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While the votes are still being counted and no official results have been announced, it is all but certain that Donald Trump has won the US presidential election. This not so much a victory for Trump as it is a debacle for the Democratic Party.
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Associate Professor of English, University of Michigan-Flint. I research and teach rhetoric and writing.
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By refusing to budge on Palestine, Harris and the Democrats surrendered their moral advantage, forcing them to track right and alienate their base.
The contours and consequences of a second-term foreign policy.
Michigan
I learned how to read by reading Baltimore Orioles game recaps in the sports section of the Washington Post. I remember sitting on our couch as my dad pointed to words like “Cal Ripken” and “Mike Mussina” and “baseball” and “Orioles,” which, at first, I wasn’t exactly reading but was guessing from memory because we had watched part of the game on TV or because, even then, I knew the names of a lot of the players from baseball cards my dad had bought me. This is one of my first memories. I was not in school yet and was probably three years old.
When people ask me why I became a journalist, for a long time I didn’t really have an answer. “I didn’t want to sit in an office all day,” I would often say, even though that is exactly what I have mostly ended up doing. I do not know why it didn’t occur to me until after I had become a journalist that one of the main reasons I went into this line of work is because my dad spent 30 years working at the Washington Post, is very proud of that fact, and brought the newspaper—and very dirty, ink-stained clothes—home every day. My dad worked in the press room, first working overnight running the gigantic, four-story machines that printed millions of papers every day. Later in his career, he did maintenance on the presses, working from 4 AM until noon. I was talking about this with a friend the other day, and it occurred to me that I am not really sure when he slept. One time, a gigantic printing press roller fell on his head and caused a herniated disc, which he needed surgery for.
On historic days—presidential elections sometimes, but mostly when DC won the Super Bowl and Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak, he brought home the metal “plates” used to print the newspaper. He taught himself how to mat and frame these, hung them up on the walls of our house, and sometimes gave them away to friends and family. He told me stories about how Donald Graham—the then CEO of The Washington Post and son of the legendary Katharine Graham of Pentagon Papers/Ben Bradlee fame—would sometimes come to the printing plant and tell them that they were doing a good job. He was proud that Graham seemed to know his name. He worked on Christmas and Easter and the Fourth of July and when there were blizzards and one time got stuck in traffic in the middle of the night because the circus was in town and elephants were crossing the road. He went back into work on 9/11 to help run a special afternoon edition of the paper. I do not think he has been late for anything in his life, which I assume is a result of working for decades at a place where the newspaper must come out every day, without fail, no excuses, and where the printing presses needed to work always in order to hit the Post’s circulation numbers.
The current owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men and the current ‘Adult in the Room’ recently made what he described as a brave and shrewd business decision to win back reader trust. This calculated business decision has, famously, made 10 percent of the Washington Post’s annual revenue evaporate overnight and has led 250,000 people and counting to trust The Washington Post so much that they canceled their subscriptions.
Much has been written about Bezos’s decision to kill the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, and about his unfathomably stupid and farcical op-ed defending that decision, in which he writes “I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened,” seemingly unaware of why he was writing this op-ed in the first place.
The aftermath of this disaster has led many of the Post’s reporters, who do good and valuable work (including brave work on the actions of their owner), to understandably ask people not to cancel their subscriptions, or to suggest that people cancel their Amazon Prime subscriptions instead, because if the Post is not profitable, they may lose the resources to do their jobs. I don’t wish for anyone to lose their jobs and I want the Washington Post to continue to exist. I want the talented journalists who work there to be able to continue to do their work, whether it is at the Post or elsewhere.
But the truth is that Jeff Bezos is a man who has made his wealth by extracting an unfathomable amount of value from his employees and by running ruthless workplaces. At Amazon corporate, in Amazon warehouses, and in Amazon delivery vans. He has amassed so much wealth that 250,000 people or 2.5 million people canceling their subscriptions to anything he owns is not even a rounding error. If he wanted to, Jeff Bezos could keep the Washington Post in operation indefinitely with zero subscribers, forever. The Post is not making a profit right now and it exists at the moment in the way that it exists because Jeff Bezos can afford to take a loss on his Washington Post side project without batting an eye and currently feels like doing so.
