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Harris’s closing argument: whose side she’s on

We’re living in a second Gilded Age of extreme inequality. Trump is on the side of the ultra-wealthy who are rigging the system. Harris should make it clearer she’s on the people’s side.

Robert Reich Oct 15

Friends,

On October 5, at Donald Trump’s second rally of the 2024 election in Butler, Pennsylvania, he enthusiastically introduced Elon Musk, the richest person on the planet, who is plunking down hundreds of millions of dollars to help the former president win.

It is the perfect storm of an alliance — Musk’s desperate desire for more political power, and Trump’s equally desperate desire for more wealth and influence. And it symbolizes the true danger America faces on this cusp of the 2024 presidential election: the toxic mixture of huge wealth and enormous power.

Jumping up and down beside Trump, Musk urged the crowd to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” and then shouted: “President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution!” and he “must win to preserve democracy in America!”

The truth, of course, is precisely the reverse: Trump is the quintessential fascist, while Musk has established himself as the quintessential robber baron of America’s second Gilded Age.

In mid-August, during a conversation between Musk and Trump on Twitter/X, Trump praised Musk for firing workers who went on strike. “You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump said. “You walk in and say: ‘You want to quit?’ … They go on strike and you say: ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone.’” Musk responded, “Yeah,” and laughed.

Neither man has a shred of integrity; neither has an ounce of shame. Both are products of cruel fathers who seem to have left them without normal human capacities for empathy or compassion. Both have tried to mold America into their grotesque selves.

Musk has joked about why no one has tried to assassinate Vice President Kamala Harris. He posted to his 195 million followers on his X platform that Democrats are flying “asylum seekers” to swing states and fast-tracking them for citizenship (a lie) and that noncitizens can vote in federal or state elections (another lie). In the past week, Musk warned that if Kamala Harris wins in November this will be the “last election.” 

Both Musk and Trump have claimed without evidence that FEMA is deliberately withholding aid from Republican-leaning areas. The Washington Post reported late Sunday that federal emergency responders were ordered evacuated from Rutherford County, N.C., due to threats. An official with the U.S. Forest Service said the National Guard “had come across … trucks of armed militia saying they were out hunting FEMA.”

2.

More than a century ago, in America’s first Gilded Age, the idea that someone running for president would feature at a rally the richest person in the country, let alone the world, would have been absurd. At that time, even Republican candidates sought to distance themselves from the robber barons.

Kamala Harris is waging a strong campaign, but it could be stronger if her closing argument in the remaining weeks of the campaign alerted Americans to the growing dangers of concentrated wealth and power at the top, and to her commitment to reversing this trend.

This would be well-received. As in the first Gilded Age, the most powerful force in American politics today is anti-establishment fury at a rigged system. But Trump, Musk, JD Vance, Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, and others who are out to destroy American democracy are channeling that fury into hate toward “them” — immigrants, liberals, FEMA workers, “socialists,” “communists,” “coastal elites,” the “deep state,” women, and transgender people.

During that first Gilded Age, millions of Americans saw vividly how wealth and power at the top were undermining American democracy and stacking the economic deck — as they’re doing today. Economic populism burst onto America like a political storm.

In 1910, Teddy Roosevelt thundered his warning that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power” could destroy U.S. democracy. Roosevelt’s answer was to tax wealth. The estate tax was eventually enacted in 1916, and the capital gains tax in 1922.

In the 1912 presidential campaign, Woodrow Wilson promised “a crusade against powers that have governed us … that have limited our development … that have determined our lives … that have set us in a straitjacket to do as they please.” The struggle to break up the giant trusts would be, in Wilson’s words, a “second struggle for emancipation.”

Wilson signed into law the Clayton Antitrust Act, which strengthened antitrust laws and protected unions. He also established the Federal Trade Commission to root out “unfair acts and practices in commerce” and created the first permanent national income tax.

Years later, Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, attacked corporate and financial power by giving workers the right to unionize, the 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, and social security. FDR instituted a high marginal income tax on the wealthy — those making more than $5 million a year were taxed up to 75 percent — and he regulated finance.

