Making Sense of a Nonsensical World

How did it happen?

For most of 2024, I’ve been making a documentary feature film, “How to Save Democracy.” I filmed interviews between April and early August, and since then have been in post-production, as I edit the film into its final version.

I’ve interviewed some outstanding people, including Jesse Eisinger, the Pulitzer Prize winning senior editor at ProPublica; David Dayen, the executive editor at The American Prospect; Les Leopold, the author of “Wall Street’s War on Workers”; David Daley, the author of “Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections”; and Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and political essayist.

I hope to have the film finished and ready to be seen by the early part of next year.

In making the film and talking with all the people I talked with, I gained greater insight into what ails democracy in the U.S.; this has also allowed me greater insight into the recent presidential election, one in which Donald Trump triumphed.

You can say the majority of the voting electorate are stupid, or racist, or misogynist, or in a cult, but that’s not what got Trump elected and is actually insulting to the people who voted for him. Ok, some are that way, but not most. Instead, it’s that America has issues, and Trump, as the seemingly insurgent candidate to Kamala Harris being seen as representing the status quo, gave the impression that he was the outsider who would upend the system.

Where did Harris and the Democrats go wrong? In a number of ways. Many of the ways they went wrong are more systemic than just the Democratic Party, and instead go to the heart of both the flawed American capitalist system and the flawed democracy system and its institutions.

The majority of the voters went with the person they perceive as the insurgent, while Harris was seen as a product of the system, for better or worse--a system that produces or enables wars, corporate corruption, Wall Street malfeasance, and many more things that have made the American dream a nightmare for far too many people.

The argument that Trump was a threat to democracy--while very true--was rationalized away by many voting for him with the thought that he was president for four years and democracy survived—so, in that way of thinking, he's no threat. The reality is that Trump is a major threat, and will run the country like the kleptocrat he is, perpetually looking to enrich himself and his allies.

But a majority of people are still pissed that they are not getting ahead, and they see the out of touch elites gaming the system and garnering all the rewards.

And they're not wrong about that.

The economy may be going strong for some, but for the vast number of people, they don’t see a strong economy. 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, while the rich are growing richer. People can't afford medical care, and are having to do GoFundMe campaigns to pay for it--or they declare medical bankruptcy. Students are going deep in debt to pay for college. The cost of housing is unaffordable. Record numbers of people are homeless. Private equity firms are decimating businesses and causing mass layoffs. Corporations are making record profits while laying people off at will, in order to enrich the corporate executives and the shareholders.

And the list goes on.

When people are living with so much precarity, they lose faith in government, and believe all politicians are corrupt. It's easy then to turn to someone who they believe will upend the system.

The reality is that America can't keep going the way it's been going. Trump will not make things better—he will only make things worse. But unless the U.S. changes the tune of its economic system, people will continue to fall prey to the false hope of a demagogue, and also lose faith in democracy.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt won election in 1932 after America was decimated by the elite, who crashed the world’s economy and caused the Great Depression in 1929. FDR understood how, when the great majority of people are struggling to make ends meet, they become attracted to authoritarian leaders.

This is what he said in a 1938 radio address:
"Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations, not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership. Finally, in desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat."

What FDR was saying was that when people are struggling to make ends meet, which was the case for the vast majority in Roosevelt’s time, as it is now, they are willing to listen to a demagogue who promises he’ll take care of them. It’s the classic strongman syndrome.

After the financial crash of 2008—caused by Bill Clinton’s willingness to curry favor with Wall Street and sign into law a repeal of the Glass-Stegall Act of 1933, a law that put guardrails on the banking industry and stopped their criminal malfeasance from crashing the economy, as they did in 1929—the banking industry received major bailouts, while tens of millions of people lost their homes and savings. No bank executive went to jail for their crimes; instead they were rewarded with large bonuses.

The total amount banks received in bailouts over the next few years after the 2008 crash was at least $29 trillion. Meanwhile, the average American got the shaft.