We have seen over and over and over what happens when billionaires decide to exert their will on the prestige publications they decided to buy on a lark, and we have seen what happens when they lose interest in their side projects. It is never good for the people doing the work there.
When I became a journalist, I thought that I wanted to work for The Washington Post, just like my dad. Then I went to work for VICE, and made working at VICE part of my identity. I wanted the company to succeed so badly because I believed in what we were doing and I believed in the institution. I worked zillions of hours of unpaid overtime, took on side projects, canceled vacations to do work, worked on vacations, and made incredibly hard decisions, thinking that, if I did my job well enough, the company would succeed and we would get to keep doing what we were doing. I spent the vast majority of that time doing work that made money for an over-bloated apparatus that existed to make a bunch of middle managers and executives large salaries and bonuses and to benefit a founder who is now retroactively denigrating our work in an attempt to cling to whatever relevancy he can find by catering to conspiracy theorists and the right.
My dad worked first in southeast DC, then in the brand new, massive printing press in College Park, Maryland near our home. When that shiny printing press shut down because circulation diminished after the internet became a thing, he worked for a few years in Springfield, Virginia. Growing up, a huge part of the mental conception of my dad and who he is was “he prints The Washington Post.” And then, one day, he didn’t work there at all. My dad took one of the many, many rounds of buyouts that hit The Washington Post, and now he works somewhere else. He doesn’t talk about the Post now much at all.
My dad worked at the Washington Post for 30 years. It was important to him. And then he didn’t work there anymore. And now it’s not. VICE was very important to me. And then I didn’t work there anymore. And now it’s not.
It has been very easy for me, mentally, to leave behind a place where I made money for a Board of Directors who made decisions about my life and my work without thinking about me or my team as human beings, who got paid much more than me, and who are showing at the moment that they do not actually care about journalism at all.
The Washington Post is probably not going anywhere and on some level we need large journalistic institutions to continue to exist. But even well-run large outlets are surely full of waste and bloat that are funded on the backs of and at the expense of the actual journalism. The “wealth and business interests” of billionaire owners, as Bezos writes, are not a “bulwark against intimidation” for journalism. They are, themselves, the biggest threat.
404 Media is barely a year old and we employ four people. You cannot compare our business or what we have done to the Washington Post. As our friend Molly White explained last week, “Just Go Independent” sounds good in theory, but it is not necessarily easy. Doing high quality, investigative journalism is hard, and it is expensive. But it’s not that expensive, and the infrastructure to do it on the internet is getting cheaper and easier to pull off. Printing presses, middle managers, fancy offices, and executive salaries are the expensive things, and they are unnecessary.
Still, it’s unclear whether “Just Go Independent” is a sustainable career path for the number of journalists who we need to have a functioning society. But I do know that relying on the passing interest of billionaires to keep journalism alive is not sustainable. And I know that 250,000 subscribers could fund a lot of independent journalists.
"Still, it’s unclear whether “Just Go Independent” is a sustainable career path for the number of journalists who we need to have a functioning society. But I do know that relying on the passing interest of billionaires to keep journalism alive is not sustainable. And I know that 250,000 subscribers could fund a lot of independent journalists."
Berlin/Germany
Until the world is perfect, people will have rage. Who should they be mad at? Fascists will tell you to be mad at immigrants and brown people and gay people and poor people. It is not enough to just say, “don’t do that.” You have to tell people who they should be mad at instead: rich people.
Making America’s political atmosphere healthier depends on the task of getting people to stop despising scapegoats and to start despising rich people. Is “rich people” a precise enough term to describe the genuine villains at the heart of our nation’s problems? Perhaps not. But it’s close enough.
