Episode Details

Donald Trump’s legacy — a proto-fascist movement we might call Trumpism — includes a Supreme Court rapidly taking America backwards, state legislatures suppressing votes and taking over election machinery, and an emboldened oligarchy taking over the economy. While the January 6 committee is doing a fine job exposing Trump’s attempted coup that culminated in the attack on the Capitol, it is not part of the committee’s charge to reveal why so many Americans were willing — and continue to be willing — to go along with Trump. Yet if America fails to address the causes of Trumpism, the attempted coup he began will continue, and at some point it will succeed. My purpose in today’s post (and others to come) is to begin to expose the roots of Trumpism , and suggest what must be done.

Let me start with some personal history.

In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina. I was doing research on the changing nature of work in America. During my visits I spoke with many of the same people I had met twenty years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children. I asked them about their jobs, their views about America, and their thoughts on a variety of issues. What I was really seeking was their sense of the system as a whole and how they were faring in it.

What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, many had expressed frustration that they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – at their employers, the government, and Wall Street; angry that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirement; angry that their children weren’t doing any better than they did at their children’s age. They were angry at those at the top who they felt had rigged the system against them, and for their own benefit. Several had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis. By the time I spoke with them, most were back in jobs, but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before in terms of purchasing power.   

I heard the term “rigged system” so often that I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.” These complaints came from people who identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. A few had joined the Tea Party. Some others had briefly been involved in the Occupy movement. Yet most of them didn’t consider themselves political. They were white, Black, and Latino, from union households and non-union. The only characteristic they had in common apart from the states and regions where I found them was their positions on the income ladder. All were middle class and below. All were struggling. They no longer felt they had a fair chance to make it.

With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked them which candidates they found most attractive. At that time, the leaders of both parties favored Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush to be the Democratic and Republican candidates, respectively. Yet no one I spoke with mentioned either Clinton or Bush. They talked about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up,” or “make the system work again,” or “stop the corruption,” or “end the rigging.”

The following year, Sanders — a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and who wasn’t even a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primary — came within a whisker of beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, garnered over 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses. Had the Democratic National Committee not tipped the scales against him, I’m convinced Sanders would have been the Democratic Party’s nominee.

Trump — a sixty-nine-ye