The USA 2025, Germany 1933

 The various appointments that Donald Trump has announced, led by those of Matt Gaetz and Pam Bondi, Kristin Noem, Tulsi Gabard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., suggest that he intends a real transformation of the federal bureaucracy and even of the function of the US government.  Given that I studied the structure of the Nazi government in graduate school and that it figured in my first book, Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War, I am inevitably pondering the similarities and differences between what Trump is trying to do and what Hitler and the Nazis did after seizing power 91 years ago.  I have a superb book by an excellent German historian, Der Staat Hitlers by Martin Broszat, to help me, and after reviewing some key chapters I am sharing some observations here.

Leaving aside for the moment their very real differences in style, background, and objectives, Trump and Hitler have played similar political roles.  They are two political outsiders who each took advantage of a collapse in popular confidence in established leaders and institutions to defeat established political leaders in democratic elections.  In both cases, their nations immediately wondered, in 2017 and in 1933, exactly what they would do and how much they would change the personnel, structure and function of those institutions.  There is one huge difference between their situations, one largely owing to differences in the nature and structure of the societies and governments over which they took power.  The German state, led by the Prussian state that had dominated it since its formation under the German Empire in 1871, had a highly developed bureaucracy that dated back centuries.  Most of the US bureaucracy that Trump wants to bring  under control is relatively young.  The FBI is only slightly more than a century old, and the CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff are not even 80.  Six of our cabinet departments date from the postwar era.  Germany in addition had far more organized political parties under the Weimar Republic than the US has today. Three of them--the Social Democrats, the Communists, and the Nazis themselves--had uniformed militias that had battled each other in the streets for several years before Hitler took power.  The Nazi militia, the SA, numbered about a million men.  The Republican Party does not have formal membership, much less a uniformed force.  And in another key difference, the German national legislature, the Reichstag, had already lost much of its power when Hitler came to power.  Successive governments had ruled largely by presidential decrees--which were legal under the Weimar Constitution--since 1930.  Nothing like that has ever happened in the United States.  On the other hand, with majorities in both houses of Congress, Trump begins his second term with much greater power under the existing system than Hitler enjoyed in January 1933, when he was merely the senior power in a coalition.  Trump has won a majority in a free election, which Hitler never did, and at this point he has already held power for four years.  That actually distinguishes 2025 here from 1933 there, as we shall see in a moment.

Trump when he first took power in 2017 tried to work within existing structures, and with pretty traditional personnel.  His leading cabinet officers came from the same kinds of backgrounds as his predecessors', including elected Republican leaders, captains of industry, and high-ranking serving or retired military officers.  It did not take him long to fire James Comey from the FBI, but he replaced him with Christopher Wray, a Justice Department veteran who has served until this day.  He was enraged when Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, and the FBI would not simply do his bidding by dismissing complaints against him on the one hand and undertaking investigations of political opponents on the other.  He parted company with his secretaries of state and defense and his national security adviser pretty quickly but eventually found men he could work with for those positions.  He did not try to install his own people at the heads of the military services.  

Hitler, on the other hand, took less than two years to seize total political power and reduce the national legislature to a rubber-stamping body composed entirely of Nazi Party members.  He replaced elections with plebiscites, national up-or-down votes that approved some of his most important steps.  On the other hand, he was at first was even more wary than Trump in 2017 in his dealings with the prestigious existing bureaucracies.  Hitler's first cabinet contained just two other Nazis: Hermann Goering, serving without portfolio, and Wilhelm Frick, who took over the Ministry of Interior--the closest analogue to our Department of Justice and FBI.  (The separate German Ministry of Justice, I believe, was chiefly in charge of the courts.)  Hitler did create a new Ministry of Information and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, but many traditional bureaucrats remained in power for a long time.  Konstantin von Neurath, Hitler's inherited foreign minister, and Economics Minister Hjalmar Schact were not removed until 1938 and 1937, respectively.  

