls herself a democratic socialist today, she isn’t talking about Havana or the old Soviet Politburo (the way Republicans and much of the press want you to think). . . .

Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works forty hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.

That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped-out about.

Americans have wanted those things for a very long time. More than a hundred and twenty years ago, Teddy Roosevelt stood up and called it the Square Deal: a fair shot for the worker, the consumer, and the “honest businessman” against the trusts and the railroad barons who’d swallowed the economy whole.

Franklin Roosevelt built the scaffolding of it with the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson finished the second story with the Great Society, and for about three decades we actually had it. The middle class in the postwar years grew faster and richer than any middle class in the history of the world. By 1980, it was two-thirds of us with a single paycheck (it’s about 41% now, and takes two paychecks to get there). . . .

And then it was taken apart on purpose. As I lay out in The Hidden History of American the American Dream, the dismantling of that middle class wasn’t an unfortunate side effect of globalization or robots or some impersonal economic weather. It was a deliberate Republican neoliberal project that began with Ronald Reagan imitating Maggie Thatcher and following Heritage’s A Mandate for Leadership in 1981 and has been carried forward by both parties ever since.

The tools were straightforward. Going back to Taft-Hartley in 1947 and the spread of “right-to-work-for-less” laws Republicans and their corporate funders handed states and giant companies the power to strangle unions, and a worker without a union is a worker without leverage.

 

They froze the federal minimum wage at $7.25 an hour, where it has sat untouched since 2009. America’s oligarchs fought, decade after decade, to keep the United States the only wealthy nation on Earth without national healthcare, herding us instead into the arms of insurance conglomerates and hospital and physician monopolies, more and more of them now owned by private equity firms that treat a sick patient as a line item to be squeezed.

The result, as the nonpartisan RAND Corporation recently calculated, is that roughly $79 trillion has been pumped upward from the bottom ninety percent of Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich top one percent since Reagan, and the middle class has sunk below 50% of us and is hanging on — now requiring two paychecks — by its fingernails.

In that same span the share of national income going to the bottom ninety percent fell from about two-thirds to less than half, we’ve watched the largest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the American republic all the way back to George Washington, and every dollar of it was a choice some oligarch or his wholly-owned politician made. . . . .

Republicans have to scream “socialism” at any candidate whose actual platform is “rent you can afford” and “a doctor you can see when you need to without going broke.” They can’t argue the economics (and their billionaire donors won’t let them even if they wanted to), so they change the subject to fear.

But the American people aren’t buying the GOP’s oligarchic bullshit anymore. The GOP got crushed in last year’s off-year elections on the simple issue of affordability — which I read as blowback against oligarchy. . . .

The Democratic base is trying hard to pull its party back toward its FDR and LBJ roots. . . .

What these voters keep saying they want is fighters against neoliberalism, fascism, and a return to the New Deal and Great Society.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, is bowing and scraping lower and lower to Trump, Project 2025, and their neofascist agenda. . . .

After forty-five years in the wilderness, Americans are reaching back for the Square Deal that Teddy Roosevelt promised and the New Deal and Great Society that FDR and LBJ delivered, and no amount of red-baiting about Havana is going to talk them out of it. 

Democrats must choose to kick the oligarchs out and let the people back in.