Opinion
Nobody wants your feeble prayers
Thoughts and prayers.
On Thursday, April 17, a 20-year-old boy, a student, walked around FSU’s sunny campus, firing a handgun. Two dead; six injured.
The response from our elected leaders? The usual: “Thoughts and prayers.”
The governor of the State of Florida said he was “praying,” adding, “We are all Seminoles today.”
First Lady Casey DeSantis: “Praying.”
Sen. Rick Scott: Also “praying.”
The president of the United States called the attack “terrible, a shame,” then blew off any suggestion of gun control reform, saying he’s a “big advocate of the Second Amendment.”
Maybe he missed the praying memo.
I teach at FSU; and that Thursday afternoon, I was locked down in my office.
It was frightening, yes; it was also horribly familiar. This is America: Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine, Uvalde, Nashville, Parkland.
The Tallahassee Democrat reported that several survivors of the 2018 Marjorie Stoneman Douglas shooting were on campus that day.
Robbie Alhadeff’s sister Alyssa died at MSD: “Something has to change,” he said.
Graduate student Stephanie Horowitz saw people running and knew instantly what was happening.
Jason Leavy was a freshman at MSD when Nikolas Cruz murdered 17 people. He knew, too, and started barricading his classroom door.
“It’s the least surprising thing in the world, honestly,” he said.
Every one of those kids has been through multiple active shooter drills. Many faculty have, too.
We are supposed to shove desks against our doors, turn off the lights, “harden” our schools and churches and college campuses and act as though we’re grateful when politicians express their insincere and frankly insulting “sympathy.”
Nobody wants their feeble prayers and, as for their thoughts, if the violence-loving reactionaries in charge of this state were actually capable of thoughts they’d realize things do not have to be this way.
Priorities
From the state Capitol to the U.S. Capitol, politicians shrug: Guns matter more than people; children, high school students, college students — they don’t give the big money to political campaigns.
The Second Amendment trumps all the others.
We’re supposed to accept there’s nothing anyone can do: This is just the way things are.
As The Onion’s evergreen mass shooting headline goes, “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
But the kids ain’t all right; the kids are scared — and furious.
Florida State University students marched to the Capitol on April 23, 2025, less than a week after a gunman opened fire on their campus, calling for legislation on guns and school safety. (Photo by Jay Waagmeester/Florida Phoenix)
Last Tuesday, a group of FSU students braved the morally noxious fumes of the Capitol to demand sensible gun control, red flag laws, firearm storage legislation — commonsense stuff like that.
Madalyn Probst, president of the FSU College Democrats, said, “The fact that they are able to sit in this place and prioritize weapons over my life, my friends’ lives, and the lives of my community around me is deplorable.”
Problem is, the grown folks in charge don’t care.
“The fact that they are able to sit in this place and prioritize weapons over my life, my friends’ lives, and the lives of my community around me is deplorable.”
– Madalyn Probst, FSU College Democrats
The Florida House has approved a bill allowing 18-year-olds to buy guns, repealing a law they passed after the murders at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School.
We don’t let them drink, but hell, they can get themselves a nice Taurus 9mm semi-automatic handgun — just like the one used to kill three and wound five at Michigan State University in 2023.
Here at FSU, you can still see the mountains of flowers and teddy bears where the wounded and dead fell. Yet the governor — who has the emotional intelligence of a poison dart frog —continues to push what he calls “Second Amendment Summer.”
If you’re buying a gun or ammo between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, you don’t have to pay sales tax.
Because we want more people packing heat.
‘Protecting’ children
The FSU atrocity was Florida’s sixth mass shooting and the 27th school shooting in the nation.
This year. So far.
The grown folks in charge are obsessed with “protecting” children from fluoride and potentially life-saving vaccines.
No letting them near books like “And Tango Makes Three,” lest they want to become gay.
No letting them discover trans people and queer people are real and deserving of dignity.
They can’t stand the thought of high schoolers reading Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” or “The 1619 Project,” lest they learn about the horrors of slavery.
