About the only good thing that can be said about 2020 is that it’s almost over. It was an annus horribilis. 

COVID took the lives of more than 340,000 Americans, about 1 out of every 1,000 of us. 

Over 22 million of us lost our jobs in March and April, and unemployment is again surging. 

The trend of fatal police shootings increased this year, with a total 864 civilians having been shot, 192 of whom were Black (as of December 1, 2020, the latest data available). 

Climate change has worsened. The U.S. suffered an extraordinary 12 hurricane landfalls in 2020, smashing previous records. California had the worst wildfire season ever, burning a staggering 4.1 million acres.

The President of the United States made all these crises worse. He played down and lied about COVID. He condemned Black Lives Matter protesters and encouraged right-wing violence. He made the climate crisis worse than it might have been by rejecting climate science and rolling back environmental protections. 

His last act has been to attack democracy head on by contesting the 2020 election and stirring up Republican voters to believe he won – despite losing by over 7 million votes, losing the Electoral College with 232 electoral votes compared to Biden’s 306 (270 Electoral College votes are needed to win), and then losing 59 of 60 court cases alleging fraud or election “irregularities” as well as a Supreme Court refusal to even hear a case. 

For 2021, I wish you and your family to be healthy, avoid COVID, and get inoculated as soon as you can. I hope your children will be able to attend classes and socialize with friends, without risk. If you’ve lost a job, I hope you to find a new one that pays as well if not better, and that you are able to pay your bills and keep your family housed and fed without economic anxiety. 

And I hope that Joe Biden reverses as much of the corruption, degradation, bigotry, hostility, inequality, and catastrophic climate change as is humanly possible. 

In short, I wish you and yours a better year than 2020. 

Most of the 74,222,957 Americans who voted to reelect Donald Trump – 46.8 percent of the votes cast in the 2020 presidential election – don’t hold Trump accountable for what he’s done to America. 

Their acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy.  

Nearly forty years ago, political scientist James Q. Wilson and criminologist George Kelling observed that a broken window left unattended in a community signals that no one cares if windows are broken there. The broken window is thereby an invitation to throw more stones and break more windows. The message: Do whatever you want here because others have done it and got away with it.

The broken window theory has led to picayune and arbitrary law enforcement in poor communities. But America’s most privileged and powerful have been breaking big windows with impunity.

In 2008, Wall Street nearly destroyed the economy. The Street got bailed out while millions of Americans lost their jobs, savings, and homes. Yet no major Wall Street executive ever went to jail.

In more recent years, top executives of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, along with the members of the Sackler family who own it, knew the dangers of OxyContin but did nothing. Executives at Wells Fargo Bank pushed bank employees to defraud customers. Executives at Boeing hid the results of tests showing its 737 Max Jetliner was unsafe. Police chiefs across America looked the other way as police under their command repeatedly killed innocent Black Americans.

Here, too, they’ve got away with it. These windows remain broken.

Trump has brought impunity to the highest office in the land, wielding a wrecking ball to the most precious windowpane of all – American democracy.

The message? A president can obstruct special counsels’ investigations of his wrongdoing, push foreign officials to dig up dirt on political rivals, fire inspectors general who find corruption, order the entire executive branch to refuse congressional subpoenas, flood the Internet with fake information about his opponents, refuse to release his tax returns, accuse the press of being “fake media” and “enemies of the people,” and make money off his presidency.

And he can get away with it. Almost half of the electorate will even vote for his reelection.

A president can also lie about the results of an election without a shred of evidence – and yet, according to polls, be believed by the vast majority of those who voted for him.

Trump’s recent pardons have broken double-paned windows.

Not only has he shattered the norm for presidential pardons – usually granted because of a petitioner’s good conduct after conviction and service of sentence – but he’s pardoned people who themselves shattered windows. By pardoning them, he has rendered them unaccountable for their acts.

