loading . . . The reckoning coming when the MAGA sleeping giant awakens Democratic primary elections, in particular, are showing us America is both in the midst of a deep crisis and is on the verge of what could be transformational, positive, life-altering political and economic change comparable to FDR’s New Deal.
It became obvious, really, in the first minute of New Year’s Day this year, when two things happened at once vividly showing us all the contrast and the crises around where America stands right now.
In a long-abandoned subway station deep under lower Manhattan, progressive Democrat Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York City, largely on the simple promise that New York could once again become “a city we can afford.”
And at that very same midnight — because Republicans refused to extend them — the enhanced Obamacare subsidies expired for more than twenty million Americans, jacking their health insurance prices overnight into stratospheric amounts that are now pushing families to skip pills, skip meals, and skip the doctor entirely.
One honest man took office swearing that he’d help ordinary people afford to live, and at that same moment, millions of working class people lost the ability to afford their insurance because Republican politicians consistently put their morbidly rich individual and corporate donors above all else.
Even Newsweek, no one’s idea of a radical rag, noticed the thing our media generally misses: the same cost-of-living fury that carried Donald Trump back into the White House in 2024 was the same fury Mamdani rode to City Hall a year later.
When Louise and I lived in a boat in a marina in Washington, DC back during the 2016 election year, we knew quite a few people retired from the Navy and Coast Guard who generally called themselves Republicans, but were split between Trump and Bernie for their vote. Why? Because both were promising real, meaningful change.
I’ve told you before about my dad. Carl came home from the Second World War, finally got a good union job in a tool-and-die shop in Lansing, and on that one paycheck he raised us four boys, bought a house, put a new car in the driveway every couple of years, sent us toward college, took my mom on vacation, and retired with a pension that let the two of them travel the world.
That wasn’t wealth: that was the ordinary American middle class, and in 1981 — the year Reagan decided to destroy our unions, cut those “socialist benefits,” and freeze the minimum wage — two-thirds of us Americans lived in that middle class on a single income. Today it’s closer to only 40 percent of us, and it takes two full paychecks to reach what one paycheck used to buy.
Particularly over the past few years, America has politically bifurcated: One side is characterized by a guy in a red hat who’s dead certain that brown-skinned immigrants took his job and he wants them gone. The other is a young organizer knocking on doors for Medicare for All and tuition-free college.
Every cable network, every consultant, every party fundraiser will tell you these two are the opposite poles of our politics, the “far right” and the “far left” of our political spectrum. But in reality, they’re both looking at the same problem.
They’re both grieving the very same dead dream, reaching up for what my father had when I was a kid: a middle-class life. The difference is that one of them — the MAGA true believer — has been handed a Black/Hispanic/queer/female scapegoat while the other — the progressive — understands that we need to stop America’s oligarchs from their pillage.
But the financial pain underneath, the force driving both to want change, is largely identical, and it’s real.
The whole economic case Republicans made for mass deportation was that clearing out the immigrants would hand American workers a raise. It ignored the Republican destruction of the American union movement, and amplified the exploitable, often-nascent racism many in the GOP’s base already carried.
Trump’s own Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, put it plainly, insisting that illegal immigration had for years “artificially suppressed wages” and gutted the prospects of working-class Americans, especially young white men. That was the promise: a blue-collar wage boom, with a dose of cruelty to speed it up.
Then the receipts came in.
A Brookings analysis found that ICE operations wiped out roughly 668,000 jobs, and that somewhere between 51,000 and 297,000 of those jobs had belonged to workers born right here in the United States. Construction, hospitality, and food service, the very industries where those anxious young men actually work, got hit the hardest.
University of Colorado economists Chloe East and Elizabeth Cox went looking for the promised windfall from Miller’s imprisonment and deportation campaign and couldn’t find it. There was no boost in jobs or wages for U.S.-born workers.
If anything, the crackdown hurt working-class men in immigrant-heavy trades like construction, because when you rip a non-citizen bricklayer off a job site you also idle the American electrician and project manager who needed that wall to go up.
So the red-hat guy’s pain is real. His paycheck really did shrink, his rent really is crushing him, his kid really can’t afford the college my dad could.
