It Really Is This Simple

I was listening to Pod Save the UK yesterday (this podcast is produced by Crooked Media, the same company that does Pod Save America and Pod Save the World) and something the hosts said struck me as profoundly true about American society – although they were talking about Britain when they said it. They said (I’m paraphrasing) that the right wing in British politics has convinced Brits that all of the problems in British society are caused by immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, and they lamented that the progressive wing doesn’t seem to have a coherent message.

I thought that this might apply to the United States as well, with some adjustments. The current Republican president and his lackeys throughout government and across the country are convinced that the problems America faces are caused by anyone who is not white, male, and born in the United States. This is a little broader than the point made by the UK folks, but it is similar. Any time a brown person, woman, or immigrant is in a position of power or significance, it is seen as prima facie evidence that the position was illegally taken away from a white native-born man. I know we’re not supposed to use someone’s own words against them these days, but here ya go.

This led me to think – how can progressives in the United States define the problem facing the country, in simple (even bumper sticker style) terms, and how can this problem be solved?

The answer, I think, is obvious. The problem the United States faces is wealth and income inequality, which drives every other type of inequality (educational, housing, health, and so forth). Wealth and income inequality, including the dramatic concentration of wealth in the hands of the upper .1% of Americans, have grown because of the implementation of specific government policies directed by the wealthy elites who benefit from provisions in the tax code and the relaxation of business regulations at the same time that educational, housing, and healthcare benefits provided to the lowest economic ranges in society have been cut.

The solutions – reorienting the tax code to benefit the vast swath of lower income earners, reducing the power of monopolistic and oligarchic owners of businesses (including banking, energy, communications, and broadcasting) through regulation and dissolution of concentrations of power, regulating campaign finance so that wealthy individuals no longer control the destiny of elected officials, extending healthcare and educational benefits so they are available at little cost to everyone in society, guarantees for civil liberties and freedom of expression, and the like – are also obvious. We only have to look at the Democratic Socialist countries in Europe – Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands, and Switzerland – to see how this can work.

Because people in power always control the levers to gain more power, there have been several instances in American history where the masses of the population have pushed back against the accretion of power to a small segment of the population.

• 1890s-1910s: The Progressives pushed back against the monopoly capitalists of the late 19^th century, creating economic and social reforms that improved the lot of workers, women, and children.

• 1930s: After the re-emergence of the power of monopolists during the 1920s, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal pushed back by creating labor, income, and healthcare programs that helped the nation recover from the stock market crash and ensuring Great Depression.

• 1960s-1970s: The Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson followed on the Civil Rights movement to broaden the availability of the benefits of the booming economy of the 1950s to wider swaths of the American people, including African-Americans, women, workers, the aging population, and people of limited income.

Since the 1980s, however, the growing power of what Heather Cox Richardson calls the Movement Conservatives (Reagan Republicans who push cutting taxes, reducing the size of government, devolution of power to the states, eliminating government regulations of private business, and a rollback of the progressive decisions made by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Early Warren) has kept the pendulum from swinging back to the elimination (or at least reduction) of the forces that lead to inequality.

Most people in America don’t realize that inequality in the United States has increased to levels not seen in a century. The uber-wealthy in the United States have what one commenter has called “fuck-it” money – they have so much money that the cost of virtually anything is irrelevant because, no matter what the cost, they can afford it.

Bernie, AOC, and Zohran Mamdani have it about right. Americans need a version of Democratic Socialism. There is a small Democratic Socialist Party in the United States. Here’s its platform written in 2021:

• Deepening and Strengthening Democracy

• Abolition of the Carceral State (emphasis on surveillance, policing, and incarceration as the dominant responses to social problems.

• Opposition to White Supremacy

• A Powerful Labor Movement

• Economic Justice

• Gender and Sexuality Justice

• Green New Deal

• Health Justice

• Housing for All

• International Solidarity, including Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Militarism

At its 2025 convention, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) adopted Workers Deserve More as its sole public program, replacing the 2021 platform. Here’s the link to the DSA announcement of its current focus. https://2024.dsausa.org/program/

The DSA believes that the Democratic Party is not the answer, claiming that the party is on the center-right and is controlled by its elite donor class.

My political science training tells me that the structure of the American political system does not make space for a third political party. So-called “third parties” either come into existence when one of the existing political parties goes belly-up (the Whigs replaced the Federalists by 1830 and the Republicans replaced the Whigs in the middle of the 1850s). It is more common for putative third parties to be absorbed into one of the two major parties – the Populists in the 1890s, the Progressives in the 1910s, the Dixiecrats in the 1940s, the Populists (again, this time under Ross Perot) in the 1990s, and the Green Party (Nader) in the 2000s. Bernie Sanders came within a whisker of being the nominee of the Democratic Party while identifying as a Democratic Socialist in 2016.

Here’s my prediction.

• The Republican Party will fly apart like clay on an uncentered potter’s wheel or kids on an out-of-control playground carousel.

• The current Democratic Party will move further to the right to take up the space abandoned by the Republicans. and to attract disaffected Republicans.

• A new left-wing party (maybe the Democratic Socialists, but maybe something entirely new) will move into the newly vacated left-of-center space.

The benefit of this prediction is that events like this take decades, and I won’t be around long enough to be proven wrong.

Here’s the Reddit image you saw earlier in this piece. It provides us with some potential names for this new party.

I can’t decide which is my favorite, although I’m kinda partial to Denmark’s The Union of Conscientiously Work-Shy Elements.