No plea to return to “normality” of the “everyday” is now worthwhile. Only the extraordinary can save us.

Gregory Claeys

The dog days of summer are in full swing, and Donald Trump’s approval ratings continue to slide, driven by a substantial erosion of support from Independents . The Epstein matter just won’t go away, as JD Vance has slyly kept it alight whenever it threatens to fizzle out of the news cycle. The mass deportation project is increasingly unpopular, as it has become evident that the wide net is capturing more workers and taxpayers than the hardened criminals Trump was promising. The economic numbers are not good, with inflation climbing steadily, despite the fact that the worst store-shelf and wallet impacts have yet to really kick in. And the job numbers were bad enough for Trump to fire the head of the BLS, his go-to solution any time reality doesn’t show the requisite loyalty to his agenda. And those pesky wars that were going to be solved on Day One of his triumphant return just won’t go away (although Trump now asserts that he was just joking about that one day stuff, because we all know how much of a cutup he is with the jokes and whatnot — he’s a laugh riot).

Trump’s response to these stubborn features of reality is, of course, to go on the offensive, dredging up old grievances and fanning the flames on new faux outrages. Obama should be locked up for treason; Gavin Newsom should be arrested for, well, for not doing a good job, or something; Washington DC needs federal agents to help with their out-of-control crime (crime that’s been sharply declining for the last few years); Jerome Powell should be fired for doing his job; etc. These are more than just distractions from the Epstein affair. They are also meant to deflect attention from the overall failure of Trump’s fever-dream, Project 2025 social engineering gambit, where everything that is bad in the world can just be fixed by purging liberals, who created all of the problems in the first place. Aside from the die-hards (who are themselves fuming about the Epstein betrayal), most Americans are growing impatient with the stalling and scapegoating. At some point, Trump will have to deliver something: lower prices, better jobs, an end to the Gaza genocide, safety and stability for Ukraine, etc. Instead, as the Big Bullshit Bill and the tariffs really kick in, we’re almost certainly going to see the opposite: higher prices, lower wages, declining life expectancy, millions losing their health insurance, and the like. As with all of recorded history, giant tax and corporate windfalls for the plutocrats will not trickle down to us plebs.

So that should all be good electoral news for the Democrats, right? Unfortunately, not so much. The Dems’ net favorability rating is at a 30-year low. On some level, this is understandable, because the GOP is actually in power. So Trump is able to implement his whims with impunity, which creates a kind of “advantage of action,” giving the impression that he’s actually doing important stuff (even if it all sucks). Dems are on the sidelines, and all they can do, at least in the federal government, is oppose, resist, and stall. Those who are out of power always look less effective than those currently at the helm.

So despite the low ratings for Dems right now, the temptation is to just target the mid-terms, hoping that Trump just hangs himself with his increasingly unpopular and ineffective policies. If the Democrats could take back the House and/or the Senate in 2026, they could then derail the rest of Trump’s term, scuttling the Project 2025 nightmare.

Bet then what? Is it just on to the 2028 presidential election, searching around for the best candidate at whom to throw gajillions in establishment money? What is the actual platform, aside from “Not-Trump”? It’s been obvious for a while now that Democratic voters want a more liberal agenda, especially with regards to heavy taxation of the rich, Medicare-for-All, significant busting up of corporate monopolies, and other social democratic ideas. Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, and AOC are among the most popular Democrats still active in government, and a democratic socialist could conceivably become the mayor of the largest city in the country. But these figures are seen by the establishment as too radical and extreme. Anything that even remotely threatens the donor class is off the table for the entrenched fogies and cronies, and that has opened up the chasm between leadership and rank-and-file, a yawning gap that explains the rock-bottom approval rating of the Democratic party in general.

The problem is that the whole system itself is not sustainable. What we are seeing is the ecological, economic, and political implosion of US-style capitalism specifically, and of global consumer-industrial civilization on a grand scale. Trumpism’s advantage, which will certainly outlive the man himself, is that it better captures the public’s growing sense of this collapse, and it provides a very clear and simple message about it: “All the bad stuff that is happening has been caused by bad people, and it’s their evil movement, liberalism, which has wrecked everything. Stick with us, because we’re good, and we’ll fix it.” So even though the actual core of Trumpism, in service to the plutocrats, consists of grift and the kleptocratic dismantling and sell-off of the public sphere, for the masses it provides a compelling depiction of just how awful everything is, and who’s to blame.

The Dems’ struggle is that they have embraced the polarization part of Trumpian politics (what I have called the Polarization Industrial Complex), bashing Trump and his enabling minions, but they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that other pillar of Trumpism, the valid impression that the system itself has failed, and needs to be overhauled from the ground up. Without admitting that regular people are right to be alarmed at this metacollapse, Dems are unable to create a convincing alternative to Trump’s dualistic war on liberalism itself.

Democrats need to move even beyond Bernie and AOC, by acknowledging that the system itself is indeed rotten, and that it needs to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt. But it is not just the government, or even the economy, that needs to be rebuilt. Our society itself has to be reimagined, but not as the lily-white, Handmaid’s Tale Gilead that Project 2025 envisions. We need three brand new fundamental pillars of social order: Universal Basic Income for economic stability, Bigger Home Bases for ecological and psychological health, and Modern Money Theory as the lever for moving government away from plutocrat-servicing and towards investing in regular people. We also need a new national mission, one embraced by government and by popular culture: repair and rehabilitation of the natural world, via institutions that allow people to live and thrive with dignity and security. This will allow us to shake off the stranglehold of the plutocrats, who want to keep us forever poor and desperate.

(Note: more information on UBI, BHBs, and MMT can be found in many earlier posts on this blog. I encourage you to search through these older pieces to see how things could fit together)