Democrats’ Policies Help Americans. The Right Wing Echo-Chamber Drowned Them Out

I’ve had a job since I was 14 years old. I’ve spent most of it working in the service industry. I have always been part of the working class here in America. The characteristics of the working class that apply to me are: food and beverage service, low to moderate income, and tipped hourly wages. While the working class had been defined as those without a higher education, I have both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. However, the changing job market has demonstrated that having advanced degrees does not automatically lead to professional or high-paying employment. 

Don’t I know it. Education is not the sole determinant of class. 

Imagine my frustration when Bernie Sanders blew the dust off his 2016 talking points to say, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party, which has abandoned working-class people, would find that the working class has abandoned them.” He clearly wasn’t talking about me, a working-class Black and Latina woman who voted for Kamala Harris. 

Bernie Sanders was talking about working-class white men. 

The Vermont senator was joined by a chorus of men lamenting the loss of the coveted white working-class vote. Sen. Chris Murphy, pontificated “the hard truth is this: Democrats clearly aren’t listening.” 

Ninety-four percent of Black women voters voted for the Democratic ticket. 

Democratic strategist James Carville said, “It’s going to take an election cycle to get the stench of [woke] language off of the Democratic Party.” After winning his election, Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi preemptively sucked up to the MAGA majority by throwing the trans community under the bus, and yelled at Democrats to “stop pandering to the far left” for good measure.

All of these men conveniently forgot the Democratic Party hasn’t garnered a majority of white voters, male or female, since 1964 when President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texas Democrat, signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law. The majority of white voters were so aggrieved that Black voters had protections against discrimination and access to the ballot box, that they took their ballots and went home to the Republican Party, where they’ve remained for over 60 years. 

Then there is Latina Washington Post reporter Sabrina Rodríguez and Black Republican pundit Shermichael Singleton promoting the right-wing talking point that the majority of Trump voters— regardless of their demographics—was driven by concerns over the cost of living, exemplified by, “the price of eggs.”

Which one of them is correct?

None of them. 

Those pundits’ failed to historically contextualize this election. Not one of their appraisals is taking into account how disinformation, dehumanization, and the multi-billion-dollar, multimedia right-wing-echo chamber impacted this election. That echo chamber effectively, if not hypocritically, used the populist trick of dubbing the Democratic Party as “the elites” while anointing the GOP as “regular guys” who just happen to have gold toilets and are funded by billionaires with spaceships. 

Now is the time for punditry to give way to experts in disinformation (e.g., Michael A. Spikes), economics (e.g., Heather McGee, Darrick Hamilton), or historians (e.g., Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Cas Mudde, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi). We need to learn the hard truths about our country, what it prioritizes, devalues, and why the election gave us the results that it did. 

Today I turn to two Jewish scholars, Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, who specialized in sociology and psychology. Löwenthal and Guterman fled Germany for America in 1933 when Hitler came into power. They quickly ascertained that fascism was already embedded in America and not unique to Europe. In 1930s America, they witnessed extreme nationalist rhetoric, appeals to a “pure” national identity, and “scapegoating” of minorities.

In their book Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator in 1949, Löwenthal and Guterman warned an American demagogue could ascend to power if democratic norms and economic conditions had deteriorated by tapping into collective anxieties, exploiting divisions, and by cultivating “dupes.” Dupes, according to Löwenthal and Guterman, are the fascist’s “followers” who are particularly susceptible to rhetoric, manipulation, and who would act against their best interests. Löwenthal and Guterman predicted someone like Trump, writing, “He uses the language of an adolescent gang leader …[he offers] nebulous solutions … without the substance of concrete plans [italics mine].”

 

An American Agitator Takes Power

There’s a scene in Prophets of Deceit where passengers on a bus are frustrated by how slow and overcrowded it is. A female passenger—let’s call her, Kamala Harris—offers practical solutions: We should add more buses and bus routes. Some buses will go express, others local. This will end the crowding and people will get to their destinations quicker. An agitator—let’s call him Trump—steps in to capitalize on the passengers’ immediate frustrations. He blames the overcrowding on the influx of migrants—with no evidence. It redirects the passengers’ frustration toward a specific group giving them a common enemy, but doesn’t actually address, let alone fix the passengers’ issues. That’s because “the agitator’s appeal is directed to those who feel themselves to be dispossessed and betrayed; he offers them a scapegoat and a promise.” Trump has offered multiple scapegoats and a vague promise “to Make America Great Again.”