But the story he was sold about who did it to him is a lie, the same lie they sold his great grandfather in the 1920s when they swore it was Black people coming for his job, or his father in the 1980s when Limbaugh said it was the “Feminazis” who wanted to displace him, now just repackaged with browner faces, tradwives, fake Christianity, and a border.
The pain of being a working person in an America — where Republicans have all but destroyed the union movement and bipartisan neoliberalism has moved millions of jobs overseas — is genuine: but the villain is manufactured. And it’s manufactured by the same people quietly emptying working people’s wallets.
You can see the shared wound the moment you take the labels off and ask people about what actual policies they support instead of which political tribe they belong to.
The Century Foundation surveyed working-class Americans, including the ones who voted for Trump in droves, alongside their college-educated neighbors who lean Democratic. On the policies that actually shape their economic lives the two groups were highly aligned, both of them overwhelmingly backing populist economics and hard limits on billionaire and corporate power.
The rest of the polling tells the same story. A CNN survey this spring found 76 percent of Americans naming the cost of living as their single biggest economic problem, with about three-quarters saying the system is rigged for the powerful and three-quarters saying it’s harder to get ahead than it was a generation ago.
A January New York Times and Siena poll found 65 percent of voters say a middle-class life is simply out of reach, and 77 percent say it’s harder to reach now than it was for their parents. That isn’t a “left” or “right” number: that’s my dad’s vanished paycheck and benefits, expressed as despair, across the whole country.
Which is precisely why the morbidly rich oligarchs and their lickspittle politicians, and the billionaire-owned media, work so hard to keep us in these neat little categories and at each others’ throats.
The irony is that while progressives have properly identified who killed the middle class (the title of my new book), Republican voters believe something entirely different, a story America’s oligarchs have spent literally billions to instill in them.
One rightwing story is that the enemy of the middle class are the Democratic politicians who Republicans are now calling communists: this very week, as I wrote yesterday, Trump is out branding Democrats as dangerous “communists” while democratic-socialist candidates keep winning primaries on Medicare for All, free college, and good union jobs.
And in a coarser corner of the rightwing world where racism is as much an animator (or more) than economic pain, the enemy Republicans are pushing are brown- or Black-skinned immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country, eating your dogs and cats, and coming for your daughter and your job.
Both are aimed at the same exhausted, squeezed, frightened American who’s living in a rightwing bubble, trapped by Fox “News” as his information source or constantly spoon-fed rightwing outrage via the secret algorithms driving billionaire-owned social media.
And as long as those Americans are glaring sideways at a “democratic socialist” or an immigrant, they aren’t looking at the American oligarchs who actually ran off with all their money.
Because somebody did run off with it. The RAND Corporation added up the damage and found that roughly 50 trillion dollars was quietly shifted from the bottom 90 percent of us to the top 1 percent between 1975 and 2018. Since then it’s up to around $80 trillion.
If wages had simply kept pace with what American workers produce, the typical worker today would be pulling in well over a hundred thousand dollars a year instead of around fifty, and the economic force driving racism and bigotry would be much weaker.
That money didn’t evaporate. It didn’t get taken by a busboy or a barista or a bricklayer. It was hauled off, in broad daylight, by the architects of forty-five years of Reaganism and neoliberalism, the ones who broke the unions, shipped the factories overseas, and turned healthcare and college loans into profit centers.
That’s who took my father’s single paycheck: not the woman picking our lettuce. Not the kid who just wants to see a doctor or get an education without going bankrupt.
The entire con depends on voters on the right never turning around and realizing they’re mourning the same identical loss that progressive Democrats are trying so hard to repair.
The instant working people stop asking “who’s the enemy who looks, prays, or loves differently than I do” and start asking “who took my dad’s paycheck,” the whole game is over.
That’s the one conversation the billionaires and their bought-off lickspittle politicians are truly terrified of.
So have it. Have it at the summer picnic with your MAGA brother-in-law and your progressive niece sitting side by side, and watch what happens when you skip the slogans and ask them both what kind of country they actually want to live in.
You’ll find (outside of the unrepentant and largely unreachable racists) that they want the very same America back, the one where an honest week’s work bought a decent life.
Then stop grieving it and start organizing to take it back, because it was never lost. As I lay out in Who Killed The American Dream?, it was stolen, and stolen things can be recovered. http://dlvr.it/TTW0Xp