Who could blame people for being pissed at that time? In 2016, Bernie Sanders spoke to this anger, and did his best to explain the cause of people’s sufferings. He ran for president as an insurgent, but the Democratic Party sidelined him in favor of Hillary Clinton, who truly was a friend to the banking industry.

Donald Trump was elected in 2016, running as someone who would break up the stranglehold of the elites; he claimed he was for the common person. He was the mirror image of Bernie Sanders, but there was no truth to his claims that he was a champion of the working class. Instead, he was a good friend to the corporate class, and was and is a kleptocrat par excellence.

Trump, as a master conman, performed a snow job on the American public. Yet at the same time, a great number of people held him in high esteem and were willing to look past his many faults, because they felt he was one of them.

And in this election, it was more of the same. Kamala Harris ran a good campaign, one that focused on human decency—it was a way to contrast herself with Trump, who has not an ounce of moral decency.

But her campaign playbook was similar to Hillary Clinton’s in that she ran as a darling of the corporate class and Wall Street elite.

During the Democratic National Convention, I almost puked when I watched Illinois governor JB Pritzker brag, to loud applause, that he was a real, honest to goodness billionaire, as opposed to fake billionaire Donald Trump.

I’m sorry to tell you this but billionaires are not our friend, whatever their political persuasion. They are the problem, not the solution.

In campaigning, Harris dialed back some of the mild populism of Joe Biden’s administration, and instead signaled to Wall Street that she was on their side. She scaled back the level of taxation that Biden wanted on the rich and corporations. When some of her billionaire donors said they wanted the Biden appointee Lina Khan, who as head of the Federal Trade Commission was suing corporations for their monopolistic practices, removed from her post by Harris, she never made a public pronouncement in support of Khan. And in the later stages of her campaign, she spent more time trying to appeal to Republicans than progressives or the working class.

Also in the latter stages of her campaign, she rolled out billionaire Mark Cuban to be a prominent media surrogate. Cuban soothed the wealth class when in his appearances he let them know Harris was on their side and would never raise their taxes.

Sadly, the election loss was further proof of how the Democratic Party has abandoned working class people, and a further demonstration that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.

And so, once again they went with the insurgent. Trump and his Republican cohort talked a good populist game, and convinced enough people that everything they want to do—mass deportations, tariffs, deregulation, more tax cuts for the rich, eliminate Obamacare, lessen worker protections, etc.—was for the good of the American people.

Democrats either have to rethink who they are for, or else a new political party needs to be established. If they continue representing the corporate class, they will continue to be seen as the party of the elites, for better or worse.

Ultimately, the problems of America are systemic—the American capitalist system is rotten and needs to be overhauled, either by the U.S. becoming a social democracy as is seen in Europe, or by transforming into a system of democratic socialism.

When you have such extreme levels of wealth inequality, as is seen in the U.S., eventually an oligarchic and kleptocratic close-knit circle of people take over the reins of power, leading, sooner or later, to system collapse. That’s because greed—the endless lust for more and more profits at the cost of everything else—becomes the force that powers everything; and when the leaders of the nation have greed as their motivating drive, it blinds them to what is in the best interests of the common good.

After all, Elon Musk, who will serve as Donald Trump’s most trusted advisor, recently said that the economy needs to crash—and people need to suffer—within two years in order for it to be rebuilt in a more prosperous way.

Musk’s version of a more prosperous way is not something that will be beneficial to the great majority of people. Instead, his version will be beneficial only to his billionaire friends.

The system is rotten, and Kamala Harris became roadkill along the way. It may get worse before it gets better, because of the lack of vision of the people who now get to call the shots.

But there is a better way, and a way to a more egalitarian society, one that is framed by human decency. It’s a society in which the wealth is shared more fairly, and there is no extreme chasm between the rich and everyone else.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt created that type of society with his New Deal policies, and that type of society lasted four decades. The time has come to bring that way back, so that everyone has the chance to flourish.

But if the Democrats continue to run as the champion of the elite, they will get what they deserve—more electoral losses.