Only Socialism Can Fix This (Gestures to The American Hellscape)

We can't just rebuild what Musk & Trump broke — we must protect it.

The most charitable interpretation of the Democrats’ plan to oppose Trump goes something like this:

1. Limit opposition to the minimum.

2. Let Trump 2.0 run its course.

3. Sometime between the invasion of Panama, Canada, and Greenland, Americans will tire of Trump and vote them back into power.

Putting aside how the lack of opposition allows Trump to damage essential institutions and vulnerable communities, this strategy is doomed to fail. Not only is there no guarantee Americans will return to the Democrats’ focus-group-approved neoliberalism, but the absolute best-case scenario for this plan is… what, exactly? If they can get Mayor Pete, Gavin Newsom, or a different progressive-sounding-but-not-frightening-to-White-voters candidate into the White House, they can repair some of Trump’s destruction, pass a few bills of their own, and halt Steve Bannon’s agenda for a decade (at most).

But until the force behind the populist-LARPing right-wing movement we know as MAGA is ended, whatever this Musk-Trump-Rogan thing your weird stepbrother is obsessed with will return. Maybe it will come back in 2032 under J.D. Vance. Or maybe in 2036, Elon Musk will toss his hat into the Presidential ring, having bought so many politicians that the native brith requirement was discarded quicker than publicly-funded cancer research. Or, maybe through some miracle, the Democrats dominate the next quarter-century, and we don’t have another Groyper In Chief for decades.

Regardless of how many elections socially progressive, centrist neoliberals win in the rest of my lifetime, as long as they remain within the approved ideological structure of the Democratic National Committee, the destruction, oligarchy, and chaos America is currently enduring will return. 100% guaranteed. How can I know this? Well, because it’s happened before.

America is not living in the birth of naked oligarchy — we’re witnessing its comeback.

“Bosses of the Senate,” published in 1889, looks much like Trump’s second inauguration.

A New Deal Or A Different Deal?

Back in the 1930s, as it will always do, capitalism busted. I won’t recall the details of the Great Depression, as I’m sure you remember the gist from history class — greedy industrialists, the Dow Jones falling by 25% on Black Tuesday,¹ bank runs, bread lines, mangy dogs, etc. etc.

No notes.

Amidst the crisis, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted the New Deal, a sweeping package of business regulations, workers’ protections, social programs, and other policies designed to civilize capitalism by softening its worst characteristics. While the New Deal is undoubtedly the second-best domestic policy package in American history (short-lived Reconstruction takes the cake in my book), it was not intended to replace capitalism but to save it from itself.

With zeroed-out bank accounts and empty stomachs, the Great Depression inspired Americans towards radical change. Unionization grew exponentially during the 1930s, while membership in the Communist Party USA tripled. The Congress of Industrial Organizations, the “CIO” in the modern AFL-CIO, was formed in 1935 and, for the first time, organized Black workers en masse.² Strike waves swept the country, with 1,700 in 1933 and 1,856 in 1934.³ For comparison, there were 350 strikes in 2024, which is considered high by modern standards.⁴ The Great Depression sourced a real, genuine appetite for a worker-controlled economic system amongst the American people. The New Deal tempered this enthusiasm by giving them a bigger slice of the capitalist pie. In doing so, it preserved capital — privately owned wealth and means of production — as a force in the American economy. Fed, housed, and promised a long, comfortable life through Social Security, Americans quieted their calls for revolution. The New Deal saved capitalism, and the capitalists never forgave FDR for doing so. Ever-greedy, the industrialists didn’t like that the people could control their profiteering through democratic elections. So, they tried to overthrow FDR and install a fascist dictator in what is known as “The Business Plot.” Fortunately, they failed. But the quest to end the New Deal continued through more subtle means.

Retired U.S. Marine General Smedley Butler exposed the Business Plot after the conspirators approached him to become America’s dictator.

I don’t mean to downplay the New Deal’s benefits. Social Security keeps elderly Americans alive and housed. Labor movements struggled for centuries for a seat at the table, and the National Labor Relations Board was a remarkable instrument of worker power that could hold bosses to account. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 separated investment from commercial banking and created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). This curbed risky investments, decreased the chance a crash in one sector would spread throughout the economy, and required banks to keep higher percentages of customers’ investments on hand to prevent the notorious bank runs that followed the stock market crash of Black Tuesday. These are all Very Good Things, and we should fight to protect them with the same intensity as those who fought to establish them.

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For a long time, the New Deal package worked well, socially, economically, and politically. The safety net policies fostered the Great Compression, the thirty-year period beginning in the 1940s that saw the most equitable wealth distribution in American history. Democrats held the White House for 61% of the rest of the century, and the New Deal coalition remained intact until the 1980s. But as time passed, the memory of the Great Depression’s misery faded, and along with it went the understanding of why capital needed to be restrained. Seeing its chance, capital went on the offensive with the birth of modern conservatism, which united Northern Rockefeller Republicans and Southern segregationists into the modern Republican Party. By employing racism, anti-communism, yelling at feminists, and giving people an excuse to pretend their personal shittines was just “politics” capital rolled back the very protections and programs FDR had implemented to protect private property and profit from revolutionary tendencies. Why? Because those policies limited profits, of course.

