What’s the Real American Story?

Donald Trump has perfected the art of telling a fake story about America. The only way to counter that is to tell the real story of America.

Trump’s story is by now familiar: he alone will rescue average Americans from powerful alien forces – immigrants, foreign traders, foreign politicians and their international agreements – that have undermined the wellbeing of Americans.

These forces have been successful largely because Democrats, liberals, “socialists,” cultural elites, the Washington establishment, the media and “deep state” bureaucrats have helped them, in order to enrich themselves and boost their power. Not surprisingly, according to Trump, these forces seek to remove him from office.

What makes Trump’s story powerful to some Americans despite its utter phoniness is that it echoes the four tales Americans have been telling ourselves since before the founding of the Republic.

To combat Trump’s fake story, we need a true story based on facts, logic and history. But in order for that true story to resonate with Americans, it must also echo the same four tales.

The first tale: The Triumphant Individual. 

It’s the little guy or gal who works hard, takes risks, believes in him or herself, and eventually gains wealth, fame and honor. The tale is epitomized in the life of Abe Lincoln, born in a log cabin, who believed that “the value of life is to improve one’s condition.” The moral: with enough effort and courage, anyone can make it in America.

Trump wants us to believe he’s the Triumphant Individual. But in fact he’s a conman who inherited his wealth and then spent his career shafting his employees, contractors and creditors.

In truth, America has many potential Triumphant Individuals. But in order for them to do well in the new economy they depend on three things that Trump doesn’t want them to have: a good education, good medical care, and the right to join together to demand better pay and better working conditions.

The second tale: The Benevolent Community 

This is the story of neighbors and friends who pitch in for the common good. It goes back to John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity, delivered onboard a ship in Salem Harbor in 1630. Similar ideals of community were found among the abolitionists, suffragettes and civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s. The moral: we all do better by caring for one another.

Trump’s fake benevolent community is a nationalism that requires no sacrifice from anyone. But today’s real benevolent community necessitates all of us doing our parts for the common good. The most fortunate among us, for example, must pay their fair share of taxes so that everyone can have what’s needed to triumph. A rising tide of productivity and wealth will lift all Americans.

The third tale: The Mob at the Gates 

This is the story of threatening forces beyond our borders. Daniel Boone fought Indians, described then in racist terms as “savages.” Davy Crockett battled Mexicans. Much the same tale gave force to cold war tales during the 1950s of international communist plots to undermine American democracy. The moral: we must be vigilant against external threats.

As with the other tales, this one has an important element of truth. America battled Hitler and other fascists in the second world war. The Soviet danger was real.

But Trump wants Americans to believe that today’s Mob at the Gates consists of immigrants, foreign traders and democratically elected governments that have been our allies for decades or more.

Wrong. These days the real Mob at our gates are thugs like Vladimir Putin and other tyrants around the world who are antagonistic toward democratic institutions, intolerant of ethnic minorities, hostile toward the free press and eager to use government to benefit themselves and those who support them.

The fourth and final tale: The Rot at the Top. 

This one is about the malevolence of powerful elites – their corruption and irresponsibility, and tendency to conspire against the rest of us.

This tale has given force to the populist movements of American history, from William Jennings Bryan’s prairie populism of the 1890s through Bernie Sanders’ progressive populist campaign in 2016, as well as Trump’s authoritarian version.

Trump wants us to believe that today’s Rot at the Top are cultural elites, the media and “deep state” bureaucrats.

But the real Rot at the Top consists of concentrated wealth and power to a degree this nation hasn’t witnessed since the late 19th century. Billionaires, powerful corporations, and Wall Street have gained control over much of our economy and political system, padding their nests with special tax breaks and corporate welfare while holding down the wages of average workers.

In this, the rich have been helped by Republicans in Congress and the White House whose guiding ideology seems less capitalism than cronyism, as shown time and again through legislative and regulatory gifts to Big Pharma, Wall Street, Big Oil and Coal, Big Agriculture, and giant military contractors.

America’s true story shouldn’t end with Trump’s authoritarianism and nativism. 

