Ben Wikler speaks at a rally with former U.S. President Barack Obama and Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers before the mid-term elections, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S. October 29, 2022. REUTERS/Daniel Steinle
I don’t recall the year (think it was 2008?), but I remember well Louise and I meeting Ben Wikler over snacks and drinks at a small party at John Nichols’ home in Madison, Wisconsin. As we left, Louise remarked to me, “That kid’s going places. Keep an eye on him!”
Ben has more than fulfilled her prediction, leading Wisconsin Democrats to victory after victory; this weekend he announced he’s running for head of the DNC. This is a truly big deal.
The Democratic Party will decide who’ll lead it in February. Will it be a neoliberal agent of the donor class, another bland technocrat who tries to please everybody and offend nobody, or a true and tested agent of small-d democratic and middle class renewal like Ben?
It may be the most important decision Democrats have made in fifty years.
This matters because the morbidly rich always screw things up in their eternal quest for more! more!! more!!! wealth and power. And they’re doing it to our country now in a way that may well become irreversible if the Democrats make the wrong choice in February.
It could, in other words, spell the end of the American experiment in democratic governance. This is a life-and-death moment in history.
In actual, historical fact, those wielding great wealth have been responsible for the failure or near-failure of pretty much every republic since the days of ancient Greece and Rome.
In modern times they’ve provoked the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, the Russian Revolution, and the downfall of dozens of smaller once-democratic or partially-democratic states from Chile in the 1960s to Egypt, Hungary, and Turkey in the last few decades. It’s also happening to Russia as you read these words, although that’s another article altogether.
And now they’re screwing up America again, much as they did in the 1920s. If they succeed, it will be both disastrous and perhaps bloody, a word that Trump himself has recently used to describe his plans for the next four years.
America has been through two great cycles since our founding, as brilliantly explained by Neil Howe in The Fourth Turning Is Here and Peter Turchin in Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. Turchin also summarized his thesis in a tight but concerning article for The Guardian last week titled “The deep historical forces that explain Trump’s win.”
(I’ve also written about these cycles of history multiple times over the years, here, here, here, here, here, etc., but it deserves a fresh examination in the light of Trump’s electoral win and the crucial decision facing the Democratic Party in February.)
Howe explains how every 80 years or so (as our elders die out) we lose access to the lessons our grandparents learned, particularly those about the importance — nay, the necessity — of regulating great wealth so it doesn’t turn government into a vehicle to exclusively serve the morbidly rich.
When the rich take over, he notes, bad things happen: it was roughly 80 years from our founding when oligarchs in the South starting the Civil War, 80 years from the Civil War to oligarchs on Wall Street kicking off the Republican Great Depression, and we’re roughly 80 years out from that right now as wealthy oligarchs have just seized all three branches of our government.
Turchin points out how, in back-to-back 40-year segments, the obscenely rich are brought to heel over four decades, but then rise up and take over again during the next forty years.Over and over again.
The cover of his book Ages of Discordprovides a graphic that visually explains his hypothesis, showing a red line for the accumulation of great wealth from 1780 to 2020 and working class wealth with the blue lines. Today, we’re about 40 years from Reagan’s counter-revolution against the New Deal, a program FDR put into place in 1933 that saved America and created the largest middle class the world had ever seen. (I’m radically simplifying both of these scholar’s works: I recommend you buy and read their books for more detail.)
In summary, Trump’s election was a reflection of the success of the anti-New Deal counter-revolution launched with the Reagan Revolution in 1981, in which America’s most wealthy essentially took control of our government.
Much of this was accomplished through a process of destroying unions, cutting taxes on the rich while borrowing from the future to fund them, and allowing corporations to search the world for the cheapest labor and least regulation (“free trade”). While it’s rarely mentioned in our increasingly-oligarch-captured media, they called this “neoliberalism” (as I detail in my new book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America).
FDR’s New Deal created massive prosperity for the American working class, lifting us from 15 percent of Americans being in the middle class in 1933 to two-thirds of us at that status when Reagan took office in 1981.(Today, we’re well below 50 percent.)
Because of forty years of success of FDR’s New Deal, a third of American workers had the protections of a union when Reagan took office, brand-spanking-new schools dotted the countryside, college was so cheap as to be virtually free, hospitals and health insurance companies were required to be nonprofit so healthcare was affordable, and housing supports meant that the cost of the average home was about twice the average annual income.
The main beneficiaries were my generation, the boomers, who came of age at the peak of the New Deal’s effects, before Reaganism bit hard into American workers starting in the 1980’s, stealing over $50 trillion of our wealth in just 44 years and handing it off to the oligarchs in the top .1 percent.
When my generation was in our 30s, we controlled about 21 percent of the nation’s wealth; today people in their thirties only control 4.6 percent of America’s wealth. Average home prices today are ten times average annual income today. College is unaffordable, as is healthcare.
Forty-four years of Reaganism, embraced by both parties until 2020, have wiped out the middle class while making the rich into the super-rich. When Reagan came to office, billionaires were a rarity (there were only 7 of them) and they were constrained by law from owning politicians or having an outsize influence in elections.
And then Republicans took over in 1981 and began their war on the American Dream.