They are terrified college students might study sociology, delve into political theories suggesting organizational models for the state that don’t insist our version of rapacious capitalism is the best, or encounter books that challenge religious or cultural orthodoxies.
As for sex, they don’t even want to think about it — unless, of course, the teenaged daughter gets pregnant or the teenaged son gets an STD.
They insist on shielding kids from a slew of normal human realities, but not gun violence.
It’s OK for young people to grow up knowing how to barricade themselves inside a classroom or learn strategies for evading a mass shooter but not appreciate poetry or play a musical instrument or master a foreign language.
It’s OK for them to live scared of that loner kid or that angry-looking guy or some person they can’t see, someone who wants to spill as much blood as possible.
The freedom to get a gun any time for any reason is more important.
So, we have Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine, Uvalde, Nashville, Parkland, and now FSU.
United Against Hate
One of my students reminded me there was supposed to be a “United Against Hate” symposium in honor of Maura Binkley on April 17.
Maura Binkley was the student shot and killed at a yoga studio in 2018 along with another woman.
The symposium was to promote campus safety, but it had to be canceled.
The FSU building where it should have taken place was a crime scene.
Maura Binkley was murdered by a guy who hated women.
The young man who allegedly walked around campus shooting his classmates hates people of color — he’s a Trump supporter and a white supremacist.
He told a fellow student Black people were ruining his neighborhood.
The United States government manufactures hatred against anyone who’s not a white Christian, embracing violence against its citizens.
Nowhere is safe.
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Why are liberals so scary?
We’ve all heard about the nine Republican state Senators who decided they were going to start voting their conscience, only to be censured by their own party. As if they would somehow become contagious.
This series of events reminded me of something I’ve been wondering about, which is: Why it has become so fashionable to present ‘liberals’ as if we are dangerous, scary people. It is now one of those labels that Republicans throw around in order to discredit a person’s character. It showed up on every other flyer that I received during the last election cycle. And of course it’s one of those terms, for example “communist,” that most people probably wouldn’t be able to define if you asked them, even liberals themselves.
So I thought about the qualities that most of my friends have in common. And the top thing on that list would probably be curiosity. I hang out with people who always want to learn more, whether it’s about you, or about the history of the region where they live, or about whatever hobby they’re interested in. And of course that also means that they are readers. Because what is the best way to learn?
Another thing that most of my friends have in common is that they love people. They love meeting new people, they like to be in small groups where they can have discussions. They like to connect. And they like to help. I feel fortunate to know so many people who believe that helping others helps them become better people. And it also helps make the world a better place.
So far, I’m not seeing a lot to be scared of. But let’s keep looking.
Most of my friends love the arts. They love how music and films and dance and visual arts force them to look at things a little differently. They love how songs and movies make them feel something, whether it’s warm or frightening or confusing or ecstatic, the arts bring strong emotional responses into our lives in a way that is always unpredictable and surprising.
Most of my friends also love to be outside. They love what the earth has to offer. They like the challenge of a long bike ride, or a hike into the mountains. They like to hunt and fish, or float one of the incredible rivers that flow through our beautiful state. They value having access to the best that Montana has to offer.
A few days ago, Bruce Springsteen, who is only three years younger than Trump but looks at least 10 years younger, opened his latest tour in Manchester, England by sitting down at the front of the stage and delivering a calm, measured criticism of the current president. He didn’t make anything up or call him a bunch of juvenile names. He didn’t threaten him. He just laid out his opinion of the man’s actions in a way that was thoughtful and most importantly, factual. Here’s how he opened his speech, and it’s pretty brilliant:
“In America, my home, they’re persecuting people for their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. That’s happening now. In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. That’s happening now. In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers. They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that led to a more just society. They’re abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those who are struggling for their freedom. That’s happening now. They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. And they are removing residents off American streets without due process of law and deploying them to foreign detention centers and prisons. That’s happening now.”
So maybe that’s it. It’s the honesty.
