During last Tuesday’s midterm elections the Democratic Party won in an absolute landslide, flipping in their favor both the House and Senate by wide margins. They now hold 54 Senate seats — with both independents, Bernie Sanders (VT) and Angus King (MA), caucusing with the Democrats, effectively making it 56 — and 259 House seats (needing only 218 for control).
These Democratic majorities render President Donald Trump a lameduck for his final two years in office. Without GOP control of either the House or Senate, or both — which Trump enjoyed both during his first term (2017-’18), as well as these last two years (2025-’26) — Democrats will ensure he passes no meaningful legislation before his second term runs up. If the midterms were any indication, then there is a significant chance that the Democratic Party will win the white house in 2028.
It is not often that I write about politics directly, due mainly to my disillusionment with the American political system over the last decade. I am one of the tens of millions of taxpaying U.S. citizens who does not vote, because to me it has felt like a false choice. I can vote for one side that is funded by billionaires, or I can vote for the other that is funded by the same billionaires. All I have known in my adult life is that I continue to make roughly the same amount of money and the power of the dollar perpetually erodes.
Moments like Tuesday happen in American politics more often than you think. As shocking as the result was, it is not entirely uncommon for the same political party to have control of both the Senate and House. Trump has twice had both (as referenced above). Joe Biden had Democratic control of both between 2021-’22. Barack Obama had Democratic control of both in 2009-’10 (including a filibuster-proof supermajority in the House). When you own the Presidency, the Senate and the House, theoretically you can accomplish whatever you want.
This one seems to feel a little bit differently, but I can’t deny that some recency bias must be at play. It is almost as if I forgot what it felt like to, like, have hope in the future. My fatalistic instincts have kind of been telling me over the last handful of years that there is nothing that can be done. That it is only going to get worse from here. That my earning power has already stagnated, that the cost of goods (rent, groceries, utilities, gas) are only going to continue to rise, and that I am more or less trapped in this American economic labyrinth.
I never thought I would see, as we did Tuesday, states like Texas have a Democratic Governor, or a Democratic Senator. I never thought I would see places like Kansas and Iowa turn blue. It is not that we have never seen the Democratic Party flourish in spurts hither and thither, giving them majorities and supermajorities; it’s rather the specific places where it happened. There was probably a time when there was some meaning to the name of this country — the United States — but on at least one day, on November 3rd, 2026, people a nation over spoke at the ballot box that we are, in fact, all in the same boat.
I shudder to read too much into this, for I have been disappointed before. But it’s obvious that a repudiation occurred, and that Americans are not at all on board with more war with Iran, with high gas prices, with high rents, with historically high grocery prices, etc. I think we are a forgiving culture, but I also think that, at the end of the day, we are also the most selfish and individualized country in the history of the planet. I suppose it’s a byproduct of being the wealthiest country in the history of the planet, while at the same time so many have so little.
For the duration of my working life — i.e. since I have been paying any amount of attention whatsoever to politics — I have been told that the American economy is doing great. That the stock market is doing fantastically well. That the only reason a person is not able to succeed is because they do not work hard enough, or that they are not smart enough, or that it is essentially their own fault if they don’t make it in this world.
I am not a political scientist or an economist or anything even vaguely resembling an upper-cased Professional on these matters. I can speak only of my experience in this country — in public education, at a four-year university (for one year, anyway), at community college, in the labor force, etc. And what I have realized is that I am not the only one who knows bullshit when he sees it, or hears it. I am educated more than the average; I have a better job than the average; I make more money than the average. Yet I, like the overwhelming majority of Americans, feel stuck in this specific economic paradigm.
Over the course of human history there have been countless examples of power and wealth being concentrated by a small and select faction of individuals. The people in most European countries pushed back against the monarchies and feudalism in the early-to-mid 1800’s; the Russians overthrew the Czars during the second industrial revolution, around the time of The Gilded Age (in the late-1800’s and early-1900’s); the Chinese, similarly, ended dynastic rule in 1912.