That, however was only one part of the story.  Although Hitler's militia the SA lost a power struggle in the first 18 months of his rule and was decapitated in June 1934, the competing SS under Heinrich Himmler assumed key police powers almost at once.  Officially deputized within a few months of the seizure of power, the SA and SS arrested political opponents, sent them to concentration camps, and began terrorizing German Jews. In 1939 all police forces were consolidated under Himmler and his new Reich Main Security office (RSHA) led by Reinhard Heydrich. Equally importantly, Germany in 1933, like the United States, was a federal state, and Hitler and the Nazis managed to extend their authority over the police of the various provinces, led by Prussia--which included more than half the whole country--by means of emergency decrees.  Within months, Nazi-led governments had taken over in every province.  Trump will presumably be able to rely on the cooperation of some red state governments in carrying out his measures against immigrants, and conflicts may develop between him and blue state governors who are pledging to resist those measures.  It seems to me that Trump would have the constitution on his side if states tried to resist authorized federal measures to deport immigrants.

Trump made no drastic attempt to alter our Constitution during his first term until he lost the 2020 election, and that attempt failed.  It now appears that his relations with the rest of the executive branch in his second term will more closely resemble Hitler's in the latter stages of his regime, when he finally let go nearly all the traditional conservatives who had held key positions until 1938 and replaced them with sycophantic Nazis.  Although he does not seem to have any plans to create new police forces,  Trump is stocking the top level of government with key allies in his propaganda war against his opponents who will do whatever he wants. Pete Hegseth at Defense, Pam Bondi at Justice, and Tulsi Gabard as Director of National Intelligence have all spoken out against Democrats as violently as he has and share his contempt for the permanent bureaucracy of the United States.  And to judge from these appointments, the 2025 Project, and other leaks from Trump's entourage, he wants to put the most important elements of the bureaucracy under his direct control and purge them of anyone who stands in his way.  That  project calls for changes in rules to make it easier to dismiss federal employees and for reduction of their pay and benefits, which would obviously make federal employment less attractive.  Matt Gaetz at Justice would surely have undertake the investigations and probable prosecutions of Democrats like John Kerry and even Joe Biden that Trump's first-term attorneys general refused to undertake, and Pam Bondi may as well. .  Reports claim that Hegseth would use the recommendations of an independently appointed body of retired officers to relieve senior military leaders who seem ideologically unfriendly to Trump.  And Kristin Noem, the designated Secretary of Homeland Security, must have signed on to Trump's plans to round up and deport millions of illegal immigrants--the cruelest part of Trump's agenda as it has so far emerged.

Trump will be doing most of these things in alliance with a long-standing strain of conservative Republicanism that regards the last 140 years of American history as a great mistake.  Its acolytes see the Pendleton Act of 1883, which enshrined the idea of an independent, merit-based civil service, as the first big step down the road to perdition, followed by the moderate reforms of the Progressive Era and the more sweeping changes of the New Deal and the Great Society.  Such ideas are also very popular among the conservative majority on today's Supreme Court, which has already drastically rolled back the government's regulatory authority.  Trump's new allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who want to privatize many federal government functions, add a new ingredient to the mix--and Musk has already privatized key parts of our defense establishment and created a private space program.  Just today, Musk and Ramaswamy have sketched out how they hope drastically to cut back federal regulations and personnel in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.  The particular ingredient Trump is providing his coalition is his goal of turning key segments of the federal government into legal weapons against anyone who stands in his way or who has a following of their own.  This, he feels, will only be doing unto others as they have done unto him, and sadly, there is some truth to that claim.  He may have to seize unprecedented presidential power to make that happen.  If the Republican Senate refuses to confirm appointments like Gabard and Hegseth, he wants to force Congress to adjourn, which would allow them to use the recess appointment clause of the Constitution to put them in power until January 2027 without confirmation.  And according to one never-used provision of the Constitution, if he could orchestrate an argument between the two Houses of Congress over whether to adjourn or not, he could sent Congress home until a date of his choosing and attempt to govern without it.  