They include aides convicted of lying to the FBI and threatening potential witnesses in order to protect him; his son-in-law’s father, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion, witness tampering, illegal campaign contributions, and lying to the Federal Election Commission; Blackwater security guards convicted of murdering Iraqi civilians, including women and children; Border Patrol agents convicted of assaulting or shooting unarmed suspects; and Republican lawmakers and their aides found guilty of fraud, obstruction of justice and campaign finance violations.

It’s not simply the size of the broken window that undermines standards, according to Wilson and Kelling. It’s the willingness of society to look the other way. If no one is held accountable, norms collapse.

Trump may face a barrage of lawsuits when he leaves office, possibly including criminal charges. But it’s unlikely he’ll go to jail. Presidential immunity or a self-pardon will protect him. Prosecutorial discretion would almost certainly argue against indictment, in any event. No former president has ever been convicted of a crime. The mere possibility of a criminal trial for Trump would ignite a partisan brawl across the nation.

Congress may try to limit the power of future presidents – strengthening congressional oversight, fortifying the independence of inspectors general, demanding more financial disclosure, increasing penalties on presidential aides who break laws, restricting the pardon process, and so on.

But Congress – a co-equal branch of government under the Constitution – cannot rein in rogue presidents. And the courts don’t want to weigh in on political questions.

The appalling reality is that Trump may get away with it. And in getting away with it he will have changed and degraded the norms governing American presidents. The giant windows he’s broken are invitations to a future president to break even more.

Nothing will correct this unless or until an overwhelming majority of Americans recognize and condemn what has occurred.

Hidden in the bill combining Covid relief and government spending is a cool $200 billion in tax breaks. An estimated $120 billion of those tax breaks will go to the richest 1 percent of Americans. 

Those giveaways include:

—A $2.5 billion break for racecar tracks

—A $6.3 billion write-off for business meals, i.e. the “three-martini lunch” deduction

—A new provision under the Paycheck Protection Program that allows forgiven loans to also be tax deductible, giving businesses the ability to “double dip” into the program

The bill also creates an independent commission to oversee horse racing, at the behest of Mitch McConnell. 

There’s no question about it: This pandemic has both revealed and exacerbated our already staggering economic inequality. 

Republicans didn’t blink twice when they handed out $6.3 billion in tax breaks to their wealthy corporate backers, but when it came to getting direct relief to struggling Americans $600 was the best they could do. Their priorities couldn’t be clearer.

What Election Day Revealed About Progressive Policies

Voters have given Joe Biden and Congress a progressive mandate to enact real change.

Americans are hungry for change, as evidenced by what happened on Election Day.

Voters handily supported progressive ballot initiatives across the country. 

In Florida, an amendment to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour passed with 61 percent support, even though the state went for Trump. 

And that wasn’t the only successful progressive ballot initiative to succeed in a redder state: Both Montana and South Dakota voted to legalize recreational marijuana, along with the bluer states of New Jersey and Arizona. Arizona continued its progressive streak by approving a tax increase on the wealthy to fund its education system, as did Colorado. Colorado also voted to fund a public paid family leave program.

And measures tackling our brutal systems of mass incarceration and policing prevailed in multiple states: California restored the voting rights of 50,000 people with felony convictions on parole, while Michigan overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment limiting police powers. 

On the local level, 18 ballot initiatives addressing police violence and accountability passed in major cities across the country. And in Los Angeles, voters passed a measure to invest in communities that have been impacted by our racist police and prison systems – prioritizing jobs, housing, and alternatives to incarceration.

All these ballot victories show that bold, progressive policies are enormously popular regardless of ideology. They’re proof that embracing humanity and dignity is both a sound moral choice and a winning electoral strategy.

Every incumbent House Democrat who co-sponsored Medicare for All kept their seat in the general election – including several of them in Republican-leaning districts, like Pennsylvania Representative Matt Cartwright, whose district went for Trump. And 92 out of the 93 co-sponsors of the Green New Deal legislation in the House won reelection, including four representatives in battleground districts.