In the most recent election — thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court with their Citizens United decision — several hundred American and foreign billionaires largely funded Trump’s campaign, massively outspending Democrats through PACs and dark money SuperPACS.
Peter Turchin identifies a three-step process that leads to revolutionary outcomes like the election of Trump this year: “popular immiseration, elite overproduction and state breakdown.”
First, the rich get control of the political system and change the tax code and regulatory state to gut worker income and organizing power, “immiserating” (impoverishing) the middle class.
We saw this with Reagan and Republicans on the Supreme Court dismantling union rights and workers’ power, followed by the passage of “Right To Work For Less” anti-union laws in state after Republican-controlled state.
The rich then redirect the government’s efforts away from supporting working class people to converting the wealth of the nation into their own coffers. The most obvious example of this are the “tax cuts” — cumulatively totaling over $35 trillion — put into place by Reagan, Bush, and Trump. Up next will be the programs supporting the middle class Elon wants to destroy with the enthusiastic support of his billionaire bros.
I put “tax cuts” in quotation marks, by the way, because they’re really not tax cuts: those taxes will eventually be paid. Just not by the people who should have paid them; they succeeded in pushing them out decades into the future with the assumption they’ll be paid for either by raising taxes on working people, cutting benefits to the middle class and poor, or both. Instead of “tax cuts,” we should rightly call them “tax deferrals” or “tax redistributions.”
Finally, as more and more of the nation’s wealth is stolen from the middle and transferred to the top one percent, the nation’s people lose confidence in the institutions that should have been defending, protecting, and supporting them. They see that no matter how they vote, no matter what they do, no matter how loud they protest, they’re still screwed and the morbidly rich are still getting richer every single day.
This leads to Turchin’s “state breakdown,” which we’ll be witnessing in real time starting on January 20th. Step-by-step, those parts of the state that work for and protect the middle class and poor are taken apart, while those parts that protect the rich (prisons, police, the military) are exalted.
Average working people know they’ve been screwed; they just don’t realize it’s the morbidly rich who did it to them unless there’s an outspoken class warrior like FDR or Harry Truman calling it out.
Thus, they vote for whoever they perceive as most likely to “shake things up,” “destroy the deep state,” or “make the country great again” by restoring the wealth of the middle class.
Sometimes we choose right, as Americans did in 1860 with the election of Lincoln, and in 1932 by choosing FDR. The country was on the brink of disaster with massive fascist movements growing during each era; Lincoln and FDR defeated them and saved our nation’s democracy.
This time, though, the billionaires had such a grip on the media and the message, much of it through their ownership of media (Xitter, Washington Post, LA Times, Fox “News,” massively subsidized podcasts, rightwing radio, etc.) and also with a tsunami of advertising cash that they convinced Americans that Trump — a billionaire rapist and convicted criminal who has promised to again cut taxes for his billionaire buddies — was the champion of the little guy.
As Trump, Vance, and Musk celebrated Thanksgiving, their toast had to include the word “suckers.”
The result of this choice, already being exultantly proclaimed by the Project 2025 authors coming into the new Trump administration, will be the further disintegration of government’s protective ability for working class people, turning it instead toward the wish-lists of billionaires and massive corporate monopolies and oligopolies.
This could become a death knell for American democracy.
As Turchin noted in The Guardian:
“One result of all this political dysfunction is an inability to agree on how the federal budget should be balanced. Together with the loss of trust and legitimacy, that accelerates the breakdown of state capacity. It’s notable that a collapse in state finances is often the triggering event for a revolution: this is what happened in France before 1789 and in the runup to the English civil war.”
The extreme irony here is that Joe Biden was actually the first president since Jimmy Carter to reject Reagan’s neoliberalism, walk a picket line, raise taxes on the rich, and start breaking up the giant corporate monopolies.
He was the counter-revolution to the Reagan Revolution. And he — and the Democrats who controlled Congress for his first two years — were damn effective at it.
The problem is that Biden, Harris, and particularly the DNC were so incompetent at messaging what they were accomplishing — and the billionaire media was so good at gaslighting us — that the majority of American voters believed the nation was in a recession and a full-blown state of crisis on election day.
This is now going to have to play out over the next two and four years, and the major thing that will determine if we enter complete state breakdown (and the associated possible bloody civil war) will be whether the Democratic Party rejects the neoliberals within its own ranks and makes a forceful argument for returning to the systems of the New Deal and Great Society that protected and enriched working class people.
If Democrats fail at this critical messaging as badly as they did over the past four years, our experiment in American democracy may well be doomed. This loss of trust in government followed by elite and then autocratic takeover is very much the scenario that played out, for example, in the early years of Putin’s ascendance in Russia. We can all see how that turned out.
If Democrats succeed at finding their voice, however, and Trump overreaches in ways that awaken the public and lead to a wholesale rejection of the GOP in 2026 and 2028, America may get the second chance we ultimately won during the past two 80-year cycles.
And the choice Democrats make for the leadership of their party — a person who will have substantial influence and power now that there’s no elected “leader” of the party in the White House, Senate, or House of Representatives — may well decide the fate of American democracy.
Ben Wikler could actually save our nation. He understands the cycles of history and is a master at communicating a progressive agenda without pandering or compromise. He should lead the Democratic Party.
Pass it along.