An end that’s far truer to America’s ideals is a reinvigorated democracy. This will require a benevolent community free from the crony capitalists who have corrupted America.

That chapter is up to us.

A Bold New Idea to Boost Wages

The challenges are well known: Working Americans are struggling to keep up with the increasing cost of living. Unemployment is low, but wages of most Americans have remained flat. More than three-quarters of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck. Most can’t afford a $500 emergency.

There’s a simple and bold solution that would cost about as much as the Trump tax cut. But instead of helping corporations and the rich, it would help millions of working and middle-class Americans by putting money directly in their pockets.

I’m talking about expanding something called the Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC. And although it’s been around for decades, it can be the basis of a revolutionary change in the lives of millions of people. 

As it now stands, the EITC gives thousands of dollars to the working poor, with the amount of money they receive gradually decreasing as their earnings rise until they reach a cap, which is now a little over $50,000.

It works so well because it directly boosts the incomes of people who need it the most. Cash gives people freedom and dignity— the power to decide, for example, whether to have their car repaired or buy new shoes for their kids or save for a rainy day. 

When working people have money to spend, they spend most of it in the communities they live in. This, in turn, causes businesses to hire more people to meet the demand. It’s a virtuous cycle that lessens poverty, makes the tax code fairer, and boosts the overall economy.

A bold new idea would be to expand this successful program in 4 simple ways:

First: Raise the maximum amount that very poor Americans receive from the Earned Income Tax Credit by several thousand dollars. This would dramatically reduce poverty in all families with someone who works full time. 

Right now, a job at a $15 minimum wage plus Medicaid and food stamps still doesn’t meet basic needs in much of America. Raising the Earned Income Tax Credit would ensure that every family with a full-time worker is out of poverty.

Second: Extend the Earned Income Tax Credit into the middle class, so even families earning the median family income – which was just about $76,000 in 2017 – will benefit. This would be a huge help to working-class families, many of whom are now one paycheck away from poverty.

Third: Expand the benefits of the Earned Income Tax Credit to two groups of Americans who are working hard, but not necessarily collecting paychecks: people (most of whom are women) who are caring for a child or for a senior in their family, and low-income students.

Fourth: Let people receive this money each month rather than in a lump-sum once a year at tax time, so it helps with monthly expenses – rent, food, education – or can be saved to build a financial cushion.

Presto. We create a kind of cost-of-living refund to lift the incomes of a third of Americans, the people who need it most, and we also include the working class and lower middle class. 

At the same time, we begin to rewrite the tax code in favor of ordinary Americans, instead of large corporations and the wealthy. 

Eighty-three percent of the benefits of the Trump tax cuts will go to the top 1 percent of Americans by 2027. Expanding and modernizing the Earned Income Tax Credit can help put things back in balance.

It’s simple. It’s fair. It’s necessary. It’s big and bold. Enlarge and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit.  

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s soon-to-be-delivered report will trigger months of congressional investigations, subpoenas, court challenges, partisan slugfests, media revelations and more desperate conspiracy claims by Donald Trump, all against the backdrop of the burning questions: Will he be impeached by the House? Will he be convicted by the Senate? Will he pull a Richard Nixon and resign?

In other words, will America fire Trump?

I have news for you. America has already fired him.

When the public fires a president before election day – as it did with Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Herbert Hoover – they don’t send him a letter telling him he’s fired. They just make him irrelevant. Politics happens around him, despite him. He’s not literally gone, but he might as well be.

It’s happened to Trump. The courts and House Democrats are moving against him. Senate Republicans are quietly subverting him. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told him to end the shutdown.

The Fed is running economic policy. Top-level civil servants are managing the day-to-day work of the agencies. States are taking up the slack: California, for example, is now running environmental policy. 

Isolated in the White House, distrustful of aides, at odds with intelligence agencies, distant from his Cabinet heads, Trump has no system to make or implement decisions.

His tweets don’t create headlines as before. His rallies are ignored. His lies have become old hat.

Action and excitement have shifted elsewhere, to Democratic challengers, even to a 29-year-old freshman congresswoman too young to run for president.

Don’t get me wrong. He’s still dangerous, like an old land mine buried in the mud. He could start a nuclear war.

