Apparently There Can Be No Co-Existence With The Billionaire Class— Unless You Choose Slavery

Working People Are Fighting For Their Lives Now

Over the weekend, Will Bunch wrote about the real damage Trump has set out to do to our country, the real stuff, as in turning back the clock on decades of progress. He wrote that “In a week-old presidency marked so far by royal proclamation, one of Donald Trump’s very first Oval Office dictates was the repeal of a September 1965 order by then-President Lyndon Johnson seeking to boost Black-owned companies for federal contracts, undoing LBJ’s promise in that revolutionary year that America would end its legacy of ‘ancient brutality, past injustice and present prejudice.’ The end of federal affirmative action was just the cutting edge of a rampage of reactionary Week One backlash that also struck at the very heart of LGBTQ rights, academic freedom on college campuses, the environmental movement, and decades of rising empowerment for women. On the surface, Trump’s dictator-on-Day-One orders were a campaign-promise-fulfilling war on 21st-century liberal ‘wokeness,’ but in reality the MAGA movement was stabbing at the heart of MLK, of LBJ’s ‘Great Society,’ and the progressive victories that have sustained my generation for our lifetimes. In a matter of hours, an American strongman had achieved the long-held dream of the far right, to toss the wave of liberations of the Long Sixties down an Orwellian memory hole.”

He wrote that “Boomers who filled the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in April 1970 to hear the Broadway cast of Hair sing ‘Air!’ and successfully demand legislation for clear skies and clean water have lived to see their president declare a bogus ‘energy emergency’ to help fossil-fuel billionaires pump more toxins into the atmosphere and to seek to block clean wind power, on the whims of sheer ignorance… To be clear, the undoing of the 1960s came (apologies, as always, to Hemingway) in two ways, gradually and then suddenly this past week. The very real cultural victories of that era— the end of legal segregation, the growth of Black voting and elected officials, the recognition of LGBTQ rights and rising opportunities for women on campus and in the working place— were undercut politically from the very start. Ronald Reagan and Nixon, the ‘war on drugs,’ the end of affordable college, and more were merely the start of a backlash by the forces of white privilege and patriarchy that— by playing the long game— made it possible for a corrupt and contented U.S. Supreme Court to gut LBJ and MLK’s Voting Rights Act in 2013 and to end affirmative action in higher education 10 years after that. But that wasn’t enough for an ascendant far right that had a dream of wiping it all away, of taking America at least back to 1959, the year of my birth, if not 1859.”

“From 1965 to 1994, we did strange and weird things as a country,” the former House speaker and a generalissimo of their culture war, Newt Gingrich, promised those who wanted to wipe away all gains for America’s formerly marginalized. “Now we’re done with that and we have to recover. The counterculture is a momentary aberration in American history that will be looked back upon as a quaint period of Bohemianism brought to the national elite.”

It took 30 years for Trump and his MAGA movement to carry out the metaphorical March on Rome as envisioned by Gingrich. I reached out to an expert, the Illinois State University historian Andrew Hartman, the author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. He agreed that Trump’s moves, especially on issues like affirmative action or transgender rights that poll poorly, are a strike against the ideals of the 1960s. With the academic left, Hartman said “Trump and the right feel like they have an edge that they haven’t had in a long time so I do see them pushing the envelope there.”

…To see that stone so quickly rolled away, and to watch the idealism of youth fading away near the end of our lives, is stunning, heartbreaking, demoralizing— along with feelings that are harder to even put into words. I asked others this weekend on Bluesky if they felt the same way, and was overwhelmed, if not surprised, by the emotional outpouring.

One response came from an ultimate child of the 1960s, Kelly Carlin-McCall— the 61-year-old daughter of comedian George Carlin whose skewering of establishment hypocrisy defined that era— who wrote that the MAGA backlash has been “a lot to process… sadness, disbelief, trying not to be cynical, and hope.”

She’s not alone.

One 75-year-old wrote about “seeing everything I fought decades for wiped out in 5 days. I don’t know if I’m more angry or heartbroken. I swing back and forth. Knowing I don’t have too much more time here, I find myself saying to the wind, “‘I’m so sorry for you who will be left.‘”

… Others wrote of a deeper arc, about how boomers like us grew up in the afterglow of victory of World War II that led us to believe America was the nation that conquered fascism, not a land that would someday succumb to it. Most of us didn’t realize as schoolchildren what we understand better today, which is that the forces of reaction that powered Jim Crow and the KKK would never go away or stop pushing back.

“We were sold a bill of goods about this country, true, but we had reason to believe the fundamentals would hold and progress was possible,” Bettina Pearl, a colleague from my college newspaper days, responded.

There is much to be written— today and by future historians, if the field of history survives— about how we got here, with the dangerous mix of understandable grievances about a capitalist and right-wing assault on the American middle class mixed with the toxic base fuels of racism and sexism. But first we’re going to have to grapple with how does it feel, with no direction home.

What we thought was the ever-upward arc of the moral universe turned out to be— as the great historian Heather Cox Richardson and others have noted— a pendulum, requiring a constant push against the unholy forces of small-minded reaction.