Of all Trump's goals, the only one that can be compared to Hitler's is the desire to deport millions of illegal immigrants.  He wants to weaken the state while Hitler wanted to strengthen it, and he does not want to fight a great war, or, apparently, any war.  War to his right-wing allies has become just another excuse to expand the power of the deep state.   Trump seems to want to create a state based entirely on personal allegiance to himself while removing all governmental obstacles to maximum profit and economic disruption.   This is nearly the opposite of Hitler, who wanted to marshal all of Germany's resources to fight a great war and create a new empire, and who imposed severe sacrifices on the German people even before the war started in 1939.  All over the world--even in Communist countries--corporate power has grown at the expense of state power now for more than forty years.  Trump will continue that trend by turning Washington politics into a circus once again.  

 As I have said here many times, it is the gradual collapse of our democracy and of the habits that allowed it to function over the last 60 years--not racism or sexism or homophobia--that has made this possible.  Exit polls showed that the increasing divide between college-educated people and the rest of the population is perhaps the real secret to Trump's success.  Our educated class needs to re-educate itself and establish a new bond between itself and the rest of the population.  I have no idea where this will end.

Thirty years later, the answer emerges

 In 1994, at my 25th Harvard reunion, I happened to meet Bill Strauss.  A lawyer by training and originally a congressional staffer by trade, Bill was now the co-founder of the comedy troupe the Capitol Steps and the other of several books, including Generations: The History of America's Future, co-authored by Neil Howe.  We talked about contemporary politics and I got some of the flavor of his generational thinking.  More importantly, when I returned to Rhode Island, I picked up Generations from the new book shelf at the Naval War College Library and began reading it.  I was so excited that I could hardly sleep for most of a week, and I found my life changed, changed utterly.  A terrible beauty was born.

Bill, who became a close friend until his very untimely death in 2007, later described the writing of Generations.  It began as an attempt to identify different generations of Americans and to evaluate their particular contributions.  In the midst of their research, however, they noticed a similarity between the political climate and generational constellation of the 1850s on the one hand and the early 1990s on the other.   A few more logical steps led them to their key finding. The history of the United States could be broken into 80-year cycles, starting in the early colonial era.  Each cycle concluded with a great crisis: King Phillip's War in the late 17th century, the Revolution and adoption of the Constitution in the 18th (1774-94), the Civil War and its immediate aftermath (1860-68 or so), and the Depression and the Second World War  (1929-45).  In each case, the crisis ultimately created a new United States, based on new values and institutions that endured for about 60 years.  As the generation that had been young adults during the crisis died off and the post-crisis generation began to come into power, those values and institutions began to crumble.  The crisis, an era of intense and sometimes violent political conflict, determined the shape of the new era to come.  In the last two crises of the Civil War and 1929-45, a particular strong leader--Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt--emerged to lead the nation and redefine its values.  Now Bill and Neil (as I have been calling them for nearly thirty years) predicted that something similar would happen between 2004 and 2024.  Shortly after I got to know Bill, they amplified that prediction in another book, The Fourth Turning--their synonym for crisis--that appeared in 1997.  History has vindicated that prediction, and on Tuesday we found out where history was heading.

As I have mentioned here many times, the publication of The Fourth Turning also led to the establishment of a remarkable online forum to discuss, and expand upon, its conclusions.  Another seven years later, in 2004, I started this blog.  Both have allowed me continually to refine my ideas about generations and "turnings" (the roughly twenty-year periods into which they divided each 80-year saeculum) and to assess where we were in the cycle.  When 9/11 hit--and this can be well documented on the archived online forum if anyone wants to--Bill Strauss assumed that this was the beginning of the crisis.  This has been hotly debated for many years since, especially after the financial crisis of 2008.  I am now quite convinced that the crisis actually began about ten months earlier, during the 2000 election controversy, but it really got going after 9/11 and it has been persisting--albeit in slow motion, in comparison to the earlier crises--ever since.  Now we know where it was going.