Most of my friends have never been convicted of a felony. Most of them have never been accused of rape, especially by multiple sources. Most of my friends wouldn’t think of referring to another country as a “sh–hole country.” They wouldn’t think to lump an entire race of people into one group and make sweeping generalizations about those people. Most of my wealthy friends wouldn’t think of rubbing their wealth in your face, or bragging about the fact that they don’t pay taxes, because they do. Most of them wouldn’t brag about going into the dressing room of a bunch of teenage girls while they’re getting ready for a pageant.
Most of my friends wouldn’t encourage people to beat the crap out of other people. Most of them wouldn’t make up lies on the spot just to make others look bad because they got their feelings hurt.
So the only thing that I can think of that makes liberals scary is that they try like hell to be honest, and if there’s one thing that scares Republicans at this moment in time, it’s the truth. Springsteen is fortunate to be huge enough that he can lose a huge chunk of his fan base without worrying about his career going off the rails.
But of course that doesn’t stop Donald Trump from trying his damnedest to discredit the man. And among other things, that means hitting him over the head with the dreaded “liberal” label. It didn’t stop Springsteen from doing the same thing at his next few stops, to the dismay of many of his long-term fans, and as someone so accurately pointed out, have they not been paying attention to what this man has stood for from the beginning?
The saddest part about Trump’s tantrums is how utterly childish they are. He always resorts to the most basic insults, saying he never liked Springsteen and that he has no talent—a meaningless insult coming from a guy who pals around with Kid Rock and Ted Nugent. Trump has and always will resort to the lowest form of attack, and that is exactly why he is so threatened by someone like Bruce, who did just the opposite.
So I guess I’ll keep doing what most of my friends have been doing, trying to become better people, failing here and there, but always striving to improve. Telling the truth as well as we know how, without resorting to hissy fits when someone offers constructive criticism. And hopefully it will continue to scare the hell out of these people.
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Trump finally finds use for Elon Musk's Cybertrucks
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Trump's ugly bill hands major polluter a multi-billion-dollar favor
In 1960, the TV show “The Twilight Zone” aired an irony-soaked episode called “Eye of the Beholder” that played around with the axiom about where beauty truly lies. In it, a bunch of grotesque doctors try to make a gorgeous woman (played by Donna Douglas from “The Beverly Hillbillies”) look like them, because conformity matters more than anything to their grotesque leader.
I was reminded of this episode last week while reading up on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Congress has been debating.
In case you haven’t heard about OBBBA and how controversial it is, consider this: Despite being strongly endorsed by our own grotesque leader, the bill squeaked through the House of Representatives by a single vote. Now it goes over to the Senate, where it’s liable to face even more opposition. I sure hope it does, anyway.
This “beautiful” bill contains a lot of ugliness. It will add trillions to the federal deficit, news that led to none other than Elon Musk calling it an abomination. It slashes food stamps for seniors to give billionaires a tax cut. And it makes such drastic changes to Medicaid that it’s led to a dispute in Iowa over how many people will die.
But what grabbed my attention is the really big favor it includes for Florida’s Big Sugar.
The feds already prop up our sugar industry with expensive government subsidies. This bill boosts that subsidy even higher, from 19.75 cents per pound to 24 cents per pound.
Bear in mind that the sugar industry produces about 8 trillion tons of sugar every year. A hike of a nickel on a pound of sugar equals an awful lot of dough.
Eve Samples via Friends of the Everglades
“It’s egregious that this polluting industry — which Florida taxpayers have paid well over $2 billion to clean up after — is poised to reap even more profits if this budget bill passes the U.S. Senate,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades.
Samples questioned how boosting the profits of the sugar industry fits in with the goals of an administration that says it’s going to “Make America Healthy Again.”
Maybe in this case the slogan should be altered to “Make Big Sugar’s Profits Healthy.”
Protected at every level
The sugar industry may be headquartered in South Florida, but it’s long been king in both Tallahassee and Washington.
“This industry is protected at every level,” Samples said.
For instance, take its horrible air pollution.
From October to May every year, Florida’s sugar companies burn their 400,000 acres of fields to prepare for harvest, thus getting rid of the outer leaves of the cane stalks.