Yet even America’s adversaries just humor him. Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping give him tidbits to share with the American public, then do whatever they want.

Why did America fire Trump? If the nation were to write him a letter informing him he’s no longer president, then it would go like this:

Dear Mr. President,

While many of us disagree on ideology and values, we agree on practical things like obeying the Constitution and not letting big corporations and the wealthy run everything.

Your 35-day government shutdown was a senseless abuse of power. So too your “national emergency” to build your wall with money Congress refused to appropriate.

When you passed your tax bill, you promised our paychecks would increase by an average of $4,000, but we never got the raise. Our employers used the tax savings to buy back their shares of stock and give themselves raises instead.

Then you fooled us into thinking we were getting a tax cut by lowering the amounts withheld from our 2018 paychecks. We know that now because we’re getting smaller tax refunds.

At the same time, many big corporations aren’t paying a dime in taxes. Worse yet, they’re getting refunds.

For example, GM is paying zilch and claiming a $104 million refund on $11.8 billion of profits. Amazon is paying no taxes and claiming a $129 million refund on profits of $11.2 billion. (This is after New York offered it $3 billion to put its second headquarters there.)

They aren’t breaking any tax laws or regulations. That’s because they made the tax laws and regulations. You gave them a free hand.

You’re supposed to be working for us, not for giant corporations. But they’re doing better than ever, as are their top executives and biggest investors. Yet nothing has trickled down. We’re getting shafted.

Which is why more than half of us support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent tax on dollars earned in excess of $10 million a year, and more than 60 percent of us support Elizabeth Warren’s proposed 2 percent tax on households with a net worth of $50 million or more.

You’ve also shown you don’t have a clue about health care. You promised us something better than the Affordable Care Act, but all you’ve done is whittle it back.

A big reason we gave Democrats control of the House last November was your threat to eliminate protection for people with pre-existing conditions. Are you even aware that 70 percent of us now favor Medicare for All?

Most of us don’t pay much attention to national policy, but we pay a lot of attention to home economics. You’ve made our own home economics worse.

We’ll give you official notice you’re fired on Nov. 3, 2020, if not before. Until then, you can keep the house and perks, but you’re toast.

Respectfully,

America

America is the only place in the world where any citizen over the age of 35 can run for president. No experience in government necessary. No support from a political party necessary. You don’t even have to have any ideas or policy proposals.

Take Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks whose most notable achievement to date has been the Mocha Frappucinno.

Last Tuesday, CNN made Schultz a Serious Presidential Candidate by giving him an hour-long “town hall” in which he fielded questions from an audience.

Why did CNN do this? Because Schultz is worth over $3.6 billion.

In today’s America, someone with this much money can buy so much advertising and self-promotion that he automatically becomes a SPC just by virtue of wanting the job and having the capacity to self-finance a campaign.

Ironically, CNN and other major media are giving Schultz free media now because he can afford an almost infinite amount of paid media later.

Years ago, political parties played the major roles in selecting presidential candidates. Candidates came up through the ranks. They had to convince party leaders across the nation they had what it took to be president. Conventions were the last step in the winnowing process.

Then, over the last several decades, the media took over the job of winnowing the pack. Winners were determined largely by campaign coverage, including presidential primary debates.

Donald Trump became a SPC in 2015 not only because of his billions but also his notoriety as the star of a popular reality TV show and, before that, decades in the tabloids where he learned the art of getting media attention.

Now, it seems, all you need to get the media to anoint you is the money to buy an infinite amount of media.

Part of the reason is the dramatic escalation in presidential campaign spending.

In the 2000 election, neither George W. Bush nor Al Gore spent more than $200 million, in today’s dollars. In 2008, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the total spent by and for Barack Obama was $730 million. In 2016, total spending by Trump and Clinton came to around $1.16 billion.

At the same time, there’s more money at the top to spend on politics. Michael Bloomberg, another SPC, with his own media empire, makes Schultz look like a piker by comparison. Bloomberg is worth over $40 billion, of which he’s already pledged at least 1% – $400 million  – to defeating Trump.