The success of these candidates shouldn’t be surprising, given the broad support for both of these policies. A pre-election report from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found that 53 percent of Americans favor a national health-care option, including 58 percent of independents. 

Exit polling this year found that 66 percent of voters believe climate change is a serious problem. 

Support for systemic action doesn’t end there: early exit polls indicated that 57 percent of all voters across the country support the Black Lives Matter movement. The movement’s historic summer protests appear to have secured Democratic victories. A recent study found that registration of Democratic and unaffiliated voters surged in June, at the peak of the protests. That voter registration effort, combined with tireless grassroots organizing by communities of color, helped carry Biden to victory.

The writing is on the wall. Voters passed progressive ballot initiatives, even in red states; they reelected progressive candidates who embraced bold policies; and they expressed support for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and an end to systemic racism.

The people have given Biden and Congress a mandate for bold, progressive change. Now they must deliver.

How should the huge financial costs of the pandemic be paid for, as well as the other deferred needs of society after this annus horribilis?

Politicians rarely want to raise taxes on the rich. Joe Biden promised to do so but a closely divided Congress is already balking.

That’s because they’ve bought into one of the most dangerous of all economic ideas: that economic growth requires the rich to become even richer. Rubbish.

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once dubbed it the “horse and sparrow” theory: “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”

We know it as trickle-down economics.

In a new study, David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London lay waste to the theory. They reviewed data over the last half-century in advanced economies and found that tax cuts for the rich widened inequality without having any significant effect on jobs or growth. Nothing trickled down.

Meanwhile, the rich have become far richer. Since the start of the pandemic, just 651 American billionaires have gained $1 trillion of wealth. With this windfall they could send a $3,000 check to every person in America and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic. Don’t hold your breath.

Stock markets have been hitting record highs. More initial public stock offerings have been launched this year than in over two decades. A wave of hi-tech IPOs has delivered gushers of money to Silicon Valley investors, founders and employees.

Oh, and tax rates are historically low.

Yet at the same time, more than 20 million Americans are jobless, 8 million have fallen into poverty, 19 million are at risk of eviction and 26 million are going hungry. Mainstream economists are already talking about a “K-shaped” recovery – the better-off reaping most gains while the bottom half continue to slide.

You don’t need a doctorate in ethical philosophy to think that now might be a good time to tax and redistribute some of the top’s riches to the hard-hit below. The UK is already considering an emergency tax on wealth.

Biden has rejected a wealth tax, but maybe he should be even more ambitious and seek to change economic thinking altogether.

The practical alternative to trickle-down economics might be called build-up economics. Not only should the rich pay for today’s devastating crisis but they should also invest in the public’s long-term well-being. The rich themselves would benefit from doing so, as would everyone else.

At one time, America’s major political parties were on the way to embodying these two theories. Speaking to the Democratic National Convention in 1896, populist William Jennings Bryan noted: “There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”

Build-up economics reached its zenith in the decades after the second world war, when the richest Americans paid a marginal income tax rate of between 70% and 90%. That revenue helped fund massive investment in infrastructure, education, health and basic research – creating the largest and most productive middle class the world had ever seen.

But starting in the 1980s, America retreated from public investment. The result is crumbling infrastructure, inadequate schools, wildly dysfunctional healthcare and public health systems and a shrinking core of basic research. Productivity has plummeted.

Yet we know public investment pays off. Studies show an average return on infrastructure investment of $1.92 for every public dollar invested, and a return on early childhood education of between 10% and 16% – with 80% of the benefits going to the general public.

The COVID vaccine reveals the importance of investments in public health, and the pandemic shows how everyone’s health affects everyone else’s. Yet 37 million Americans still have no health insurance. A study in the Lancet estimates Medicare for All would prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths each year, while saving money.

If we don’t launch something as bold as a Green New Deal, we’ll spend trillions coping with ever more damaging hurricanes, wildfires, floods and rising sea levels.

The returns from these and other public investments are huge. The costs of not making them are astronomical.