It’s an old-fashioned practice that other countries have banned. So much burning sends billows of thick smoke floating across the little towns by Lake Okeechobee, showering down what residents refer to as “black snow” that coats their houses and cars and the lungs of the unlucky.
Four years ago, the Florida Legislature passed a bill — with support from both parties — that makes it much harder for anyone harmed by all this soot to sue the sugar industry.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, when he was a congressman, repeatedly voted against federal price supports for the sugar industry. When he moved into the governor’s mansion in 2019, he called for all the members of the South Florida Water Management District board to resign for being too pro-sugar.
But when the Legislature handed DeSantis its bill to protect the sugar industry against suits over its burning practices, he signed it into law without a word of protest.
Or take water pollution. Twenty years ago, the industry deployed 40 lobbyists — picture an army marching in bespoke suits and Italian loafers — to persuade lawmakers to extend the deadline for cleaning up Everglades pollution from 2006 to 2026.
The bill sailed through, and then-Gov. Jeb “Punctuation Marks Are Cool!” Bush — a self-described Everglades advocate — signed it behind closed doors.
The industry controls these politicians so utterly that if sugar executives demanded they line up and start dancing to the old Archies hit “Sugar Sugar,” they’d say, “Sweet!”
Money makes the world go ’round
The main reason Big Sugar always gets what it wants is that it’s ready to spend Big Bucks to get it. As the song from “Cabaret” put it so well, “Money makes the world go around!”
According to the Dirty Money Project database created by the folks at the Vote Water environmental group, between 2018 and 2024 Florida’s sugar industry spent $36 million on Florida political contributions.
In the past year alone, Big Sugar gave more than $5.2 million to Florida politicians, including $3.1 million donated by U.S. Sugar, $2.1 million donated by Florida Crystals, and just over $43,000 by the Sugar Co-op.
Acting like an always-available ATM has its advantages. Access, for example.
On Presidents’ Day in 1996, Bill Clinton was busy breaking up with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office when the phone rang. The caller: Sugar magnate Alfonso Fanjul Jr., of Florida Crystals.
Clinton spent 20 minutes on the phone with him, listening to Fanjul complaining. The sugar baron was upset about Vice President Al Gore’s proposal of a penny-a-pound tax on Florida sugar growers to pay for cleaning up the Everglades. After that phone call, Clinton shelved the plan.
Incidentally, the Dirty Money website shows that the company Fanjul runs with his brother Pepe, Florida Crystals, donated $1 million last year to the super-PAC known as Make America Great Again Inc. You can probably guess which grotesque presidential candidate it supported.
The industry has already seen a benefit, Patrick Ferguson of the Sierra Club told me. Three years ago, former President Joe Biden banned imports from a sugar company based in the Dominican Republic named Central Romana over evidence the company used forced labor, i.e. slaves.
Central Romana is run by the Fanjuls, and in March the current administration quietly removed the Biden ban. Maybe they count “being concerned about slavery” as being in favor of DEI. Can’t have that!
It’s not just politicians who reap the benefits of sugar’s bucks. In the 1960s, the sugar industry paid Harvard scientists to produce research that played down the connection between sugar and heart disease. Instead, they shifted the blame to saturated fat.
One of the scientists paid by the sugar industry went on to become head of nutrition at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He helped draft the forerunner to the federal government’s dietary guidelines.
That’s why environmental advocates weren’t at all surprised to see Big Sugar included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“Big Sugar is once again getting gifts they really don’t deserve,” Ferguson said.
Up goes the price
Sugar has been getting special treatment from the federal government since the days when Alexander Hamilton was a real guy and not a smash Broadway show.
In 1789, Congress imposed a tariff on imported sugar to raise revenue for the struggling young nation. It was the first substantive legislation passed by the young nation, and it was signed into law by the first president, George Washington.
Despite that connection to our Founding Fathers, you know who’s been the most critical of federal policy on propping up Big Sugar? Right-wing think tanks like the Cato Institute. Eight years ago, Cato published a paper titled, “Candy-Coasted Cartel: Time to Kill the U.S. Sugar Program.”