It’s not clear if Bloomberg will run. If he does, he’ll run as a Democrat. But Schultz is planning to run as an independent, so he won’t even have to go through the gauntlet of primary battles.

Which means Schultz could deliver the 2020 election to Trump by siphoning off votes from the Democratic candidate.

Schultz cannot win, so why is he running? Not because he has any burning issue he wants to raise, or policy he wants to push. His interviews to date have been curiously anodyne.

Back in 2014, before anyone thought of Trump as a plausible candidate, Schultz berated the incivility he saw in American politics and called for business leaders like himself to “take the lead and do what we can to move the country forward”.

Is that it? He wants more civility?

It didn’t seem to occur to Schultz that America’s growing incivility might be related to the frustrations of people earning coffee grinds while those at the top run off with the Super Venti Flat White.

That same year, Starbucks paid its baristas an average of $9 an hour (it now pays $11, which, adjusted for inflation, isn’t much more). Schultz took home $149.8 million.

Under Schultz, Starbucks touted its so-called “social responsibility,” but it was for show.

Take, for example, the bracelets it sold for $5, whose proceeds were donated to banks and loan funds to support investment in poor communities. At the very same time, Starbucks kept some $1.9 billion offshore to avoid paying US taxes – representing hundreds of millions in lost tax revenues that might otherwise have helped poor communities.

Social responsibility my macchiato. Starbucks spends millions each
year lobbying the federal government, often seeking spending cuts along with the kind of tax breaks that continue to minimize Starbucks’s tax bill.

For Schultz, like Trump, it’s all about money and media.

Schultz is running because he thinks it will be a hoot – the capstone to his coffee career, the apex of his espresso.

But like many other billionaires of America’s New Gilded Age, Schultz doesn’t seem to give a damn about what his political escapades do to America.

WHO WILL BE THE NEXT PRESIDENT?

The presidential primaries will soon be heating up, and the betting has already begun over which Democrat has the “money advantage,” who’s sufficiently “moderate,” and who can “beat Trump” (assuming he’ll be running again).

Pardon me, but if you want to know who will be the next president, these are exactly the wrong criteria. 

First: raising money from big donors is far less important than it used to be. In recent campaigns, Democratic challengers have drawn in millions from small donors — just look at Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Beto O'Rourke and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018.

Grassroots activism has also become critical to getting out the vote. 

The next president will be the candidate best able to inspire such activism. After years of Trump, voters will be especially inspired by someone with the character and temperament to lead the nation – a person of modesty, honesty and integrity, who puts the country’s interests above his or her own, and above the interests of Wall Street and big corporations. Someone who will honor and protect our democracy, who will restore America’s moral authority in the world.  

Second: Labels like “moderate” have become meaningless. Over the last several decades the Republican Party has pushed the playing field of American politics so far to the right that the new moderate “center” is now where the old conservative goalposts used to be.

Today’s biggest political divide doesn’t fit on the old playing field, anyway. In both parties, it’s between the establishment and anti-establishment. And almost all the political energy is anti-establishment.

If you want to know who will be the next president, look to who can best harness that energy across the political spectrum. Someone capable of reversing the forces that created Trump. I’m not referring just to racism and xenophobia, but also the widening chasm between the few who are succeeding and the many who have been left behind.

Someone who will take on the profound imbalance of wealth and power that has grown in recent decades not just under Republican administrations but also under Democrats. Who will mobilize the poor, working class, and middle class into a countervailing power to change that system.

Who will unite races and creeds and ethnic groups to attack concentrated political and economic privilege. Who will get big money out of politics. Who will demand that the wealthy pay their fair share to keep American going. Who will empower ordinary workers to get a better deal, and expand prosperity and political rights to the many instead of the privileged few. 

The third criterion of the early presidential handicappers is who can beat Trump. Should the candidate go low by imitating him, or go high by appealing to the best in America? 

It’s a meaningless and endless inquiry. In reality, the person who will beat Trump will possess the two attributes mentioned above: the character, integrity, vision to lead the nation, and the ability to mobilize the many who have been left behind.

No more will be needed, but also no less.