In 2001 and again in 2009, two presidents--George W. Bush and Barack Obama--had the opportunity to step into the role of the "Gray Champion," the generic term Bill and Neil used for history's Lincolns and FDRs.  Bush, I am convinced, consciously tried to do so.  I do not think that he had read Generations or The Fourth Turning, but I definitely think that Karl Rove had, and the speeches that Rove helped Bush draft for the whole of his presidency dripped with the rhetoric of previous crises.  Bush promised a worldwide crusade for democracy that would end terrorism and reshape the world, using American force to remove any hostile regimes that might pose a danger to the United States. (We must remember that we did not in 2001 regard Russia or China as threats.)  He explicitly echoed the rhetoric of the Second World War and the Cold War.  In the first two years after 9/11 our entire political establishment and most of the country lined up behind him as he announced the impending invasion of Iraq.  He also seized emergency powers, as Lincoln and FDR had, to deal with terrorism. His administration had every intension of following up the Iraq invasion with similar strikes upon the other members of his "Axis of evil," Iran and North Korea.  Two blind spots, however, doomed this project and ultimately turned the nation against Bush and what he stood for.  First, he tried to fight a global war on the cheap, cutting taxes instead of raising them and buying new military arguments that technology could take the place of manpower.  Secondly, the overthrow of regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq led to nothing but chaos.  Nonetheless, he created a new military-industrial-intelligence complex, and his successor Barack Obama continued much of the war on terror and the regime change policy himself, with new disasters in Libya and Syria as a result.  A similar policy has now brought the Biden administration to the brink of war with Iran in alliance with Israel.  None of this has done any good for the American people or the broader world, which now faces completely different threats.

Meanwhile, the abandonment of the New Deal's very successful effort to regulate financial markets and check the growth of wealth that had begun in the 1970s and accelerated under Reagan had led under Bush to a speculative catastrophe in the housing market and the greatest crash since 1929--exactly 79 years later.  That allowed the Democrats to regain both houses of Congress and then, behind Barack Obama, the White House.  He entered office with freedom of action comparable to that that Roosevelt had enjoyed in 1933--but he failed to use it.  The Democratic Party had abandoned the New Deal tradition, and Obama's advisers repudiated it as well.  They claimed to restore the economy "from the top down" instead of "from the bottom up," and substituted the Federal Reserve Board's massive infusion of credit, buying up worthless assets, for FDR's big public employment programs.  Obama made health care his biggest domestic priority, and although he passed it, it could not go into effect until 2013.  And, reflecting his own iron grip on his emotions, Obama failed to mobilize the nation's anger against the financial community--as FDR had--and allowed Republicans to mobilize it against him instead.  And so it was that just eighteen months into the Obama presidency, on July 5, 2011, I wrote what was until now the most important post that I have ever done here.  I could see that Obama was not going to undertake another New Deal, and that the era of corporate supremacy would continue into the High that would follow the crisis.  It was clear by then that he was about to lose the House of Representatives because he, unlike FDR, and failed to provide real relief to the American people in the first year and a half of the crisis.  And so he did, and he never regained it.

Neither I nor anyone else, however, realized how far the alienation of the American people from its bipartisan ruling elite had gone at that time.  Both Democratic and Republican politicians were still living off of the legacies of earlier generations--FDR, Kennedy and LBJ for the Democrats, and Reagan for the Republicans.  They had collaborated in the neoliberal policies of free trade and free markets that had stopped the economic progress of the lower half of the population while enriching the top few percent.  And the depth of their alienation from the voters opened up, for the first time, an opportunity for a complete outsider to upset the political order and move into the White House.