When I talked to him this week, the author of that Cato paper, Colin Grabow, pointed out something about the OBBBA’s nickel-per-pound boost for Big Sugar that hadn’t occurred to me:
“This is basically raising the cost of sugar in the United States,” he said. “We just had an election where people were complaining about the cost of things.”
Yeah, I told him, I recall a lot of people fussing over the price of eggs before going to the polls in November.
“Now, instead of reforming the system,” Grabow said, “we’re just going to hand them more money and make sugar more expensive.”
I heard similar points from Vincent Smith of the equally right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The boost called for by the bill is “a pretty dramatic increase,” he said.
That will make all the goods that contain sugar — soft drinks, cookies, cake, applesauce, cereal, you name it — cost more as well. As an avid consumer of Publix sweet tea, hearing this made me do a classic spit-take.
Smith joked that making sugar and its related products so much more expensive may be good news for dentists but not for family pocketbooks.
Colin Grabow via the Cato Institute
Grabow pointed out, “You can bet that the language related to sugar in the bill is directly due to lobbyists.’
What do the senators say?
I tried contacting officials from the sugar companies about all this, but I just couldn’t sweet-talk them into speaking with me.
The closest I got to a quote was this statement from Ryan Duffy, senior director of corporate communications for U.S. Sugar, who told me via email, “We typically don’t comment on pending legislation.”
Of course, the more important folks to talk to would be our two senators. Everyone wants to find out where they stand on the Big Bad Wolf — er, I mean, One Big Beautiful Bill. But they didn’t respond to my requests for comment either.
Our senior senator, Rick Scott, has a long history of being tucked in Big Sugar’s hip pocket. Last year, when he was running for re-election, the sugar companies made big donations to his campaign’s super-PAC.
In his story on those donations, my colleague Mitch Perry pointed out the hypocrisy of Scott’s pro-sugar stance. When he first ran for governor 15 years ago, he blasted his GOP primary opponent, Bill McCollum, for accepting contributions from Big Sugar.
“He’s owned by U.S. Sugar,” the Orlando Sentinel quoted Scott saying of McCollum. “They’ve given him nearly a million dollars for his campaign. And it’s disgusting.”
Scott apparently thought it was a lot less disgusting when Big Sugar’s big payouts were going into his coffers, not McCollum’s. He hasn’t turned down a dime from them since.
In fact, as governor, Scott was one of quite a few Republican officials who accepted hunting trips to Texas from a sugar company, then declined to answer reporters’ questions about it.
Yet Scott says he has serious qualms about the One Big Beautiful Etc. He doesn’t believe it cuts enough federal fat, so he says he’s inclined to reject it.
U.S. Sen. Rick Scott (photo via the Scott campaign)
“I think there’s plenty of us would not vote for it in the Senate,” he said, according to CBS News.
Then we come to Florida’s newest senator, the recently appointed Ashley Moody. When she was Florida’s elected attorney general, the former Plant City Strawberry Festival queen was no friend to the environment. She also fought several absurd legal battles on the behalf of Mr. Grotesque. So far, she hasn’t indicated whether she’s in the same position as Scott or not.
If you’re inclined to bang your head against the wall, I’d encourage you to call or email these two and demand they stop this giveaway to a polluting industry. But bear in mind, they may not listen to you.
After all, the more money the sugar companies rake in, the more they can give away to our elected officials. That’s right — by boosting their profits, we’re enabling the sugar companies to continue to spend so freely on buying the favors of our politicians.
But I do have suggestion. If Scott and Moody say, “The heck with my constituents!” and vote to pass this bill for Big Sugar, I think every single one of us should send them our grocery bills, demanding a refund.
A tsunami of grocery store receipts inundating the senators’ offices would be, I think, a beautiful thing to behold.
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Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
This is democracy in a red state's blue dot
On an April afternoon in a small Midwest town, I stood on the side of a busy street with around 500 of my neighbors and community members to protest the current administration and to defend democracy.