It was President John F. Kennedy who said famously that, ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,’ and violence is what revolution has brought historically. The French Revolution iconically implemented the guillotine to publicly behead those in power. The Vladimir Lenin- and Leon Trotsky-led Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution executed the entire royal family of Czar Nicholas II. When the people decide, finally, at last, that they have had enough, they express it through violence.
America is (and I would argue has been) at a particularly delicate tipping point for several years, which dawned when, in 2016, its electorate decided that the two most popular politicians in the country were an 80-something-year-old socialist named Bernie Sanders, and the man who would one day serve two terms, spread over twelve years — Donald Trump. It has been a full decade since Trump first took office, and America is still in an anti-establishment kind of mood.
Part of the problem in the United States — as compared to most European countries of the 1800’s, and Russia and China during the late-18’s and early-19’s — is that our country remains so young. It remains perpetually in a sort of adolescence where ordinary everyday folks don’t really know what they want, partly because the propaganda here is so strong and in your face and partly due to the fact that most Americans aren’t all that educated.
This youth of ours has obviously taken time. We feel generally that the hard work has already been done by our ancestors, whether through the American Revolution against Great Britain (1776), or through our struggles with slavery during the Civil War (1860’s), or through the economic changes during The Great Depression (1930’s), or through the Civil Rights Movement (1960’s), and so on. We have been taught through public education a certain vibe, or image of ourselves — of so-called American Exceptionalism — but still so much falls through the cracks.
The crossroads we find ourselves at currently is one where we can no longer unsee how well a select few are living while the rest of us are stuck in squalor. On the one hand we have media constantly (and at high volume) telling everyone that America has never been better and, on the other, people are working multiple jobs just to live in a two-bedroom apartment with two or three or four other family members who are doing the same. You can only bullshit hardworking people for so long before they begin to wonder if, really, it actually is raining (as we are continually told), or if it’s just plain piss that keeps running down our backs.
Democratic leadership is culpable for the demise of the American workingclass, because for the last thirty years it has adopted Bill Clinton’s (objectively brilliant) blueprint of campaigning as champions of the ordinary worker while governing in power as any garden-variety Republican. Barack Obama accomplished this better than any Democratic President in history, and his failures — of not prosecuting the bankers who destroyed the economy in 2007-’08, of not ending the wars, of not providing a healthcare system that wasn’t a giant handout to insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry, etc. — were inevitably what paved the way for a self-interested dickhead such as Donald Trump to take over.
But now, finally, Americans have seen what Trump is all about. En route to enriching both himself and his family, people now understand that he has done virtually nothing worthwhile to benefit the lives of common folk. He promised in 2024 to lower gas prices and grocery costs and to lower inflation, and so on, while in actuality the price of literally everything has only continued to rise. The war with Iran came at particularly poor timing — what with the midterms over the horizon — not only because the cause was worthless and the war itself un-winnable, but due to the fact that he fucked with the one singular country on the planet that has the power to completely disrupt the world economy.
In other words, America has had a hard-on for Iran for like fifty years, and Iran knew this, and so Iran has been preparing seemingly forever for this war, and it takes a certain arrogance that only an American President could possess to believe that what has happened — and what has already been proven to be a failure — wasn’t going to happen.
Such a war was probably the number one cause for why Democrats mopped the floor with Republicans during the midterms. Because people are just sick and tired of it all. Sick of working harder for money that doesn’t spend — at least not on the leisurely activities that make life worth living — and tired of hearing the same bullshit about improving American lives that has been regurgitated by presidents and politicians generation-by-generation without any change or end in sight.
The American population, however, unlike the violent revolutions of the last two centuries in every sector of the globe, is not suited for savage takeovers of our wealthy and powerful overlords. We as taxpayers dump too much money into the military, and our state and local governments too many of our tax dollars into police departments, that if ever We The People really tried to take up arms and destroy the banana republic system that we reside in, it would be squashed at a moment’s notice. The police do not exist to serve and protect us citizens; they exist to serve and protect the property, and the owners of that property (i.e. the rich).