No political movement or party can hope to seize the public’s imagination and channel the public’s energy without being able to clearly tell the public who is to blame for their problems. Right wing zealots have never have a hard time understanding this. Who is to blame for the fact that the America that you live in does not match the America of your imagination? Immigrants are to blame! Black people are to blame! Dirty Muslims are to blame! Weird trans people are to blame! Mexicans speaking an inscrutable language are to blame! Criminals, inclusive of all the preceding groups, are to blame! Purge your beautiful nation of these rogues and the perfect America of your imagination will finally bloom—with you in the driver’s seat!
This message is a poisonous stew of lies. But that is not a political liability. It is a message that offers plain answers to hard questions. It is easy to understand. It soothes inflamed souls by pinning the crimes of modern capitalism on the perfect culprit: People different than you. Since you already didn’t care for those people too much, assuming that they are the root of all your woes is seductively plausible.
Clarity of lies should be countered by clarity of truth. Who is to blame for the fact that the America that you live in does not match the America promised to us all—the great land of hope and opportunity and equality and justice for all? Rich people are to blame. Why are rich people to blame? Because rich people, as a group, represent the beneficiaries and biggest defenders of the system of American capitalism that is ultimately responsible for producing the state of affairs that has robbed you of the ability to live a free and happy life. America is a wealthy nation. So why aren’t you wealthy? Because rich people take all the wealth for themselves. America has the resources to create a system that takes care of all of us. So why don’t we have such a system? Because rich people prefer a system that exploits most of us, in return for making rich people richer.
That’s a fact. You can spend a lifetime studying the intricacies of the economics and history and psychological motivations and sociology of this state of affairs, but if you boil it down to the idea “Rich people are the villains of America,” you are going to be on the right track. If a political message is meant to usher the public through a door that leads to deeper exploration of all of these wonderful details, then “Fuck rich people” is a healthy message, and one that—if delivered with sufficient energy—is robust to any attempts to debunk it. Nitpicking exceptionalism is nothing in the face of deep truths. We need not fear the well-funded public relations backlash to this message, any more than the fascists do to their own. When Donald Trump made his famous remark that Mexicans are “rapists,” he made sure to add, “And some, I assume, are good people.”
I’m sure many rich people are very nice folks. Unfortunately, they are responsible for all of this nation’s problems.
Not to fear. Whereas the solutions to the fascist set of villains demand horrifying mass deportations and military-style oppression and the imprisonment of an ever-expanding set of undesirables, the solution to “Rich people are the villains” is much more humane. We simply make rich people less rich. As a bonus, all of you will get richer, in the process. Terrific! Instead of concentrating our nation’s ample resources in a few hands, let’s spread those resources around to everyone who needs them. (The rich people will still be left with plenty!) Does this sound so bad? No. It actually sounds quite nice. This is socialism. The path to achieving it begins with the simple explanation that rich people are at the root of our problems.
The class war is a reality. It is an ongoing process in the real world that constantly affects our lives. American capitalism is a system in which the forces of capital forever try to strengthen their own economic and political position, and the result of their success if that everyone else finds themselves in a diminished economic and political position. Politicians can either acknowledge this and take a position on it or they can try to deny it, but either way, the class war continues on. Some politicians say, “Hey, we should probably draw a line that limits how powerful and wealthy rich people and corporations can get, since we don’t want to live in a dystopia,” and some politicians say “All wealth is created by our beloved rich people and businesses and we must not stand in their way.” Some politicians avoid the entire issue by saying “Look at all those immigrants!” and some politicians avoid the entire issue by saying “What we need is civility and hope,” and in both of those cases the rich win the class war by default. It takes energetic political action to place limits on capitalism. In the absence of that energetic political action, there is only capitalism’s logic, which is the ruthless and ceaseless accumulation of wealth in fewer hands. Those hands are the hands of the rich. You can see why it might behoove us to pay attention to them.