I’m not going to lie. I was afraid. Even knowing we would be peacefully protesting in a public space where we are allowed by law to congregate and express our opinions, it felt dangerous. The reality of today is that people are being snatched off the streets and judges are being arrested. Plus, I live in a small blue dot in the middle of a large swath of red.
I deleted screenshots of funny memes and current facts from my phone. I wrote a phone number in sharpie on my upper arm in case I needed to contact someone with my one phone call. I researched Articles 90 and 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and printed out small messages to explain to any police or military presence that they will only be charged with disobeying any lawful orders and providing the GI Rights Hotline number in case of need. I disabled the location on my phone and logged out of all my social media. I made sure facial recognition and thumbprint were both turned off and couldn’t be used to open my phone against my will. I removed my dangly earrings and necklace. I took a deep breath and I walked out the door.
When I got to the city park, I found our allowed protest area neatly marked off with ribbon and volunteers writing signs on posterboard for those of us who forgot to bring a sign. I chose a sign that said “Freedom From Fear” and found a spot between the curb and sidewalk with my neighbors.
For the next two hours we held our signs high and waved at passing cars as they honked and cheered. It felt so empowering to be out in the world and with community members who feel the need to protect our democracy just like I do. I saw a professor I recognized from the nearby university. I saw knitting and crafting friends. I met new people. We were university students and working families and retirees and young parents with babies and toddlers.
Someone handed me an American flag to wave along with my “Freedom From Fear” sign. A veteran in a chair nearby along the line had a sign that read, “Hands off our democracy!” Several versions of “No Kings” or “America does not have a king!” showed up in the signs. So did “Resist Fascism,” “Hands off my books,” and, “No one voted for Elon Musk.” I chanted “Flush the orange turd!” along with the grade-school young ladies every time they walked up and down the line on the sidewalk with a parent and a homemade sign.
Every time someone chanted, “Show me what democracy looks like!” I shouted back, “This is what democracy looks like!” as loud as I could along with hundreds of neighbors and community members. Standing along that line I realized I am not alone. A whole lot of other people fear for our democracy and do not like the actions taken in our names. We are afraid and we are also willing to stand up for our democracy despite that fear. And I started to believe that most of us feel that way. None of us are in this alone.
Hundreds of cars drove by to cheer us on and honk. One drove by flipping us off. Another drove by shouting but no one could tell if they were shouting with us or against us. One large truck gunned the engine and spewed a black cloud along the street. But the rest? Hundreds and hundreds of people agreed with us. And the smiles of relief as they drove by were worth the fear. I was relieved too.
I recently heard U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride, (D-DE) say that no one needs to be a hero as long as we all have a little courage, that seeing someone be courageous helps others have courage too. That day we had enough courage to walk out the door. I have faith that next time it will be easier. And next time? Next time I hope you’ll join us.
Tamara Moots lives and works in Manhattan. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
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Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Democrats embrace ‘Great Un-Awokening’ as inequality and rage explode
Apologies for the length of today’s letter, but this is vitally important.
Some leading Democrats are now engaged in what’s being called the “Great Un-awokening.”
Former Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel calls Democrats “weak and woke.”
Democratic Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, who is Black, vetoes a bill passed by his Democratic-dominated state legislature that took steps toward reparations.
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom calls it “unfair” to allow transgender athletes to participate in female college and youth sports.
Michigan’s Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin says the party needs more “alpha energy.”
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg removes his pronouns from his social media bio.
Hello?
None of this gives the Democrats a message for the future. None responds to the central issues Americans care about.
The largest force in American politics is antiestablishment fury at a rigged system. There is no longer a big-government left or a small-government right or a moderate “center” in between.
There’s only right-wing cultural populism — taking aim at immigrants, transgender people, the “deep state,” “DEI,” “woke-ism”, “socialism,” critical race theory, and other Trump Republican bogeymen.