This is showcased in every which way, but most notably the severe sentences that get levied against petty crimes of the poor, compared to the fact that every time a banking institution knowingly commits fraud against its consumers (like Wells Fargo), or every time a pharmaceutical company pumps out an addictive drug to enrich themselves and ends up killing thousands of people (like Purdue Pharma), they just get slapped with a fine and that’s the end of the story. They make tens of billions in profits, and they are fined mere single-digit billions. It’s a great business strategy.
It might sound crazy, but there once was a time in American History when the government cracked down on corporations who were egregious offenders against the public. The Department of Education was run by someone who formerly worked in education. There was once a time when the Department of Labor was led by a former union representative. And so on. Governments of a hundred years ago were held accountable because the individuals who ran them had a stake in the game.
The only stake in this current iteration of the United States government are those who are in a race to make as much money as they possibly can. Cabinet members are no longer the best of the best in their specific fields, but rather former investment bankers seeking to benefit financially not only themselves but the institutions they once represented, loyalists to whomever the current President happens to be, ex-lobbyists, those who do not believe in the role government is supposed to play in helping the plight of the workingclass, or some combination of any of the above.
That’s why I call it a banana republic. I didn’t make that up. It was Martin Luther King Jr. who famously critiqued the American economic system by saying: The problem is that we all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. Credited for his larger-than-life persona during the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. was actually a hardcore socialist who was assassinated while rallying sanitation workers in Memphis TN. King Jr.’s politics were, in retrospect, pretty evident. But public education did not spend any time teaching us about that.
Anyway, his criticism — about how the economy is built on socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor — was (and remains) prescient. Whenever big industry fails (the banks, automobile manufacturers, etc.), the taxpayers are always the ones who bail out the rich. Yet at the same time the minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 (USD) since 2009. Social Security is dwindling and can’t keep up with inflation. Medical costs continue to skyrocket. Higher education puts young people in debt for decades, if not lifetimes. And wages remain stagnant.
In any reasonable society — as is the case in almost every other advanced country — millions of people would be out in the streets demanding that the government do something to correct these wrongs. In America, again, because the propaganda is so strong here, huge swaths of the population have been poked and prodded and swayed into voting against their economic interests.
My own father, as one example — an 80-something year-old white man, to be fair — worked his ass off for decades and never eclipsed $50,000 in a year, is just one man in sea of other old whites who was captured by the Fox News’s of the world. And I, a 36 year-old millennial who regularly makes anywhere between $110,000 and $130,000 in a given year, became an unapologetic socialist. One would think something more closely resembling the opposite would have occurred, between my dad and I. But alas.
Where I come from is actually a quite simple place: In any other generation I would be considered, if not rich, then at least upper-class. My six-figure annual earnings would be enough to buy a house, allow my wife to be a homemaker (if she so decided that’s what she wanted), send my children to private school, and so on. It would be a good life, in other words.
But I am reading the tea leaves, and I can already feel it coming. For me, I mean. What good is all the money in the world — which I do have, in the abstract, I’m saying, considering I am a single man and I make more than I need to survive — if the capital I generate remains fixed whilst in the meantime the cost of life continues to soar? It is a slow drip. It doesn’t happen overnight. And at the same time there will one day be a night when what I have is no longer enough and I am forced to make the decisions so many millions of others have already been forced to make.
That is why I am a socialist: Because even though I do better than the average, what is good for the average person is, by default, good for me, too. There are over one hundred million America workers in the service industry, and if more money is in their pockets then they will spend it. When ordinary workers are out spending money, some of that money will find its way in the pockets of people like me and, in turn, I will be out spending it, and so on. That is how an economy is supposed to work. From the bottom upwards.
The problem with such great concentrations of wealth — such that have not been seen since the violent revolutions of The Gilded Age — is that fewer and fewer people have the disposable income necessary to go out. When regular people don’t have money to spend, then it means I will be making less and that I will have less money to spend. It goes in reverse of how an economy can reasonably function.