Accepting renomination for president in 1936, FDR warned the nation against the “economic royalists” who had pressed the whole of society into service. On the eve of his 1936 reelection, he told the American people that big business and finance were determined to unseat him: “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

3.

But after World War II, the Democratic Party gave up economic populism. Gone from their presidential campaigns were tales of greedy businessmen, unscrupulous financiers, and monopolistic corporations.

There no longer seemed any need. Postwar prosperity had created the largest middle class in the history of the world and reduced the gap between rich and poor. By the mid-1950s, a third of all private-sector employees were unionized, and blue-collar workers were receiving generous wage and benefit increases regularly.

Keynesianism had become a widely accepted antidote to economic downturns — substituting the management of aggregate demand for class antagonism. Even Richard Nixon purportedly claimed: “We’re all Keynesians now.”

There was a second reason for the Democrats’ increasing unease with populism. The civil rights struggle and the Vietnam War had spawned an anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian New Left that distrusted government as much if not more than it distrusted Wall Street and big business.

The New Left viewed the war as a symbol of all that was rotten in the U.S., including the Democratic establishment that waged it. The Democratic establishment viewed the anti-war New Left as entitled children who obsessed about personal expression and idealism rather than labor activism and the alleviation of poverty.

That split was dramatically revealed during the violent protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The split lived on: A half-century later, it could be seen in Bernie Sanders’s candidacy in the 2016 primaries and the struggle within the Democratic Party between his populists and Hillary Clinton’s mainstream Democrats.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, embraced cultural populism. In Ronald Reagan’s view, Washington insiders and arrogant bureaucrats stifled the economy and hobbled individual achievement. Cultural elites coddled the poor, including “welfare queens,” Reagan’s racist dog whistle.

Reagan’s cultural critique took hold of the GOP. In the 2004 presidential election, Republicans portrayed Democrats as an effete group of “latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing [and] Hollywood-loving” people out of touch with the real America.

By the 2020s, Republicans saw the culture wars as the central struggle of American public life.

Republican cultural populism is bogus. The biggest change over the last four decades — the change lurking behind the mounting insecurities and resentments of the working middle class — has nothing to do with immigrants, Democrats, liberals, “socialists,” “communists,” coastal elites, women, transgender people, or any other Republican cultural bogeymen.

The biggest change over the last four decades — the change that has undermined the working middle class and corrupted American democracy — is the giant upward shift in the distribution of wealth and power that began in earnest under Reagan.

4.

Class has become the most important driver of American politics — larger even than race or ethnicity (look no further than the recent movement toward Trump of Black and Latino voters without college degrees).

Yet — with the notable exceptions of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Bob Casey, Jeff Merkley, and Sherrod Brown — most Democratic officials have been reluctant to embrace economic populism and criticize the increasing concentration of wealth and power at the top.

Hence, Republicans’ fake cultural populism has become dominant by default.

Democrats haven’t embraced economic populism because for too long they’ve drunk from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans — big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.

“Business has to deal with us whether they like it or not … We’re the majority,” crowed the Democratic representative Tony Coelho, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1980s when Democrats assumed they’d continue to run the House for years. Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but it proved a Faustian bargain.

Now, even as Trump pretends to be the “voice” of working Americans, he boasts the support of many of the richest right-wingers in America (including the wealthiest man in the world, who’s viciously anti-union).

Harris is waging a good campaign, and I’m not going to criticize her strategic decisions to propose a lower increase in the capital gains tax rate than Biden had in his budget or to allow billionaires like Mark Cuban to act as her surrogates even while they openly push Harris to replace FTC chairwoman Lina Khan.

But in these last weeks of her campaign, I would strongly encourage Harris to loudly and clearly condemn how ultra-wealthy individuals — starting with Elon Musk — and the giant corporations they own and run are undermining and corrupting America.

As she closes her campaign, Kamala Harris should be absolutely clear about whose side she’s on — the side of the people, not the wealthy and powerful.