Much has been written about Donald Trump, but not enough of it, it seems to me, from a generational perspective--largely because the nation's editors don't want to recognize a fellow Boomer.  He (like George W. Bush before him, as I pointed out in one of my very first posts on this blog) is in key ways an archetypal Boomer, very reminiscent of the violent student radicals who first brought Boomers to the nation's attention in the late 1960s.  Like most of us, he owed his comfortable childhood to the successes of our parents' generation and specifically to his own father.  Like the protesters, he showed from the beginning of his career a complete contempt for established principles and ways of behaving.  Confronted by any opposition, he simply shouted it down, and he would never, under any circumstances, admit that he was wrong.  He turned himself and his name--not his buildings--into his product.  And he made a career of saying outrageous things--a key tactic of the student protesters who violated every language taboo as a means of disrupting society.  He started his presidential campaign in 2015 in exactly that way, and within less than a year he had wiped out the entire Republican establishment.  Using the same tactics in the general election, he won a narrow victory over Hillary Clinton, who like Kamala Harris embodied one of the principles of the new Democratic party: that gender and race were in themselves critical qualifications for high office, because women and minorities had earned high office to make up for centuries of oppression.

Trump in office repudiated three key tenets of status quo politicians: that immigration was good, that free trade benefited the US, and that we had a right and a duty to affect all critical conflicts overseas and to spread democracy.  None of those stances, as far as I can see, cost him any popularity among average Americans.  Because he was an outsider, he somehow grasped what no establishment figure ever has:  that much of our population no longer accepted much of what the establishment believed.  And he would almost surely have been re-elected in 2020, I think, had it not been for the third great crisis of the last 24 years, COVID.  The nation under his leadership took the critical step in combating that crisis, the development of an effective vaccine, but we were now so divided that the experience of the pandemic only made our divisions worse. Despite COVID, Trump very nearly did win re-election. When he lost, he violated yet another taboo, trying to subvert the electoral process and provoking an insurrection that led rioters inside the Capitol.

The election returned the Democratic establishment under Joe Biden--who had repeatedly failed to emerge as a national leader in his own right before becoming Vice President--to power.  The establishment now assumed that Trump had discredited himself among the voters by violating establishment taboos, and that they could safely ignore him.  When it began to be clear that he remained a threat, they turned to the criminal justice system to try to eliminate it.  Trump however had used his four years in office to pack the federal courts and the Supreme Court. Lower court judges have stalled or even tried to halt prosecutions against him, and the Supreme Court has now endorsed Richard Nixon's theory of the presidency--that presidents cannot, by definition, break the law in the execution of their duties.  A large portion of the population--at least 50 percent, as it turns out--views those prosecutions as politically motivated and unfair--and there is, I think, more than a grain of truth in those accusations, particularly as regards the New York state trial that convicted him.

Trump did threaten American democracy in November, December and January 2020-21, but the threat failed.  He had plans to threaten it again this year, but it turns out that he did not have to.  He has won a convincing victory fair and square, both for himself and for the Republicans in the Senate and in Congress.   And despite the loud wails of progressive op-ed columnists that have already begun, he did not win based on racism and sexism.  He won because, yet again, an administration had proven deaf to the needs of hundreds of millions of Americans--in this case, the need to combat inflation effectively--and had tried to insist that as responsible adults they had no alternative but to vote for Kamala Harris. Instead, 51 percent of them--including larger numbers of Hispanics and black Americans--voted for Trump, and large numbers stayed at home instead of voting for Harris.  To understand that vote we must put the question of threats to democracy into historical context.  Both Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt were accused of such threats, and of actually becoming dictators, at least as loudly and widely as Trump has been.  It is the nature of fourth turnings, when everything is up for grabs, for presidents to need, and use, emergency powers--something for which the Constitution even provides.  Their opposition always reacts violently.  People like myself endorse what Lincoln did and attack Trump because of their objectives.  But we are less than half of the electorate now.  Ironically, a New York Times headline this morning explains the result thusly: "Democracy Fears Lost Out to Everyday Worries."  The headline is wrong.  The CNN exit polls found that 35 percent of respondents thought democracy is "somewhat threatened" and 38 percent pronounced it "very threatened."  But they also found that of that 73  percent of the electorate, 37 percent--half--voted for Trump!  They hate our establishment for treating Trump, who has expressed many of their resentments as no one else could, as a threat that must be stopped by any means necessary.  In that very real sense, Tuesday's election was a victory for democracy--the rule of the people.

