2024: America's Point of No Return
The Ramifications of 2024 Will Be Long Lasting and Perhaps Even Irreversible (Especially If Trump Wins). Choose Wisely.
Feel free to check the entire blog archives from “Political Pulse” & “Salzillo Report” on the 2024 primary cycle, rural outreach, redistricting litigation, base dynamics, campaign organization, the current media landscape, the issues at stake, Project 2025, Build Back Better, the progressive movement, the true story about 2024 VP contender Gina Raimondo, and much more.
For an understanding of the significance of President Joe Biden’s legacy and what it could mean for a President Kamala Harris, check out the latest on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS. And here’s a real life example this past week of the value of President Biden’s leadership.
This year, that model of leadership—of valuing our allies, of getting loved ones home to reunite with their families, of supporting democracy’s freedom fighters and human rights activists—is on the ballot this year. President Biden’s model of selfless public service could not be a clearer contrast to Donald Trump’s awful record as president. In office, Trump instead preferred chaos over governing, and spent most of his time kissing up to dangerous autocrats like Putin, Kim Jong-Un, and Orban. When he wasn’t sparking a once-in-200-years assault on our Capitol.
The contrast is stark, and the threat to our democracy acute. But we have seen dark moments like this before. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President on the premise of stopping the expansion of slavery with the help of the newly formed Republican Party. Without his election, how would a different president have handled the South’s threats to secede from the Union? How would a different president have resolved (or failed to resolve) the American Civil War, and the question of whether chattel slavery and indentured servitude would still exist in the United States of the years to come?
Would Reconstruction of any kind have ever taken place at all? Would there even be a Union after 1860 had that election gone differently?
In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt routed Herbert Hoover in an electoral landslide with Democrats conquering Capitol Hill for what would prove to be the decades to come. Before this inflection point, America was on the brink of falling along with the battered and broken economy. The middle and working classes were in tatters, all while foreign adversaries, Communist and Fascists, gained ground abroad. Some in America openly wondered whether our country should even be a democracy after 1932.
Yet we met the challenge, and we excelled. The New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society paved the way for an unprecedented time of prosperity in our nation. Within a few decades, we became an industrial powerhouse, a global food supplier, a center of the Baby Boom, a leader in human rights & civil liberties, and a force to be reckoned with abroad. The expansion of government worked, and Jim Crow was undone. Much like the agendas of Theodore Roosevelt & Woodrow Wilson before, the new progressive agenda did not turn our capitalist society into a Marxist, Communist state. It instead leveled the playing field, and snatched us up before we fell off the cliffs of the Gilded Age and the Great Depression.
Though here’s another turning point, to show us that elections can have consequences in the other direction. In 1980, Ronald Reagan trounced Jimmy Carter and brought with him Republicans who believed government “was the problem.” Well, well, well. When the federal government passes tax cuts for the elite few and the largest corporations, but leaves very few crumbs for the rest of us, that is a problem.
When state taxpayer dollars go to private businesses who pad their pockets more by outsourcing jobs overseas—including manufacturing jobs—that is a problem.
When business consolidation cripples agriculture and results in monopolies jacking up prices on families and households, that is a problem.
When government agencies are downsized and financially strapped, and key social services and programs are privatized for profit—and turn out to be less efficient—that is a problem.
When union-busters are empowered and consumer protectors and protections are undermined, that is a problem.
When corporate special interests and dark money entities around—Wall Street, Corporate America, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, the “Right-to-Work” Movement, the fossil fuel industry, predatory lenders, health insurance companies, the top 1%, defense contractors, Big Tech, bitcoin companies, and DC lobbyists—are dictating the terms of the Washington agenda, that is a problem. When both Republican presidents like Reagan and Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton allowed that to happen, that was a problem. So no, “government is not the problem.” The problem is bad pro-corporate government leadership.
What has Reaganomics and Clintonian politics resulted in? It has delivered ballooning deficits by the trillions of dollars, the closure of family farms, the regular decline of union membership, rising inequality not seen since the Gilded Age, an unnatural, unprecedented, and precipitous decades-long rise in healthcare, education, energy, and housing costs, a deterioration in our infrastructure and transportation, and the recessions induced needlessly by mortgage bubbles, tax cuts, and the deregulation agenda that Reagan & Clinton supported. That is the path the policies of Reagan and Clinton have put us on.
In 2016, we got Donald Trump. Fortunately, he failed to achieve many of his goals, most of which were all talk and no action to begin with. But his legacy is still notable. Without a remedy in 2024, he will have a long lasting imprint on American society through the activist United States Supreme Court and the entire judiciary system that overturned reproductive access for tens of millions of women, proliferated the amount of guns on our city streets and small towns by weakening laws on the books, crippled half a century of progress on voting rights, and threatens same-sex marriage, contraception, IVFs, DREAMers, and even more now.
Our nation has never been so more divided on party and ideology than now because Donald Trump denigrated his opponents personally, legitimized fringe far-right conspiracy theories, abandoned our allies and sided with foreign adversaries (like Russia, China, North Korea, and Hungary), and undermined our system of free and fair elections for his own preservation of power. Look no further than what happened on January 6, 2021. We also cannot forget his central role in the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans from the coronavirus pandemic, and the way in which his mismanagement helped tank the economy in the process. Nor should we forget how he exacerbated racial strife post-George Floyd. Elections do have consequences.
