There will be a reckoning as the sleeping giant awakens from this nightmare

I wrote an earlier version of this piece shortly after the start of this horrific regime. The regime has become far more horrific since then — worse than I’d feared.

I mentioned then that a woman I didn’t know was about to pass me on the sidewalk and then stopped, turned toward me, and almost shouted, “It’s a f—ing nightmare!”

Well, it has been a “f—ing nightmare.”

But a “f—ing nightmare” is not all bad if it awakens America.

America is like a sleeping giant whose passion for democracy and social justice is fearless, once awakened.

The giant doesn’t awaken easily, but a nightmare can do it.

Remember how Martin Luther King Jr. mobilized the nation against racial injustice? He let everyone see its horrors. Night after night on television, America saw peaceful Black people getting clubbed and arrested for exercising their rights.

A true nightmare.

Yet were it not for that painful national exposure to racist brutality, we wouldn’t have gotten the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act.

Something similar happened in the first years of the 20th century, when muckraking journalists revealed the giant monopolies, corruption, and public harms of the robber barons.

Were it not for that painful national exposure, we wouldn’t have gotten the reforms of the Progressive Era.

I believe a similar dynamic will play out as Americans live through the nightmare of Trump’s neofascism.

As we see and absorb its horrors — Trump’s insatiable greed and cruel vindictiveness, the excesses of Elon Musk, the vicious nativism and libertarian fanaticism of the regime — we will mobilize against it.

Not all of us will mobilize, of course, but the great majority will. And we will make sure this never happens again. The mobilization has already begun.

We had to come to this point. We couldn’t go on as we were, even under Democratic presidents. For 40 years, a narrow economic elite has been siphoning ever more wealth and power for themselves.

I’m old enough to remember when CEOs took home 20 times the pay of their workers, not 300 times. When members of Congress acted in the interests of their constituents rather than be bribed by campaign donations to do the bidding of big corporations and the super-wealthy.

When our biggest domestic challenges were civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights — not the very survival of democracy and the rule of law.

But starting with Reagan, America went off the rails. Deregulation, privatization, free trade, wild gambling by Wall Street, union-busting, record levels of inequality, near-stagnant wages for most, staggering wealth for a few, big money taking over our politics.

Stock buybacks and the well-being of investors became more important than good jobs with good wages. Corporate profits more important than the common good.

Democratic presidents were better than Republican, to be sure, but the underlying rot continued to worsen. It was undermining the foundations of America.

We couldn’t go on as we were.

The Trump regime has harmed many innocent people. Its lawless cruelty is sickening — as is the cowardice of so many CEOs, Wall Street bankers, law firms, university presidents, publishers, social media titans, Republican politicians, some Democratic politicians, and other so-called “leaders” who are staying mum or obeying in advance or sucking up to Trump.

There will be a reckoning.

As bad as this “f—ing nightmare” gets, it will awaken the sleeping giant of America to what has happened to this country — and what we must do to get it back on the track toward social justice, democracy, and widespread prosperity.

That’s what I believe. That’s my faith, even as we slide into deepening darkness.

Be well. Be safe. We will prevail.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/