Or economic populism — aiming at the real causes of the nation’s soaring inequality and the legalized bribery of politicians: large corporations that insist on regulatory rollbacks, their fat-cat CEOs (now earning 350 times their typical employees) who want bigger tax loopholes, and other hugely wealthy Americans who are demanding larger tax cuts.
Democrats cannot win by giving in to Republican cultural populism. They must hammer economic populism.
We are at a time in the nation’s history when inequality has soared to record highs, when big money from large corporations and the rich has engulfed our politics, when CEOs are raking in record compensation compared to average workers, when a president has surrounded himself with billionaires and pledged a huge tax cut that will mainly benefit the rich at the expense of programs on which the poor and working class depend, and when American democracy is in imminent danger of succumbing to a dictatorship.
Democrats must move the national conversation to the terrain they occupied the last time inequality and corruption exploded in America.
1. The era of the Democrats’ economic populism
In the early 20th century, Americans reclaimed the economy and democracy from the robber barons of the first Gilded Age.
The Progressive Era, as it was called, emerged because millions of Americans saw that wealth and power concentrated at the top was undermining democracy and stacking the economic deck.
Wisconsin’s “Fighting Bob” La Follette instituted the nation’s first minimum-wage law. Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan attacked the big railroads, giant banks, and insurance companies. Ohio’s Senator John Sherman led the way to America’s first antitrust legislation.
President Theodore Roosevelt used that legislation to bust up the giant trusts. Suffragists like Susan B. Anthony helped secure women the right to vote. Reformers like Jane Addams successfully pushed for laws protecting children and the public’s health. Organizers like Mary Harris “Mother” Jones spearheaded labor unions.
In 1910, Roosevelt warned that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power” could destroy American democracy. Roosevelt’s answer was to tax wealth. The estate tax was enacted in 1916 and the capital gains tax in 1922.
Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, saw in the 1929 crash an opportunity to renegotiate the relationship between capitalism and democracy. He attacked corporate and financial power by giving workers the right to unionize, the 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, and Social Security.
FDR also instituted a high marginal income tax on the wealthy — those making more than $5 million a year were taxed up to 75 percent — and regulated finance.
Accepting nomination for reelection as president in 1936, FDR spoke of the need to redeem American democracy from the despotism of concentrated economic power. He reviewed what had led to the Great Crash:
Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, [an] industrial dictatorship [now] reached out for control over Government itself . . .[T]he political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor — other people’s lives. . . . Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people’s mandate to end it.
Roosevelt warned the nation against the “economic royalists” who had pressed the whole of society into service. “The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor . . . these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship,” he thundered. What was at stake, he said, was nothing less that the “survival of democracy.”
On the eve of his 1936 reelection, FDR told the American people that big business and finance were determined to unseat him. He said that during his first term of office:
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.
2. Why the Democratic Party gave up economic populism
By the 1950s, the Democratic Party had given up economic populism. Gone from their presidential campaigns were tales of greedy businessmen and unscrupulous financiers.
Postwar prosperity had created the largest middle class in the history of the world and reduced the gap between rich and poor. By the mid-1950s, a third of all private-sector employees were unionized, and blue-collar workers regularly received generous wage and benefit increases.
Keynesianism had become a widely accepted antidote to economic downturns — substituting the management of aggregate demand for class antagonism. Even Richard Nixon purportedly claimed “we’re all Keynesians now.” Who needed economic populism when fiscal and monetary policy could even out the business cycle, and when the rewards of growth were so widely shared?
Postwar fears of Soviet communism also put a damper on the older Democratic class politics.
Then the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements spawned an antiestablishment, anti-authoritarian New Left that distrusted government as much as it distrusted Wall Street and big business, if not more. The split eventually gave rise to a struggle within the Democratic Party between Bernie Sanders’s populists and Hillary Clinton’s mainstream Democrats.
As Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg concluded after the 2016 election, “Democrats don’t have a ‘white working-class’ problem. They have a ‘working-class problem’ which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly. The fact is that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate.”
Before Trump’s election in 2016, Democrats had occupied the White House for 16 out of 24 years. During the first two years of the Clinton and Obama administrations, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.