Trickle-down economics is a cruel hoax. The benefits of build-up economics are real. At this juncture, between a global pandemic and the promise of a post-pandemic world, and between the administrations of Trump and Biden, we would be well-served by changing the economic paradigm from trickle down to build up.

Joe Biden’s Biggest Challenge

“Life is going to return to normal,” Joe Biden promised in a recent address to the nation. He was talking about life after Covid, but he might as well have been making a promise about life after Trump.

But a return to “normal” would be disastrous. We can’t give in to the allure of “normal” – because normal is what got us here. Normal led to Trump. 

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the last four years have been traumatic for the nation. After Trump’s abuses of power, human rights violations, blatant racism, and maliciously incompetent response to the pandemic, people are understandably exhaling a sigh of relief. 

But we can’t return to “normal” because “normal” was four decades of stagnant wages and widening inequality when almost all economic gains went to the top. 

The Republican Party’s core response has been stoking division and hate while suppressing the votes of communities of color. And the Democratic Party abandoned the working class. 

Another reason we can’t go back to normal is that “normal” led to our staggering Covid death toll and devastating economic fallout that have most brutally harmed lower-income Americans, especially communities of color. 

That’s because normal in this case has been decades of systemic racism as well as shredded safety nets for everyone in need, the most expensive but least adequate healthcare system in the modern world, and a growing climate catastrophe that’s steadily undermining public health.

Unless these trends change, the pandemic and economic crisis America is experiencing will be nothing compared to what’s to come. And after Biden, we could have Trumps as far as the eye can see. 

The only way to avoid this is to fundamentally change course.

It’s a mistake to see this task as placating the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Fighting these systemic problems is not a matter of ideology. It’s a matter of morality and common sense. 

If we don’t address them now, they will be even more destructive in the years to come.

In other words – back-to-normal complacency would be deadly. Joe Biden’s great challenge is to restore America to sanity after four years of Trumpian chaos while at the same time offering bold solutions to the crises of our time.

Our task must be to ensure he finds the energy and political will to do so.

As a former Secretary of Labor, I often receive mail from workers with job complaints who apparently believe I still have some authority. But the email I received a few days ago from a worker at Amazon’s Whole Foods delivery warehouse in Industry City, Brooklyn, New York, was particularly distressing.

She said that six of her co-workers had tested positive for COVID since October 22, because “safe social distancing is not only being ignored but discouraged,” adding that “when we express our discomfort to management, we are yelled at about filling orders faster, or told that we can take a leave of absence without pay.”

She ended by noting “we work for a trillionaire.”

Well, not quite. Jeff Bezos is worth $180 billion, making him the richest person in the world. And his corporation, Amazon, which also owns Whole Foods, is among the world’s richest corporations.

Bezos has accumulated so much added wealth over the last nine months that he could give every Amazon employee $105,000 and still be as rich as he was before the pandemic.

So you’d think he’d be able to afford safer workplaces. Yet as of October, more than 20,000 U.S.-based Amazon employees had been infected by the virus. That estimate comes from Amazon, by the way. There’s been no independent verification, nor has Amazon revealed how many of them have died.  

Decades ago, employees in most large corporations could remedy unsafe working conditions by complaining to their union, which pressured their employer to fix the problems, or to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (founded in 1970), which levied fines.

Alternatively, they could embarrass their companies by going public with their complaints. As a last resort, they could sue.

None of these routes is readily available to Amazon warehouse workers – nor, for that matter, to warehouse workers at Walmart, or to most workers in other super-spreader COVID workplaces such as meatpacking plants and nursing homes.

Amazon’s workers have no union to protect them. (Throughout its 25-year history, the corporation has aggressively fought union organizing.) Nor, for that matter, do 93.8 percent of America’s private-sector workers. Fifty years ago, more than a third were unionized.

And OSHA? Since the start of the pandemic, it’s been useless. Although receiving more than 10,000 complaints of unsafe conditions, it has issued just two citations.