The wealth distribution of the richest Americans. The 1940-1980 period, in which they held the least wealth, is the Great Compression.

In 1999, the Financial Services Modernization Act passed Congress, repealing the New Deal era Glass-Steagall Act. The new act removed the barriers stopping banks from acting as both investment and commercial banks, which had contributed to the 1929 stock market crash. The Representatives who sponsored the repeal, Phil Gramm of Texas, Jim Leach of Iowa, and Thomas Bliley of Virginia, were all backed by Wall Street.⁵ So was the Democratic President who signed the repeal, Bill Clinton.⁶ But not everyone was for sale. Amidst the passage, Senator Byron Dorgan warned about the dangers of repealing Glass-Steagall:

“I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this, but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past. And that which is true in the 1930s is true in 2010.”

Dorgan was too optimistic. Nine years later, the re-allowed crossover between investment and commercial banks contributed greatly to the 2008 financial crash. When the housing bubble burst, investment portfolios took a big hit. While Glass-Steagall was a critical regulation restricting capital’s worst tendencies that protected the American economy for seventy years, because the New Deal didn’t have a plan to end capital’s influence, the restriction was eventually repealed. We see the same dynamic play out with Trump’s Administration today.

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The aforementioned National Labor Relations Board, which I can personally attest helps workers unionize, stay safe, and respected on the job, is capital’s next target. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are currently suing the NLRB for being “unconstitutional,” a term which means “I don’t like it and want it to go away.”⁷ While time will tell where the case will go, Donald Trump, who owes his second presidency to Musk and other billionaire donors, has effectively killed the NLRB for them. On his first week in office, Trump illegally fired NLRB board members, shrinking the board to two. Without a quorum, the Board cannot hear cases brought by aggrieved workers, a gift to capitalists who seek to ignore every labor protection on the books.⁸

Gwynne Wilcox, Jennifer Abruzzo, and Jessica Rutter, the three illegally-fired NLRB board members.

Despite the well-intentions of FDR and every other labor-conscious politician who has supported New Deal programs over the years, because they refused to challenge the capitalist system that gives one sect of society exorbitant power over the rest of us, New Deal protections were always going to end. Until capital is removed from private hands and democratically controlled, every government institution that does not serve the interests of capital has a shelf life — public schools, Medicare, Social Security, cancer research, and everything else we enjoy will eventually be destroyed.

Let me guess. Americans will die.

Not only is there no guarantee Democrats will win back political control and restore New Deal and other pro-worker programs (many of their wealthy donors despise these programs, too), but there is absolutely nothing — nothing — from stopping capitalists from trying to end them again. If we do not have a plan to end the system that gives these parasites unlimited money and power, they will come back for whatever rights and entitlements the American people have — again, and again, and again.

We can re-institute the New Deal. We can pass the Green New Deal. There could even be a set of laws explicitly outlawing what Trump, Musk, and the GOP are doing right now. However, many of their acts are already illegal, and they’re doing it anyway. How can this be? Because they have power. Power that is generated by a childish economic system that gives them the fruits of another’s work. As long as capitalism exists, so will the power imbalance, and so will capital’s urge to destroy what good we have built.

As long as our economy looks like this, we’ll continue getting different versions of Trump.

I’m sure some people reading this are not fully convinced of the need for socialism. Perhaps you’re of the mind that a social democratic platform of Medicare for All, free public college, and increased welfare are enough to cut fascism off at the knees. Such policies certainly would undercut reactionary politics, and I’ll fight for them until the day I die. But if we limit our struggle to only creating these programs and not planning to protect them by dismantling our adversaries’ primary weapon, anything we build will perpetually be under threat from capitalist-backed politicians who have more money and influence than the people ever will. Until we bring workplaces, the economy, and the country under democratic control and end the system in which the few have a lot and the many have little, dumb guys like Musk will always have the power to end Medicare and fire air traffic controllers for being Black DEI hires.

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In Solidarity — Joe

1. https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/stock-market-crash-of-1929

2. https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0113/the-history-of-unions-in-the-united-states.aspx

3. https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/labor-upheaval-industrial-organization-and-the-rise-of-the-cio

4. https://www.employmentlawworldview.com/union-strike-activity-surged-in-2023-more-of-the-same-in-2024/

5. https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/phil-gramm/summary?cid=N00005709

6. https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/the-clintons-and-wall-street-24-years-of-enriching-each-other/

7. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/18/nx-s1-5192918/spacex-amazon-nlrb-labor-board-elon-musk

8. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/trump-nlrb-firing-musk-doge-workers-rights-labor-unions-paralyze/