Empty Promises: Harris and Trump’s Neglect of the Middle Class
By Todd Davis
Neither Harris nor Trump Would Provide Help For Middle Class Americans
Kamala Harris’s campaign ads bombard the streaming services proclaiming the middle class makes America stronger. She promises to help working Americans while Donald Trump will give tax breaks to wealthy corporations. Rich irony considering it is billionaires and those corporations donating to her campaign that allows her to saturate the media space with this message. An informed voter might recall Harris has been in the Biden Administration for the last four years when the middle class has suffered the highest rate of inflation most living Americans have ever seen driving prices of everything from cars to groceries into the budget-breaking stratosphere.
Trump, albeit belatedly, pointed out in his closing statement during the Presidential Debate on ABC that Harris isn’t likely to do anything for viewers and voters saying,
So she just started by saying she’s going to do this, she’s going to do that. She’s going to do all these wonderful things. Why hasn’t she done it? She’s been there for three and a half years.
And yet, even though Trump has a working-class populist as his running mate in J.D. Vance, the governing apparatus of the Republican Party still is entrenched in the archaic thinking of Willard Romney and Paul Ryan; cut taxes for the “job creators”, cut benefits for Americans to pay for this, unleash rugged individualism on the country where the 1% become fabulously wealthy and the 40% slough along as a serf class supporting the luminaries of society.
Teamsters Union Won’t Endorse
Teamsters International, a transportation union with 1.3 million members, declined to endorse either presidential candidate, the first time this has happened in three decades. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien gave a fiery pro-labor speech at the Republican National Convention this summer, becoming the first person in his position to speak at the event. This speaks to the success of American populism that is trying to drag the Republican Party into the 21st century. Internal Teamsters polling suggests 59% of its members wanted the union to endorse Trump. Hundreds of thousands of union workers know they will get next to no consideration from Harris.
Trump has a dismal record when it comes to unions. He has his own four years of history where one might ask why he didn’t do something for the millions of Americans who support him. The MAGA base that adores Trump is the middle class and the working poor of all races and backgrounds. They have flocked to Trump because they realize Democrats only care about them for 90 days every four years offering hope and change that never comes. Democrats of 2024 aren’t the Democrats of 1964. Today’s Democrats are financed by Mark Cuban-style billionaires pushing a corporate agenda wrapped in a shiny inclusive package. In a two-party system, America can’t afford to have two corporate parties that could care less about the economic status of two-thirds of the country. And yet, that’s exactly where the country stands.
The Working Class Paradox
Where will American workers turn when neither party cares about them except for the small window of time when both parties feed them empty promises about a prosperous future? Under the Harris/Biden Administration, life has gotten worse for the majority of Americans even as stock markets pad the pockets of the corporate interests that fund the coffers of both political parties. Corporations recorded a staggering increase in profits of 9.9% in 2022 followed by another increase of 3.3% in 2023. Inflation hasn’t affected them, they’ve increased in profits by almost 14% in two years. Meanwhile, the price of food products has nearly doubled. All of that money has been stolen from the pockets of Americans under the auspices of inflation. The end result of the amalgamation of capital looks like this.
Aside from the crippling economic pressure neither party has put a plan forward to alleviate, Americans face social issues that tear apart what remains of their communities that have been stripped of God, fathers, and home ownership. People have expectations that their communities will not be overrun by immigrants who don’t share a common cultural background, religion, and history. The Harris/Biden Administration has allowed over 200,000 Haitians to come into the country. Haiti is one of the worst countries in the North American hemisphere and while it is impossible to make generalizations about an entire group of people, if you’ve destroyed your own country and make no attempts to assimilate into the American way of life, what do you think is going to happen here?
Conversely, the Republican Party remains obsessed with a pull-yourself-up-the-bootstraps mentality. Instead of showing a willingness to accept a variety of lifestyles the GOP wants to beat into everyone that you must work, consume, and then die. Yes, unregulated capitalism is amazing for the 1% but more and more the American dream only applies to that 1%. Messaging from the Republicans continues to boil down to you having to rely on yourself despite all the money floating around in the country. Programs and benefits that might help you are the first to be cut and the first to be denounced as “socialism”. In America, corporate socialism is embraced, and individual socialism is vilified. If, as we’ve been told in Citizens United, corporations are people too in regards to campaign finance, which amounts to the influence of elections, why aren’t they individuals when it comes to the lens through which socialism is applied? It’s almost like the whole thing is rigged.