Amazon employees who go public with their complaints are likely to lose their jobs. The corporation prohibits its workers from commenting publicly on any aspect of its business, without prior approval from executives. So far during the pandemic, it has fired at least two white-collar employees who publicly denounced conditions at its warehouses, as well as several warehouse workers who raised safety concerns to media outlets.

Amazon isn’t alone. A survey conducted in May by the National Employment Law Project showed that 1 in 8 American workers “has perceived possible retaliatory actions by employers against workers in their company who have raised health and safety concerns” about COVID.

The final option is to sue the company, but lawsuits against employers over COVID have been rare because of difficulties proving that the employee contracted the virus at work. A Washington Post analysis found that since the pandemic began, just 234 personal injury or wrongful death lawsuits have been filed due to the virus.

All of which reveals the utter fatuousness of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s and his fellow Senate Republicans’ demand that any new COVID relief package must include a corporate “liability shield” against COVID cases.

Even if such lawsuits were successful, corporations already have limited liability. That’s what it means to be a corporation. In the unlikely event Amazon were sued and plaintiffs won, Jeff Bezos would remain comfortable.

The heinous resurgence of COVID makes clear that corporations need more – not fewer – incentives to protect their workers from the virus.  

As millions of Americans lose whatever meager income they had, they should not have to choose between taking a risky job – such as in an Amazon warehouse – or putting food on their family’s table.

Bezos, as well as every major employer in America, can easily afford to protect their workers. And as Mitch McConnell and his fellow Senate Republicans should know, the richest nation in the world can easily afford to provide every American adequate income support during this national emergency.

That they’re not doing so is disgraceful.

The Biden Administration: Who Will Hold the Power?

Joe Biden is in the process of appointing several hundred people who are critical to what the administration gets done over the next four years. But not all these people will wield the same amount of power – as I discovered during my own time as a cabinet secretary. Here’s what you need to know about where the power really lies.

Appointments can generally be separated into three categories: cabinet members, presidential advisors, and heads of task forces.

 1. CABINET APPOINTMENTS
Cabinet appointments usually get the most media attention, so we’ll start there. But just because you’re in the cabinet doesn’t mean you’re in the loop. In fact, as I discovered as Labor Secretary, it’s possible to be in the cabinet and not in the loop – and sometimes not even know the loop exists. 

Despite the media coverage – and the hoopla over Senate confirmations – most cabinet members don’t actually play a large role in a president’s major decisions. Presidents almost never meet with their full cabinets, and most cabinet members rarely see a president. Cabinet members run departments which implement or enforce laws enacted by Congress. A capable and conscientious cabinet member keeps everything on track and rarely makes headlines.

Now, there are a few cabinet positions that have a significant influence on public policy, and you should pay attention to who fills them. A cabinet member’s role in policymaking varies depending on a president, but generally, the big four are the Secretary of the Treasury, who plays a major role in economic policy; the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, on foreign policy; and the Attorney General, in the administration of justice. 

Health and Human Services is important because of the coronavirus as well as the Affordable Care Act and any move toward Medicare for All. Homeland Security is important because of all the abuses that can occur under it. 

But Commerce, Transportation, Energy, Interior, Veterans Affairs, even, dare I say it? Labor – well, they’re not at the same level.

2. PRESIDENTIAL ADVISORS

The most important influencers on day-to-day policy-making, who are very much in the loop, are presidential advisors, who don’t need Senate confirmation. The most influential of them work inside the West Wing of the White House – and the closer their office is to the Oval Office, the more influence they have. 

From the view of the White House staff, cabinet officials are provincial governors presiding over independent domains. Anything of any importance occurs in the center – the West Wing – a rabbit warren of offices squeezed into three floors clustered around the Oval. It’s such a maze that I used to get lost in it more times than I’d care to admit. 

The advisor with the most influence on day-to-day economic policy is the chairman of the National Economic Council. The advisor with the most influence on foreign policy is the National Security Advisor.

Then there are the assistants to the president, such as on international trade; a director of the Office of Management and Budget; a Council of Economic Advisors, and a variety of people with titles like Counselor to the President. 