This is a really longwinded way of saying that because of the factors already mentioned — the war, the cost of rent, the cost of goods, the cost of gas, et. al — the Democrats won, and won easily, in states they’ve hardly been competitive in for the last century. That is why Republicans are panicking, and in a way it’s why Democrats should feel a little panicked, too.
Because while the Dems did crush the GOP in these particular midterms, their clock has already begun to tick. They have to do something meaningful these next two years, or else the American population is going to look for further change. Over the last fifty years there has been much flip-flopping: Democrats get in power and don’t do anything, so the people vote in Republicans. Then the Republicans don’t do anything, and the people flip back to the Democrats. All the while, the billionaires continue to prosper.
The freshest ideas, however, belong to neither Democrats nor Republicans. They belong to the socialists (which since Bernie Sanders ran for President in 2015 has been rebranded as democratic-socialists). Only there do we see support for popular policies such as Medicare For All, free tuition to public universities, a Green New Deal, a higher minimum wage, an expansion of Social Security, etc. Pundits always ask: Who is going to pay for it? The answer is us, obviously.
Imagine for a moment a world where people are not starting GoFundMe pages for medical expenses, or going bankrupt for getting sick. Imagine a world where the minimum wage is enough to buy a house, or afford an apartment where they live comfortably. Imagine going to college and not being in debt a hundred thousand dollars (or more) by the time you graduate. Imagine working your entire adult life and Social Security allows you to retire with dignity.
These things should not be hard to imagine. Not only because every other advanced country is able to accomplish it, but because the United States of America was once a country where all of these things were a regular part of the deal you entered into as a human being. Housing was affordable. College was super cheap. Medical costs were reasonable, and no one ever lost it all because they didn’t have insurance. It’s fucking crazy how far in the other direction we have come.
If you have made it this far, then you ought to know the culprit: It’s the multi-millionaire and billionaire class. It is they who have placed a gigantic wedge between themselves and the 99.9% of ordinary people. They have found a way to legalize bribing politicians. They own every media apparatus — from newspapers to social media sites and apps to corporate news networks like Fox and MSNBC and CNN — that you consume from. They have legalized stashing their money away in offshore tax havens. They have made it harder to start, and join, unions. They have made it more difficult, and in some situations illegal altogether, for workers to protest and/or go on strike. They have fixed the game for themselves.
And we, as voters, have allowed it. Rather than choosing between candidates who have opposing economic or social values, we instead chose between whether or not we support abortion, or whether or not we are afraid of poor people immigrating from Mexico, or any manner of other bullshit that has no bearing on how we live our lives. We voted against our economic interests in lieu of the culture wars.
But we are here now, and the people are desperate. They are desperate for another change. Barack Obama left a trail of breadcrumbs that led so many working Americans into putting their faith in a charlatan like Donald Trump, and even though Joe Biden existed in the White House as President of The United States — like that is a thing that actually happened — we have been living in Trump’s world for the last ten years… soon to be twelve. The promises he made ultimately went unkept, and thus it is now on the Democrats to do something about it.
As a socialist who identifies with neither major political party, my expectations for the Democrats to meet this moment and capture the hearts and minds and frustrations of workingclass people cannot possibly be any lower. The only thing I am confident in is that they will find a way to fuck this up. That is their style. That is what their track record shows. And the sad thing is… it might not even matter.
Because Donald Trump screwed up so royally over these last ten years that voters in fucking Texas, and fucking Iowa, and fucking Kansas, chose literally anything other than the candidate with an ‘R’ next to their name to represent them. Democrats may be able to sleepwalk their way into a cushy 2028 white house and it won’t matter if it’s an actual change candidate or another empty suit — which is my obvious fear — since the Democratic Party will push the empty suits in lieu of the more ‘radical’ candidates who simply want things like no war with Iran and maybe a little healthcare and maybe not sucking Israel’s dick every chance they get.
That is for another article, however. I was actually pretty happy with the midterms. It gave me a sense of hope. It isn’t every day that I am able to feel such a thing. Especially not when it comes to the American political system.
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