And who underwrote this great American reaction? Well, South African billionaires and the billionaire class in general. As we’ve been advocating for a solid decade, Billionaires should not exist— cannot exist within a democracy. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”

DWT readers do, but not everyone knows what an oligarchy is or what an oligarch is. Bernie noticed that as well and decided to explain, too that at least his followers will all know. He wrote that “For years and years in the corporate media, you'd only heard the word 'oligarch' preceded by the word 'Russian.' But oligarchs aren't uniquely a Russian phenomenon or a foreign concept. No. The United States has its own oligarchy. When I first started talking about this, many people didn't understand what I meant. Well, that's changed. When the 3 wealthiest men in America sit behind Trump at his inauguration, everyone understands that the billionaire class now controls our government. They also understand that one of the major functions of government policy will be to make these incredibly rich people even richer and more powerful. When those same 3 men control some of the largest media and information distribution channels in America, everyone understands that the billionaire class now controls our media. They also understand that one of the major functions of that billionaire owned media (think Musk and twitter) will be to manufacture massive amounts of disinformation and outright lies.”

When 1 of those men spent hundreds of millions of dollars to elect Donald Trump and another used his power as a newspaper owner to withhold an endorsement of Kamala Harris, everyone understands that the billionaire class now significantly controls our politics, as well. They also understand that one of the major functions of our political system is to maintain the pretense that we are a real democracy when, in fact, the average citizen has less and less impact over what goes on.

But it is not just Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.

Today in America we have more income in wealth inequality than we have ever had. We have more concentration of ownership in the financial services sector, health care, agriculture, transportation energy, food and housing than we have ever had. We have more media consolidation than we have ever had. And we have a political system that is increasingly controlled by the billionaire class.

Add it all together and what you see is a nation and world trending very strongly toward oligarchy— where a small number of multi-billionaires exercise enormous economic and political power over everyone else. Increasingly, government is just one more entity owned by these enormously powerful forces.

So, in the midst of all of this, where do we go from here?

First, we don’t have time to moan and groan and bury our heads in despair. Yes. Many of us are angry and frustrated at a Democratic Party establishment that continues to turn its back on the needs of working people. But our job now is not to look back, but to look forward.

Let me be clear. One of the tools that the Oligarchs use to maintain their position of power is to make it appear that real change is impossible, and opposition is useless. They have the power. Ain’t nothing we can do about it. That’s the way it is and always will be. Give up trying.

Fortunately, these masters of the universe are wrong. Very wrong.

What history has always taught us is that real change never takes place from the top on down. It always occurs from the bottom on up. It occurs when ordinary people get sick and tired of oppression and injustice— and fight back. That is the history of the founding of our nation, the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement and the gay rights movement. That is how we elected dozens of progressives to Congress and made the Congressional Progressive Caucus one of the most important entities in the U.S. House of Representatives. That is the history of every effort that has brought about transformational change in our society.

It won’t be easy but, together, we will educate, organize and build an unstoppable grassroots movement around a progressive agenda that is based on the principles of justice and compassion, not greed and oligarchy. Together, we will lead the fight to create the kind of nation and world we know we can become.

Sisters and brothers, we are right now in the midst of a struggle between a progressive movement that mobilizes around a shared vision of prosperity, security and dignity for all people, against one that defends oligarchy and massive global income and wealth inequality.

The story of progress in this country— imperfect, halting, and often tragic— has always been written by those who refuse to accept that the forces of greed and hate will have the final say. From the abolitionists who tore down slavery brick by brick, to the suffragists who won the vote, to the civil rights activists who marched for justice, progress has never been gifted from above. It was seized by those willing to fight, to organize, and to dream of a better world. Do we still have that in us?

The billionaire class, with its stranglehold on our economy, media, and government, is not invincible. Their wealth, though immense, cannot buy legitimacy. Their power, though overwhelming, cannot snuff out the collective will of millions who understand that democracy is incompatible with oligarchy. And their vision of a nation regressing into cruelty and repression is not a foregone conclusion— because we have the power to say no.

But this will require more than anger. It will require hope. It will require solidarity. It will require rejecting the despair that says our best days are behind us and embracing the belief that we can, once again, bend the arc of history toward justice. It will require organizing in every town, every workplace, and every election to push back against the reactionary tide— firmly embedded inside both careerist parties— and build a society that truly works for the many, not the few.

Yeah, the pendulum swings, and we are in a dark moment. But the forces of reaction underestimate the resilience of those they seek to silence. They underestimate the power of generations who grew up believing in the ideals of freedom, equality, and dignity for all. And they underestimate what happens when ordinary people decide they’ve had enough.

We are the heirs of those who fought for civil rights, for environmental justice, for gender equality, for LGBTQ liberation, and for a world that could be. Their victories, though under siege, are not forgotten, and their spirit lives in all of us who refuse to surrender. The billionaires and their enablers may think they own our future, but the truth is this: they only own it if we let them.

Can we rise, organize, reclaim the promise of a democracy? I’m pretty sure I won’t be around to see it. But for as long as there is a single person who dares to resist, the story of America will not yet be written. The pendulum will swing again.