A good rule of thumb for understanding who really wields power is the location of their office. If it’s in the West Wing, they’re in the loop and you need to know who they are. If it’s in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which lies west of the White House, they’re more likely to be staff who don’t directly advise the president – and aren’t in the loop.

The president’s most important and powerful advisor is the Chief of Staff, whose office is just down the hall from the president. They control the flow of paperwork and people into the Oval Office and manage the President’s schedule, setting the President’s agenda. In other words, the Chief of Staff controls and manages the loop.

Even with a competent, experienced chief of staff, day-to-day life in the West Wing of the White House in any administration is one of controlled chaos. Don’t be misled by the TV series the West Wing, where everyone’s witty and loves each other. Realistically, the West Wing is intense, sometimes even backbiting and competitive, but this is where crucial policies are made.

3. TASK FORCES

The last category of presidential appointments to pay attention to are the heads of task forces the president sets up – composed of cabinet and sub-cabinet members from different departments and agencies, usually assistant secretaries and the heads of various bureaus. Particularly important are task force heads who meet often with a president – such as John Kerry and his upcoming climate group. 

Finally, keep in mind that every president has a different way of making policy decisions and using advisors and cabinet members. George W. Bush, in his response to 9/11, deferred almost entirely to his chief of staff and Secretary of Defense. Barack Obama responded to the financial crisis by drawing on several economic advisors simultaneously. Donald Trump rejected all expertise and focused only on issues that fed his ego. 

My guess is Joe Biden, in tackling the pandemic and reviving the economy, will rely heavily on experts in Health and Human Services, the Treasury Department, and his National Economic Council. 

All of these people – cabinet members, White House advisers, and special appointees who run task forces – formally answer to the president, but they work for the people, for you. This is where your power lies. Let’s make sure Biden’s appointees never forget who they work for.

“It’s time we address the structural inequalities in our economy that the pandemic has laid bare,” President-elect Joe Biden said last week, as he introduced his economic team.

It’s a good team. They’re competent and they care, in sharp contrast to Trump’s goon squad. Many of them were in the trenches with Biden and Barack Obama in 2009 when the economy last needed rescuing.

But reversing “structural inequalities” is a fundamentally different challenge from reversing economic downturns. They may overlap – last week the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a record high at the same time Americans experienced the highest rate of hunger in 22 years. Yet the problem of widening inequality is distinct from the problem of recession.

Recessions are caused by sudden drops in demand for goods and services, as occurred in February and March when the pandemic began. Pulling out of a recession requires low interest rates and enough government spending to jump-start private spending. This one will also necessitate the successful inoculation of millions against Covid-19.

By contrast, structural inequalities are caused by a lopsided allocation of power. Wealth and power are inseparable – wealth flows from power and power from wealth. That means reversing structural inequalities requires altering the distribution of power.

Franklin D Roosevelt did this in the 1930s, when he enacted legislation requiring employers to bargain with unionized employees. Lyndon Johnson did it in the 1960s with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, which increased the political power of Black people.

Since then, though, not even Democratic presidents have tried to alter the distribution of power in America. They and their economic teams have focused instead on jobs and growth. In consequence, inequality has continued to widen – during both recessions and expansions.

For the last 40 years, hourly wages have stagnated and almost all economic gains have gone to the top. The stock market’s meteoric rise has benefited the wealthy at the expense of wage earners. The richest 1 percent of US households now own 50 percent of the value of stocks held by Americans. The richest 10 percent, 92 percent.

Why have recent Democratic presidents been reluctant to take on structural inequality?

First, because they have taken office during deep recessions, which posed a more immediate challenge. The initial task facing Biden will be to restore jobs, requiring that his administration contain Covid-19 and get a major stimulus bill through Congress.  Biden has said any stimulus bill passed in the lame duck session will be “just the start.”