MAGA-style fascism benefits the rich but it is also crucial to point out that neoliberalism, the status quo prior to Trump’s rise, also benefited the rich. The status quo in general benefits the rich. Having more comity between Democrats and Republicans, having Congressional baseball games where members come together across the aisle, having John McCain as the moral soul of the Republican Party—none of this matters much in terms of the class war. In fact the reason why it was so easy for a monster like Trump to slide into the king’s throne is that the political landscape had been so polluted with insincerity for so long that the “norms” that Trump shattered were already hollow and brittle. Most people expect that they will get bullshit from political leaders, and they are not disappointed. This is not an atmosphere conducive to generating high-minded outrage about the decline of Our Venerable Democracy.
The Democrats are trembling over the apparent migration of working class voters into the Republican Party. The labor unions that they have allowed to decline for decades no longer seem sufficient to corral voters into their corner. Is there any doubt that the cravenness, the meekness, the empty sloganeering of the Democrats themselves for the past 15 years is to blame? The Republicans do not offer working people a genuine ally, but they do offer them an enemy. The Democrats offer them a mush of mixed messages, a bunch of technocratic pablum, an offer to join hands with Hollywood millionaires and Silicon Valley billionaires to come together in a united front against… something. “Let’s not be crude” seems to be the Democrats’ overriding pitch against Donald Trump. Not as catch, I’m afraid, as “Fuck the rich.”
Do not tell voters that Trump is rude and boorish and impolite. Tell them that Donald Trump is the motherfucking problem. This silver spoon billionaire motherfucker wants to take away your health care! This skyscraper-living motherfucker wants to take away your retirement! This spray-tanned greedy motherfucker wants to raise your taxes to give his greaseball rich buddies a tax cut! This soft-handed hand sanitizer grasping motherfucker wants to talk shit about people who actually work for a living! This scumbag con man overpriced steak-selling motherfucker wants to keep you overworked and underpaid and sick while he rides around on his ugly ass private jet with some of America’s biggest assholes kissing his ass the whole time! He wants you to have less so he can have more—more money, more power, more fucking meatloaf to shove in his fat fucking pink lips while he rides around on his little golf cart.
Piece of shit rich motherfucker.
Economically speaking, the rich and their interests are the underlying cause of our drastic crisis of inequality. Politically speaking, the rich and their interests have captured our government and our laws and twisted them to serve those who have the most. Plainly speaking, the rich are the problem. Want a villain? Don’t look at Mexico. Don’t look at people who came to this country for a better life, just like your ancestors did. Don’t look at poor people who never had a fair chance, or at people different from you in some superficial way. Look right up at the rich people who have too much and keep taking more and fix the whole world so that nothing can ever change that.
Rich people are the enemy. Say it! Live it! If you consider that message to be too harsh, I invite you very politely to wake the fuck up. The message coming from the other side is more evil, more damaging, and less true. It’s time to be honest. And if we end up making rich people feel demonized, well, that is a step in the right direction.
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Related reading: Who Is Your Enemy, My Brother?; Your Money Is On The Table; We Have a Distribution Problem.
If you are interested in class war and how it might be won rather than lost, you might enjoy my book about the labor movement. It’s called “The Hammer” and it is available for order wherever books are sold. If you’re in NYC, you can hear me speak about it at the NY Society for Ethical Culture on Sunday, November 3 at 11 a.m.
Are you dissatisfied with “the media,” this election year? Yeah, me too! The publication you are reading, How Things Work, is pure and uncut independent media. I started this site because the traditional journalism industry is falling apart, and yet I still want to keep saying stuff, and also the New York Times does not allow cuss words. So here we are. The only thing that enables me to do this work is the financial support of you, the readers. If you have been reading this site for free, I love you and that is great, but if you can afford to, please take a moment right now and become a paid subscriber. It’s affordable and it keeps the lights on here and if we all just give a little support to independent media, then it will continue to exist. Thank you all for reading, my friends.
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