It’s easy to forget the condescension and amusement that greeted him when he announced his first campaign for president, on May 26, 2015.

How, it was asked, could a rumpled, 73-year-old, self-described Democratic Socialist – a junior senator from tiny Vermont, who was born in Brooklyn, Jewish, hadn’t even been a Democrat for most of his political career, and eschewed money from super PACs – possibly triumph against Hillary Clinton?

In the end, he didn’t. But he triumphed in other ways.

Bernie won a surprising 46 percent of the pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention. His primary campaign whipped up a storm of enthusiasm among young people and grass-roots activists. He garnered over a million individual donations, including $20 million in January 2016 alone ($5 million more than Clinton), with an average individual donation of $27.

Most importantly, he showed Democrats they could run successfully on policies like Medicare for all, free public higher education, and higher taxes on the wealthy – instead of the cautious “New Democrat” centrism of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barack Obama.

Bernie Sanders put “progressive” back into the Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt.    

Now, ironically, his success four years ago may impede his second candidacy. Not only is he four years older, Bernie is no longer the only progressive in town.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sharrod Brown are pushing many of the same themes and drawing enthusiasm from many of the same quarters.

And partly because of his success at mobilizing and energizing Democrats in the 2016 primaries, a slew of other presidential hopefuls are approaching the 2020 primary campaign the same way – foregoing big money, talking up the importance of reviving democracy, using social media, and advancing ideas that would once have been considered too radical.

The conventional view is Bernie helped move the Democratic Party to the “left.” 

Wrong. Even before his primary campaign, American politics was moving away from the old right-left spectrum that had distinguished “small-government” conservatives from “big-government” liberals.

Bernie helped reveal a new and deeper political divide in America – between oligarchy and democracy.

Rather than the size of government, he raised the more central question of who government is for.

Donald Trump rode a similar wave of populist anger at a political elite too cozy with big business and too concerned about its own survival to pay attention to average working people. But, as has become clear, Trump was a Trojan horse for the same oligarchy he condemned.

The American oligarchy is real. According to a study published in 2014 by Princeton Professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern Professor Benjamin Page, although Americans enjoy many features of democratic governance, American policymaking has become dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans. The typical American has no influence at all.

This is largely due to the increasing concentration of wealth and economic power. In a recent research paper, one of my colleagues at Berkeley, Gabriel Zucman, found that the richest 1 percent of Americans now owns 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. That’s up from 25 to 30 percent in the 1980s.

The only advanced country Zucman found with similarly high levels of wealth concentration is Russia, whose oligarchy is notorious.  

America has had an oligarchy once before – in the first Gilded Age, which ran from the 1880s until the first decades of the twentieth century.

Teddy Roosevelt called those oligarchs the “malefactors of great wealth,” and fought them by breaking up their monopolies and instituting a progressive federal income tax.

His fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, reduced their power further by strictly regulating Wall Street and encouraging the growth of labor unions.

“Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob,” F.D.R. thundered in 1936. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

By the end of World War II, the American oligarchy had dissipated – its wealth lost during the Great Depression, its power countervailed by government and unions.

But in recent years, the American oligarchy has returned.

Bernie Sanders has done more than any other politician in modern America to sound the alarm, and mobilize the public to reclaim our democracy and economy. For that alone, we owe him our enduring gratitude. 

A president who claims he has an absolute right to declare a national emergency and spend government funds that Congress has explicitly refused to appropriate for the ends he seeks, is assuming the role of a dictator.

A president who shuts down government in order to get his way on a controversial issue, such as building a wall along the border with Mexico, and offers to reopen it as a concession when and if his opponents give in, is treating the government of the United States as a bargaining chip. This, too, is the behavior of a dictator.

As is spouting lies over what Trump terms an “undeniable crisis” at the southern U.S. border, which is in fact no crisis at all.  

Donald Trump is violating the Constitution. He is negating our system of government based on the rule of law. He is violating a president’s core responsibility to protect American democracy. 

But the threat to American democracy is not just from Trump’s dictatorial moves. And real threat to American sovereignty is not coming from Trump’s fantasized hordes seeking to cross the Mexican border. 