Trump is now, without question, the most significant American political figure of the twenty-first century.  He has reshaped American politics and will indeed reshape American government.  As much as anything else, he, with his Republican acolytes, want to go back 140 years and undo the first major reform of the post-civil war era, the creation of an independent federal civil service selected on merit and protected from political pressure.  He wants to further reshape our economy with new tariffs, and he wants to deport at least ten million immigrants whom our economy really needs.  He will also lift or avoid any new regulation of financial markets, including the new crypto market--steps that will surely lead at some point to yet another crash.  He has both a whole plan and a team-in-waiting to execute plans that may well change the federal government beyond recognition.  Elon Musk's emergence as a critical supporter and collaborator is tremendously significant--it unites Trump with one of the most powerful Silicon Valley disrupters and the newest, fastest-growing sectors of the economy. And as to what he will do in foreign policy, and what consequences it might have, I do not dare speculate.  His first challenge will be Benjamin Netanyahu's explicit desire--stated clearly months ago before Congress--to get the United States to join in a war with Iran.  That may turn out to be a hard sell, because Trump is a sincere isolationist and very risk-averse. Only time will tell.

It will have occurred to many readers that one question remains.  How has Trump, who has a very tenuous grip on reality, cannot absorb real information, and relies on intimidation to get himself through every situation he faces, won the allegiance of the American people?  Why has he not paid a penalty for his complete absence of self-restraint, both personal and political?  I have two answers.  First--trite though it may sound--there is a little bit of Donald Trump in all of us--as Sigmund Freud, among others, certainly understood.  All of us have chafed to some extent under traditional emotional and legal restraints and at some level have dreamt of denouncing them and letting ourselves go.  And indeed, that I think is why the media can't wait to headline Trump's latest outrage.  His rants are a new form of pornography--one apparently of which the public never tires.

More importantly, the loosening of those restraints--personally, culturally, intellectually, and politically--has been perhaps the biggest mission of the whole Boom generation since it reached young adulthood in the late 1960s.  Its first great political victory was the elimination of the military draft, that compelled young men to surrender two years of freedom--and perhaps their lives--for the common good.  They liberated the arts from restrictions on subject matter and language, and tore down successive strictures against various forms of sexual behavior.  They cut taxes and continued ending economic regulations.  They have legalized various forms of gambling.  They destroyed the respect for facts and traditions in my own profession of academia, with fateful consequences.  And under Bush II, they arrogated to the United States to undertake any war anywhere in the world that served its idea of a greater good.  Too many Boomers in too many fields have not allowed anything to stand in the way of what they wanted.  Seventy years ago, a giant of an earlier generation whom I had the great good fortune to meet, Edward R. Murrow, concluded his broadcast on the evils of another demagogue, Joe McCarthy, with a chilling quote from Shakespeare: "The fault, dear Brutus, was not in our stars, but in ourselves."  So it is again.  What my generation has done was only human.  The self-restraint which, as the Founders realized, was essential to make the American experiment work, had weighed upon too many generations for too long.  It could not, human nature being what it is, endure indefinitely, and it didn't.  It had indeed gone too far in some ways, and humanity has benefited from loosening some of those restraints.  Now it will fall to future generations to re-establish some of those restraints and enable us to live together and solve new problems in the large, cooperative communities which their vast numbers now need to survive.

On the eve

 I am not going to predict the outcome of Tuesday's election, despite a temptation to do so.  I have relied throughout the campaign on Nate Silver's analysis on his substack.  His model shows tiny gains on Harris's part over the last few days, but Trump still has a marginally higher percentage chance of winning--a gap that is really irrelevant since we are having this election only once, not at least 100 times.  A coin flip, in effect, will determine the winner.  At the same time, Silver's simulations find a good possibility that whoever wins may do so by a comfortable margin in the electoral college, because most of the seven swing states may well go the same way.  That would be blessing.  We are now in the position of a combat soldier facing two more months of a hazardous tour of duty or a patient awaiting the results of a biopsy or CT-scan that will determine whether they have a fatal disease.  Those situations, like this one, are so anxious that those involved would honestly prefer any outcome--even the worst one--to the continuation of their uncertainty.  I feel that way about the election, and it would be easy to write a few paragraphs on the probable sources or consequences of either a Trump or Harris victory to pretend that it didn't exist--but it does, and I am determined to live with it for about three more days, and maybe more.