Voting Based on Emotional Appeal
Back in 2016, Trump tapped into that, it’s rigged. Rigged against you. You can’t succeed because we have allowed defacto monopolies like Walmart and Amazon to crush any competition. Those same monopolies fund campaigns and buy politicians to ensure the same policy remains in place. America is an oligarchy and I’ll fight for you. Except he didn’t. Trump didn’t build a wall to stop the immigration invasion that Biden allowed. Trump cut taxes for all those rich donors who funded his campaign, like every politician before him.
Harris is equally indebted to these corporations, more so in fact. Almost all the Silicon Valley money, the new Wall Street, is behind Harris and the Democrats. Why do they choose to push for Democrats over Republicans? Because it makes them feel good. The faux moral superiority. And therein lies the choice facing voters this fall. Policy isn’t going to change regardless of who moves into the White House so voters are left deciding between competing emotional appeals.
Voting for Democrats and Kamala Harris feeds the moral yearning people have to feel superior, to be on the side of the just. Forget for a moment that Democrats are currently engaged in a catastrophic war in Ukraine and another war where they support a theocratic state in Israel waging genocide on the Palestinian people. Democrats allow you to believe that you have evolved, you are enlightened, you are woke. Voting for Harris provides a single-serving white savior adrenaline rush. Ecce Homo! Modern version. If God is Dead, neoliberalism has provided a solution.
A vote for Trump is also an emotional choice. Deep down, people likely know that Trump isn’t going to solve their problems. They know that Trump is only doing this for himself. The only time he got agitated in the Presidential Debate was when Harris mocked the size of his crowd at his political rallies. Politics is all vanity for Trump. An extension of his reality shows. Every rally from Des Moines to Detroit to a mini-Trump Tower erected in the heartland. Trumpism for flyover country that never could afford to get to Atlantic City. These people, these poor increasingly destitute people who are having everything stripped from them cling to Trump as he promises that although he knows they are being replaced, forgotten, and left behind he has empathy for them. He’s listening to them. And you know what, maybe he is. No one else is. The American middle class has been reduced to the role of a faithful dog willing to take whatever comes its way if only it can get an occasional pat on the head.
Decline, Division and Dreams
Democrats have been in power for 12 of the last 16 years. Attributing all the problems of the country to Trump, the Baba Yaga of American politics, is a degree of gaslighting rarely seen on the national scale in this country. The social fabric of America has been torn apart by neoliberal ideology over the last two decades. Democrats have largely been responsible for this and Democrats have no intention of changing their messaging. Racial triggering and instigation are good for their business model. Perched high in their academic or corporate ivory towers they are oblivious to the chaos this has sown on the ground. America is now a more divided country than at any time in the last half-century. Contrary to their accusations, it is not Trump dividing America it is Democratic social philosophy that reduces everyone to their skin color or sexual orientation.
Republican politics are so disorganized they are unable to capitalize on this and offer Americans something better. Where is the Republican version of hope and change? Who was the last Republican that offered any working-class American hope? George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism? How did that turn out? Two decades of war.
Pitting Americans against each other, fermenting the idea of civil war, sowing discord might seem like a splendid way to keep the oligarchs in power; and it is, unless you leave people without hope. Oligarchy aims for political nihilism, it wants people to give up, but this is America, not Europe. Americans aren’t going to go quietly into the dark night. You can’t pull out Meryl Streep on a pandering interview with Oprah and expect Americans are going to fall over themselves for the AI construct that is Kamala Harris. Struggling people in Madison and Milwaukee don’t care what Meryl says. The entire smug charade of the affair only causes rage. These are “elites” talking down to you, telling you to shut up, do what is good for them, accept what we’ve made America, and go eat cake.
When neither party offers a path forward, when citizens see their children can’t get jobs because of their skin color, can’t buy houses because all the wealth has been transferred out of the middle class, and have no electoral way to change this machine, people in America are not going to meekly accept their loss of the American dream.
What happens to a dream deferred?