It is coming from a foreign government intent on undermining our democracy by propagating lies, turning Americans against each other, and electing a puppet president.

We do not know yet whether Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to win the 2016 election. What we do know so far is that Trump’s aides and campaign manager worked with Putin’s emissaries during the 2016 election, and that Putin sought to swing the election in favor of Trump.

We also know that since he was elected, Trump has done little or nothing to stop Putin from continuing to try to undermine our democracy. To the contrary, Trump has obstructed inquiries into Russian meddling, and gone out of his way to keep his communications with Putin secret, even from his own White House.  

He has also done exactly what Putin has wanted him to do – threaten to pull out of NATO, pull out of Syria, and accept Russia’s presence in Ukraine. 

Perhaps Trump’s current attack on American democracy through his assertion of a fake national emergency is intended as to distract from this larger attack on America. No matter. Both threaten the essence of the nation. 

There is only one answer: Donald Trump must be removed from office. Impeachment should start immediately.  

Elizabeth Warren is one of the most talented politicians and policy leaders in America. We must not allow Trump or anyone else to “swift-boat” her because she identified herself as an American Indian three decades ago.

At worst, Warren may have stretched the bounds of the definition of whiteness. That’s understandable. She grew up in Oklahoma, a state created from Indian Territory. She probably witnessed the disrespect and occasional brutality that Native Americans were, and still are, subject to. Her own genetic test showed at least one Native American ancestor. She has stressed that she is not a member of a tribal nation.

Warren didn’t call Mexicans rapists. She didn’t call nations populated primarily by black or brown people “shitholes.” She didn’t assume all Muslims are terrorists. She didn’t characterize black neighborhoods as war zones. She didn’t assert that an American president was born in Africa. She has not sexually assaulted anyone. She has not paid hush money to prostitutes. She hasn’t insulted Native Americans by calling a leading politician “Pocahontas” and joking about the Trail of Tears in the 1830s.

Warren got no career benefit from her self-designation. At every step of her exceptional rise in the legal profession, those responsible for hiring her saw her as a white woman. The fact that she claimed Indian descent on a Texas bar form that was meant to be confidential is further evidence that her identification arose from sincere belief.

In a larger sense, our Native American heritage should be a point of national pride. Bill Clinton proudly claimed in 1998 that his grandmother was “one-quarter Cherokee.” I remember former Republican Senator Alan Simpson beaming proudly as he showed me an old family reunion photo in which several of the eldest attendees were Native Americans.

It’s far better for a presidential candidate to err on the side of racial or ethnic inclusiveness than for a president to whip the nation into a dangerous and delusional frenzy of racial or ethnic divisiveness.

America’s Widening Inequality of Place

You’ve heard me talk about inequalities of income and wealth and political power. But another kind of inequality needs to be addressed as well: widening inequalities of place.

On the one hand, booming mega-cities. On the other hand, an American heartland that’s becoming emptier, older, whiter, less educated, and poorer. Trump country.

To understand what’s happening you first need to see technology not as a thing but as a process of group learning – of talented people interacting with each other continuously and directly, keying off  each other’s creativity, testing new concepts, quickly discarding those that don’t work, and building cumulative knowledge.

This learning goes way beyond the confines of any individual company. It now happens in geographic clusters – mostly along the east and west coasts in places like Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston and suburban Washington D.C.

Bright young college graduates are streaming into these places, where their talents generate more value–and higher wages–together than they would separately.

As money pours into these places, so do service jobs that cater to the new wealth – lawyers, wealth managers and management consultants, as well as cooks, baristas and pilates instructors.

Between 2010 and 2016, according to Brookings, nearly half of America’s employment growth centered in just 20 large metro areas that are now home to about a third of the US population.

One consequence is a more distorted democracy. California, now inhabited by almost 40 million people, gets two senators – as does Wyoming, with just 579,000.

Even though Democratic Senate candidates in the 2018 midterm elections received 18 million more votes than Republican Senate candidates, Republicans still gained 2 more Senate seats.

A second consequence is turbo-charged gentrification in these mega-urban clusters, creating growing populations of poor who have been stranded.

