Yanis Varoufakis at Project Syndicate:
Following the 2008 financial collapse, US capitalism changed forever. While the banks were bailed out, more and more workers with secure, high-quality employment found themselves among the “untouchables” scrounging for a living in short-term, low-paid, dead-end jobs. Whereas Reagan and the Bushes won elections because secure proletarians voted for them and untouchables were too disheartened to vote at all, Trump won by rallying the untouchables, who now included a growing number of hitherto secure proletarians.
Against the backdrop of Bill (and Hillary) Clinton’s open romancing of Wall Street, Barack Obama’s banker bailouts, and Joe Biden’s suicidal strategy of telling struggling people that the Democrats had delivered an “excellent” economy, Trump tapped into working-class rage. All it took to attract voters the Democrats had long since abandoned were some incoherent musings about a “broken” country and the “carnage” that feckless, self-interested elites had inflicted on people like them.
Democrats hope and pray that when the pain from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill begins to bite, workers will desert him.
More here.
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