They scored some important victories for working families, including the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act.
I’m proud of having been part of a Democratic administration during that time.
But I was also terribly frustrated during those years by the New Democrat political operatives who focused on suburban swing voters and ignored the old Democratic working class, and the corporate Democrats in Congress who refused to do more for average workers and who failed to see that if the middle class continued to shrink, authoritarianism would only grow.
Bill Clinton used his political capital to pass free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who consequently lost their jobs the means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. His North American Free Trade Agreement and acquiescence to China’s joining the World Trade Organization undermined the wages and economic security of manufacturing workers across the nation, hollowing out the Rust Belt.
Both Clinton and Obama stood by as corporations busted trade unions, the backbone of the working class. Neither Clinton nor Obama spent any political capital to reform labor laws by allowing workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down majority vote, or even to impose meaningful penalties on companies that fired workers for trying to form unions.
During the 2008 campaign, Obama was instructed to not even use the words “labor union,” since most workers were not members and unions were thought to be unpopular.
Labor unions don’t just give workers more bargaining leverage to get higher wages and benefits. They also used to be a political counterweight to the power of large corporations and Wall Street.
Yet under Clinton and Obama, corporate power continued to rise and union membership to fall as a portion of the workforce. Antitrust enforcement continued to ossify.
Both Clinton and Obama depended on big money from corporations and the wealthy. Both turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general election campaigns, yet he never followed up on his reelection promise to pursue a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United v. FEC decision.
3. The Republican Party’s embrace of cultural populism
The Democrats’ failure to embrace economic populism as they did under FDR enabled Republican cultural populism to fill the void, offering Americans who have been losing ground an explanation for what’s gone wrong and a set of villains to blame for what’s happened to them.
Richard Nixon and his protégé Pat Buchanan saw in cultural populism a means of destroying the New Deal coalition and attracting the white working class to the Republican Party.
Reagan deployed cultural populism in claiming that Washington insiders and arrogant bureaucrats had stifled the economy and hobbled individual achievement. The rot at the top of America was a cultural elite out of touch with average working Americans, and who coddled the poor — including “welfare queens,” Reagan’s racist dog-whistle.
In the 2004 presidential election, Republicans described Democrats as an effete group of “latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times–reading, body-piercing [and] Hollywood-loving” jerks out of touch with the real America.
Meanwhile, big money poured into the American political system. By the 2016 election, the richest 100th of 1 percent of Americans — 24,949 extraordinarily wealthy people — accounted for a record-breaking 40 percent of all campaign contributions flowing to both parties. That same year, corporations flooded the presidential, Senate, and House elections with $3.4 billion in donations.
Labor unions no longer provided any countervailing power, contributing only $213 million.
By the 2020s, Republicans saw the culture wars as the central struggle of American public life.
Enter Trump.
4. The consequence
In the decades immediately after World War II, college graduates voted Republican. Republican legislators were significantly more likely than Democratic legislators to hail from Ivy League universities.
It’s the reverse today. Between the 1980s and 2020s, the Democratic Party went from being the party of American workers to the party of college-educated professionals. Today, they vote Democratic.
Trump is the consequence rather than the source of these trends.
Yet Republican cultural populism is entirely bogus. The biggest change over the previous four decades — the change lurking behind the insecurities and resentments of the working class — has had nothing to do with identity politics, “woke”ism, critical race theory, transgender kids, immigration, “cat ladies,” or any other Republican cultural bogeymen.
It has been a giant upward shift in the distribution of income and wealth; in the power that has accompanied that shift; and in the injuries to the pride, status, and self-esteem of those who have been left behind.
The so-called “Great Un-Awokening” in the Democratic Party is a dangerous diversion from where the party should be — a deflection from what has really happened to a very large number of Americans.
If Democrats have learned anything from what has occurred in America, it should be that they must reverse the giant upward distribution of income and wealth. Counter the upward shift in power. Strive to heal the injuries borne by those who have been left behind.
In short, they must embrace economic populism. Otherwise, why have a Democratic Party?
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
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