The current New Yorker, however, includes a fascinating article by Nicholas Lemann on what the Biden economic policies are actually accomplishing, and how little political difference they have made.  I must have begun reading Lehmann in the late 1970s and I am now shocked to discover that he had only just graduated from college at that time, and that he is actually seven years younger than I am.  He has always been interested in the lives of ordinary people.  He runs down the major pieces of legislation that passed during Biden's first two years, and he argues (most debatably in my opinion) that they may have been more significant than what Lyndon Johnson managed to do.  He focuses on the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better Act, eventually passed as the disastrously renamed Inflation Reduction Act after Joe Manchin rejected it in its original form.  Those acts are reshaping parts of the American landscape with transportation improvements and new factories to build microchips, electric cars, and clean energy technology.  Politically, however, they seem to have had no impact whatever, partly because Kamala Harris never talks about them.  Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has been the administration's point man traveling the country to inaugurate new projects, but the media, as far as I can see, ignores him.  This, as Lemann mentions at one point, contrasts with FDR, whose measures had an immediate impact, and who spent a lot of time traveling the country to speak at the dams and bridges and other projects.  That is why the Democrats increased their Senate and House majorities in both 1934 and 1936.   

It does seem that great things nowadays take a lot longer to accomplish than they did in the middle third of the twentieth century--if they can be accomplished at all.  Compare the interstate highway system to the California high-speed rail project, for instance.  The marketing failure, however, is another matter Joe Biden spent 36 years in one of the safest Senate seats in the country, working behind the scenes.  He failed in two attempts to market himself to the American people as a presidential candidate before becoming vice president.  More importantly, successive Democratic presidents from Clinton onward have spent their political capital on one or two pieces of legislation during their first two years--usually getting one of them, in Biden's case getting three--only to lose the House of Representatives in the midterms, and with that, any chance of doing anything further.   Obama got Obamacare, but it took another three years to roll it out, and the roll-out was a public relations disaster.  Biden in his first few years did nothing about the issue the voters cared about most--inflation.  Rather than focus on their actual accomplishments, Biden and then Harris made Donald Trump the biggest issue in the campaign, continually repeating that his election was an entirely unacceptable outcome--even though half the country obviously disagrees.  Harris has emphasized this even more in the last few days of the campaign, while promising, like Clinton, Obama and Biden before her, to help the middle class.

Two things, it seems to me, are hurting the Democratic establishment in our era.  The first is the sense that their policy proposals are so obviously right that they don't have to explain them to the nation.  That was how they handled NAFTA and other trade agreements, and Obama's finance-friendly, "top-down" approach to recovery from the Great Recession.   The second is the rise of Trump, which has convinced them that not being Trump should secure their victory.  That strategy failed in 2016, barely succeeded in 2020, and has a 50-50 chance of succeeding now.  Balancing that, perhaps, are the Dobbs decision and new red state abortion laws, which have given the Democrats what looks like a winning social issue.  

Nearly half a century of neoliberalism has left much of our population in a precarious economic state.  I have been struck by the complete failure of the government to even try to affect inflation--quite a contrast to our last bout with inflation in the late 1960s and all through the next decade, when Nixon may have saved his presidency by imposing wage and price controls.  Lemann shows that Biden did take some long-term steps to improve the lot of ordinary Americans in the heartland--but those steps had to be highlighted and sold.  The administration preferred to fill its favorite newspapers with headlines about Donald Trump's legal problems, which have not captured the country's admiration.