Finally, we saw reason for hope in the consequences of the 2020 election—when former Vice President Joe Biden became our 46th President. Joe Biden is the first American president in more than 40 years to reject the neoconservative economic philosophy responsible for the many of the struggles facing our nation today. That includes the rise in costs of living and inflation, which he has rightly blamed on post-pandemic supply chain bottlenecks, foreign conflicts, and yes, price-gouging & corporate greed. Greedflation and shrinkflation is real, as dismissive as Republicans are of it. Only Biden Democrats will get to the root source of your economic pain.
President Biden is the most pro-union President we have seen in the past century and all of history. He joined picket lines and stood side-by-side with auto workers, rail workers, nurses, screenwriters, and film producers. He is a President whose Administration represents the best of America’s strengths. He has a record filled with policy achievements and historic benchmarks, including the appointment of the first black woman on the United States Supreme Court. And he has united the world in support of democratic values, as we saw with Ukraine.
President Biden has had one of the most productive terms in presidential history. Most remarkably, the Biden-Harris Administration has done what it has done despite a very divisive and polarized political climate. Not to mention the slimmest of congressional majorities. Domestic accomplishments like the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS & Science Act, the PACT Act, Postal Service Reform, the Camp LeJeune Justice Act, the Electoral Count Act Amendments, a bipartisan gun safety bill, the Respect for Marriage Act, supply chain reshoring bills, and more are unmatched in our history.
The Biden Administration has made the largest climate investments ever, with the most investments in infrastructure & transportation since Eisenhower, the greatest expansion of healthcare access and affordable housing since Johnson, the most devout commitment to addiction & mental illness since Kennedy, the most significant return to environmental protectionism since Nixon & Carter, and the sharpest economic recovery since FDR himself.
Executive action has also greatly assisted in improving federal workers’ compensation agencies like OWCP post-Trump, in emboldening the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau & the FTC to go after corporate monopolies in industry & agriculture and needless junk fees, in expanding the Affordable Care Act, in putting a new focus on maternal mortality and environmental injustice, in offering some student debt relief with debt at a record high, and in pardoning low-level marijuana offenders who fell victim to the shortfalls and biases of our criminal justice system.
And that’s just domestic policy. The Biden-Harris Administration has come close to rivaling Truman in unifying NATO and the entire free world against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and against his bloc of autocratic allies in China, Iran, North Korea, and Hungary. Historic international agreements have been made with multiple allies— comprising Europe, Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and especially Ukraine and Taiwan.
Now, I hope you can see the true choice for 2024, with the Biden-Trump records easily at hand.
The first choice? Vice President Kamala Harris, who wants to continue the progress envisioned in Build Back Better. She understands that more action needs to be taken on greedflation, on making communities safer with a robust public safety system, on reversing the long-existing economic inequalities today, on rebuilding our industrial & agricultural bases, and on codifying our hard-won victories on rights & liberties into law before it’s too late.
The Vice President has proven that in her role as a voice for Black and brown communities, women, and young people. The tie-breaking votes of a VP have never been proven more significant than in these past 4 years. And she will absolutely prosecute the case very well on abortion access, gun safety, voting rights, and more in the days to come. For those who want to see Build Back Better fully enacted—whether that means eye, dental, and hearing aid coverage in Medicare, or 2-year community college, or paid leave, or a new and improved vision of child care and elder care, or making housing affordable, or finalizing a Clean Energy Plan, reviving the across-the-board popular Child Tax Credit, or restoring Glass-Steagall, or passing the PRO Act, and more—Kamala Harris is your choice. For those who want to see our democracy strengthened, our rights protected, and racial inequities in maternal care, environmental pollution, and wage gaps be addressed, Kamala Harris is your champion for the working men and women of this country.
The second choice? Wall Street heir Donald Trump. He’s too busy meeting with Pharma executives, the charter school lobby, Big Oil tycoons, the factory farms, anti-union activists like Elon Musk & Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley elites, and Big Crypto interests to think of the working and middle classes.
Corporate America (including the owners of large companies like Home Depot) and the billionaire class are coming in droves to return Trump back to power for their interests. They want more Trump Tax Cuts, more Dodd-Frank deregulation pushes, a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, commercialization of our public lands & natural resources for fossil fuels, and more school vouchers. Jim Crow 2.0 will be fully enacted nationwide and the US will be a puppet ally for Putin and Xi’s global pursuits.
(Meanwhile, you will feel the economic pain and inflation that comes with 10% tariffs across the board).
That and more is part of the far-right agenda. The culmination of that agenda is the radical Project 2025. Before Trump tried to run away from them, he praised its authors over the years for their work, and they remain close even today with his running mate JD “Chameleon” Vance. More economic hardship, more inequality & suffering, more infant mortality and unwanted pregnancies, more gun-related crimes, more hate, and the erosion of our institutions and our democracy. That is the future we will have with the MAGA Agenda.
Harris offers a new direction for the future. Trump is just dangerous, reckless, strange, tasteless stale bread, spoon-fed to us by the corporate powers-at-be. What really is MAGA beyond the old, empty sloganeering?
2024 is a historic time, an inflection point that rivals the most trying & challenging times of 1932, and 1860. Its outcome will shape the nation for decades to come. And for those thinking about voting for Jill Stein or Cornel West, think about what you are putting at risk by playing the spoiler game at such a crucial point in our nation’s history.
Excellent.