Why I'm demonstrating today

Friends,

Someone asked me this morning what we’re demonstrating for today. “I know what you’re demonstrating against — Donald Trump — but is there a positive purpose, too?”

Here’s what I told him.

Ending the reign of King Trump isn’t the sole goal of today’s demonstrations. The purpose is much larger than that.

Trump himself is not the cause of the growing cynicism about democracy and the deepening polarization of our society.

He’s the consequence and culmination of decades of neglect of our system. Even before Trump, we could not have remained on the road we were on toward ever-widening inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity.

That’s because when income, wealth, and opportunity are concentrated in few hands, so is power. And when power is concentrated in a few hands, trust in all institutions declines. Democracy withers.

In 1964, when I was in my formative years, only 29 percent of voters thought government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.” By 2013 — years before Trump emerged in American politics — 79 percent of Americans thought so.

A large portion of the American public has become so frustrated and cynical about democracy that they have believed the blatant lies of a self-described strongman and supported a political party that no longer stands for democracy.

If there’s a silver lining to this darkening cloud, it is that Trump is finally forcing us to confront this long-term crisis.

Decades ago, America’s monied interests bankrolled a Republican establishment that believed in fiscal conservatism, anti-communism and constitutional democracy.

That former generation of wealthy conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater, who wanted to conserve American institutions.

Today’s billionaire class is pushing a radically anti-democratic agenda for America. It backed Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, bankrolled his 2024 election, and is even questioning the value of democracy.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech financier who is among those leading the charge, once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Thiel and his fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve much of anything – at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, which includes Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote. As Thiel wrote:

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

Rubbish. If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Thiel have been drowning democracy in giant campaign donations to authoritarian candidates who want to disempower the people.

Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the First Gilded Age, when America’s rich ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.

When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression.

It was also the decade when Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.

America and the world should have learned one big lesson from the First Gilded Age and the fascism that began growing like a cancer in the 1920s:

Gross inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity fuel the gross inequalities of political power that lead to strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.

We are now in America’s Second Gilded Age. The only way to guard what is left of our freedom is to confront today’s anti-democracy movement with a bold pro-democracy movement that protects and revives the institutions of self-government.

A pro-democracy movement dedicated to not just to standing up against authoritarian strongmen like Trump and against big money like Peter Thiel’s, but to empowering all Americans, politically and economically.

That’s why I’m demonstrating today.