These gleaming cities are becoming the most Dickensian locales in America, with homelessness and squalor among luxury high-rises and trendy restaurants.

So as the American middle class disappears, the two groups falling most perilously behind are white, rural, non-college Trump supporters, and the very poor inside America’s trendiest mega-urban centers, who are disproportionately black and Latino.

This inequality is unsustainable. It’s literally tearing America apart.

“America will never be a socialist country,” Donald Trump declared in his State of the Union address. Someone should alert Trump that America is now a hotbed of socialism. But it is socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.

In the conservative mind, socialism means getting something for doing nothing. That pretty much describes the $21 billion saved by the nation’s largest banks last year thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, some of which went into massive bonuses for bank executives. On the other hand, more than 4,000 lower-level bank employees got a big dose of harsh capitalism. They lost their jobs.

Banks that are too big to fail – courtesy of the 2008 bank bailout – enjoy a hidden subsidy of some $83 billion a year, because creditors facing less risk accept lower interest on deposits and loans. Last year, Wall Street’s bonus pool was $31.4 billion. Take away the hidden subsidy and the bonus pool disappears.

Trump and his appointees at the Federal Reserve are easing bank requirements put in place after the bailout. They’ll make sure the biggest banks remain too big to fail.

Trump is promoting socialism for the rich and harsh capitalism for everyone else in other ways. Since he was elected, GM has got more than $600 million in federal contracts plus $500 million in tax breaks. Some of this has gone into the pockets of GM executives. Chairman and CEO Mary Barra raked in almost $22m in total compensation in 2017 alone.

But GM employees are subject to harsh capitalism. GM is planning to lay off more than 14,000 workers and close three assembly plants and two component factories in North America by the end of 2019.

When he was in business, Trump perfected the art of using bankruptcy to shield himself from the consequences of bad decisions – socialism for the rich at its worst – while leaving employees twisting in the wind.

Now, all over America, executives who run their companies into the ground are getting gold-plated exit packages while their workers get pink slips.

Sears is doling out $25 million to the executives who stripped its remaining assets and drove it into bankruptcy, but has no money for the thousands of workers it laid off.

As Pacific Gas and Electric hurtles toward bankruptcy, the person who was in charge when the deadly infernos roared through northern California last year (caused in part by PG&E’s faulty equipment) has departed with a cash severance package of $2.5 million. The PG&E executive in charge of gas operations when records were allegedly falsified left in 2018 with $6.9 million.

Under socialism for the rich, you can screw up big time and still reap big rewards. Equifax’s Richard Smith retired in 2017 with an $18 million pension in the wake of a security breach that exposed the personal information of 145 million consumers to hackers.

Wells Fargo’s Carrie Tolstedt departed with a $125 million exit package after being in charge of the unit that opened more than 2 million unauthorized customer accounts.

Around 60 percent of America’s wealth is now inherited. Many of today’s super rich have never done a day’s work in their lives.

Trump’s response has been to cut the estate tax to apply only to estates valued at over $22 million per couple. Mitch McConnell is now proposing that the estate tax be repealed altogether.

What about the capitalist principles that people earn what they’re worth in the market, and that economic gains should go to those who deserve them?

America is on the cusp of the largest inter-generational wealth transfer in history. As rich boomers expire over the next three decades, an estimated $30 trillion will go to their children.

Those children will be able to live off of the income these assets generate, and then leave the bulk of them to their own heirs, tax-free. (Capital gains taxes don’t apply to the soaring values of stocks, bonds, mansions and other assets of wealthy people who die before they’re sold.)

After a few generations of this, almost all of the nation’s wealth will be in the hands of a few thousand non-working families.

To the conservative mind, the specter of socialism conjures up a society in which no one is held accountable, and no one has to work for what they receive. Yet that’s exactly the society Trump and the Republicans are promoting for the rich.

Meanwhile, most Americans are subject to an increasingly harsh and arbitrary capitalism in which they’re working harder but getting nowhere, and have less security than ever.

They need thicker safety nets and deserve a bigger piece of the economic pie. If you want to call this socialism, fine. I call it fair.