Second, it’s because politicians’ time horizons rarely extend beyond the next election. Reallocating power can take years. Union membership didn’t expand significantly until more than a decade after FDR’s Wagner Act. Black voters didn’t emerge as a major force in American politics until a half-century after LBJ’s landmark legislation.

Third, reallocating power is hugely difficult. Economic expansions can be a positive-sum game because growth enables those at the bottom to do somewhat better even if those at the top do far better. 

But power is a zero-sum game. The more of it held by those at the top, the less held by others. And those at the top won’t relinquish it without a fight. Both FDR and LBJ won at significant political cost.

Today’s corporate leaders are happy to support stimulus bills, not because they give a fig about unemployment but because more jobs mean higher profits.

“Is it $2.2tn, $1.5tn?” JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon said recently in support of congressional action. “Just split the baby and move on.”

But Dimon and his ilk will doubtless continue to fight any encroachments on their power and wealth. They will battle antitrust enforcement against their giant corporations, including Dimon’s “too big to fail” bank. They’re dead set against stronger unions and will resist attempts to put workers on their boards.

They will surely oppose substantial tax hikes to finance trillions of dollars of spending on education, infrastructure and a Green New Deal. And they don’t want campaign finance reforms or any other measures that would dampen the influence of big money in politics.

Even if the Senate flips to the Democrats on 5 January, therefore, these three impediments may discourage Biden from tackling structural inequality.

This doesn’t make the objective any less important or even less feasible. It means only that, as a practical matter, the responsibility for summoning the political will to reverse inequality will fall to lower-income Americans of whatever race, progressives and their political allies. They will need to organize, mobilize and put sufficient pressure on Biden and other elected leaders to act. As it was in the time of FDR and LBJ, power is redistributed only when those without it demand it.

Trump’s Final Days: Who Stood Up to Him?

We always knew Trump would contest the election results. He’s spreading wilder and wilder conspiracy theories about non-existent voter fraud. Of course, these claims haven’t held up in court because there’s zero evidence. But the integrity of thousands of people responsible for maintaining American democracy is being tested as never before.

Tragically, most Senate and House Republicans are failing the test by refusing to stand up to Trump. Their cowardice is a devastating betrayal of public trust, and will have lasting consequences.

They worry that speaking out could invite a primary challenge. But democracy depends on moral courage. These Republicans are profiles in cowardice.

Fortunately for our democracy, many lower-level Republican office-holders are passing the test.

Take, for example, Brad Raffensperger – Georgia’s Republican secretary of state who oversaw the election there and describes himself as “a Republican through and through and never voted for a Democrat.” 

Raffensperger is defending Georgia’s vote for Biden, rejecting Trump’s accusations of fraud. He spurned overtures from Senator Lindsey Graham, who asked if Raffensperger could toss out all mail-in votes from counties with high rates of questionable signatures. And Raffensperger dismissed demands from Georgia’s two incumbent Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, both facing tougher-than-anticipated runoffs) that he resign.

“This office runs on integrity,” Raffensperger says, “and that’s what voters want to know, that this person’s going to do his job.”

Raffensperger has also received death threats from Republican voters inflamed by Trump’s allegations. Election officials in Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona are also reporting threats. But they’re not giving in to them.

Let’s not forget other public officials in the Trump administration who have stood up for democracy and against Trump – public health officials unwilling to lie about Covid-19, military leaders unwilling to back Trump’s attacks on Black Lives Matter protesters, inspectors general unwilling to cover up Trump corruption, U.S. foreign service officers unwilling to lie about Trump’s overtures to Ukraine, intelligence officials unwilling to bend their reports to suit Trump, and Justice Department attorneys refusing to participate in Trump’s obstructions of justice.

Some of them lost their jobs. Some quit. Many were demoted. A few have been threatened with violence. That’s the price they had to pay to do what’s morally right under Trump, who has no idea what it means to do what’s morally right.

The question after January 20, when Trump is gone from the White House, is how many Senate and House Republicans will find the integrity to stand up for America rather than bend to the conspiracy theories and hatefulness that will be the legacies of Trumpism.