It’s even worse than I’d imagined.
Trump's been “flooding the zone” with so many outrageous (and often illegal) initiatives that many people are overwhelmed, demoralized, and just plain freaked out.
That’s the intent.
This morning, a woman I didn’t know was about to pass me on the sidewalk and then stopped, turned toward me, and almost shouted, “It’s a f------ nightmare!”
Well, it is a “f------ nightmare” and unfortunately there’s nothing anyone can do right now to legally stop it (unless you’re a federal judge).
For now, we can and should do everything possible to protect people who are most vulnerable to the nightmare.
But allow me to take a longer-term view.
A “f------ nightmare” is not all bad if it awakens America.
Remember how Martin Luther King Jr. mobilized the nation against racial injustice? He let everyone see its horrors. On television. Night after night. Peaceful Black people getting clubbed and arrested for exercising their rights.
Were it not for that painful national exposure to racist brutality, we wouldn’t have gotten the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act.
Something similar happened in the first years of the twentieth century when muckraking journalists revealed the giant monopolies, corruption, and public harms of the robber barons.
Were it not for that painful national exposure, we wouldn’t have gotten the reforms of the Progressive Era.
I believe a similar dynamic will play out as Americans witness the nightmare of Trump’s neofascism.
When we see and absorb its horrors, there will be mass outrage, and we will mobilize against it. Not all of us, of course, but the great majority.
We had to come to this point. We couldn’t go on as we were, even under Democratic presidents. For forty years, a narrow economic elite has been siphoning ever more wealth and power for themselves.
I’m old enough to remember when America had the largest and fastest-growing middle class in the world. We adhered to the basic bargain that if someone worked hard and played by the rules, they’d do better than their parents had, and their children would do even better than they.
I remember when CEOs took home 20 times the pay of their workers, not 300 times. When members of Congress acted in the interests of their constituents rather than be bribed by campaign donations to do the bidding of big corporations and the super-wealthy.
I remember when our biggest domestic challenges were civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights — not the very survival of democracy and the rule of law.
But over the last forty years, starting with Reagan, America went off the rails. Deregulation, privatization, free trade, wild gambling by Wall Street, union-busting, record levels of inequality, stagnant wages for most, staggering wealth for a few, big money taking over our politics,
Corporate profits became more important than good jobs and good wages for all. Stock buybacks and the well-being of investors became more important than the common good.
Democratic presidents were better than Republican, to be sure, but the underlying rot continued to worsen. It was undermining the foundations of America.
The Trump regime will harm many innocent people. It already has. Its lawless cruelty is sickening — as is the cowardice of so many CEOs, Wall Street bankers, leading lawyers, university presidents, publishers, social media titans, Republican politicians, some Democratic politicians, and other so-called “leaders” who are staying mum or obeying in advance or sucking up to Trump.
There will be a reckoning.
As bad as this “f------ nightmare” gets, it will awaken Americans to the truth about what has happened to this country — and what we must do to get it back on the track toward social justice, democracy, and widespread prosperity.
That’s what I believe. That’s my faith as we slide into deepening darkness.
Be well. Be safe. We will prevail.
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Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.