Creating an Enemy

When Trump descended down his golden staircase in 2015 to announce his bid for the presidency he deployed the full fascist handbook in one speech. What was at the center of Trump’s presidential announcement was xenophobia, nationalism, and glaringly obvious, a call to action for white supremacists.  

In James Baldwin’s essay “On Being ‘White’… and Other Lies,” he wrote:

“No one was white before he came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country … whiteness was an attempt to forge unity through shared power rather than shared humanity.”  

Baldwin said it would take generations for the vast majority of Americans to consider themselves white, and non-white Americans to perceive proximity to whiteness as power. During this election season, Trump offered not just proximity to whiteness for non-white Americans but access to “class solidarity” over “racial, ethnic, and gender solidarity”—what Baldwin referred to  as a “forged unity.” He also gave his prospective voters multiple enemies to unite against: “the elite” Democrats, migrants, and the transgender community. 

Deteriorating Conditions

Löwenthal and Guterman believed sociopolitical and economic conditions would have to deteriorate over time for an American agitator to take power. The conditions include: economic instability, disillusionment with established institutions, social fragmentation and alienation, cultural and racial tensions. According to Löwenthal and Guterman, for an agitator like Trump to come into power, conditions didn’t actually have to deteriorate fully. He would just need to manipulate public perceptions so they believe conditions are far worse than they are through psychological manipulation and the empty promise of restoration and glory. 

While there is much room for improvement, the last four years have shown we were far from collapse. Under President Biden, inflation hit its lowest level in three years, the unemployment rate hit an all-time low, and the administration added 800,000 manufacturing jobs to the economy. Democrats introduced Raise the Wage Act to gradually raise the federal minimum wage to $17 per hour, pushed for Affordable Healthcare Expansion, and introduced the PRO Act to strengthen workers’ rights to organize and collectively bargain. Republicans, spurred on by corporate interests,  blocked or stalled them all. For decades, Republicans punted on Democratic legislation aimed at alleviating economic hardships, aiding families, and expanding rights.

Republican policies like Ronald Reagan’s Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 and Donald Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 have led to sky-high payouts for conglomerates’ CEOs—and wage stagnation for the working class and a deep chasm of income inequality. These economic issues have caused or exacerbated other American crises: opioid addiction, the loneliness epidemic, and gun violence—all of these are issues Republicans have mostly prevented from being confronted and aided by Congress.

Many Americans can’t distinguish the policy differences between the two parties. Republicans take advantage of that, claiming credit for policies they didn’t support. Americans’ lack of basic civics knowledge and our consumption of media from unvetted sources has made many of us susceptible to disinformation. 

Disinformation

Legacy newspapers and Beltway media spent most of the last nine years sanitizing Trump’s racist rhetoric, and normalizing and sanewashing fascist warnings. Many capitulated to their CEO’s blocking endorsements, or worried about alienating viewers by taking a  “whataboutism” and “bothsiderism” stance in journalism, that supposedly Democratic “liberal echo chamber.”

On the other hand, the right wing has a mammoth echo chamber, which encompasses cable, film, newspapers, YouTube streaming, social media, podcasts, and radio worth billions of dollars. It first got its footing during the Cold War to push anti-communist propaganda and conspiracy theories. Today’s right-wing echo chamber started in earnest during 1970 when Roger Ailes sent a memo to Richard Nixon, with the title, “A Plan for Putting the GOP on Television.” It was then the right-wing echo chamber got its motto: “People Are Lazy: The Thinking Is Done for You.” 

The purpose of right-wing disinformation is to keep Republicans in power by fostering bigotry and polarizing narratives to prevent people from uniting against corporate interests. While they have been very effective for the right wing, they have harmed us as a democracy, a body politic, and greatly injured its own audience. There have been numerous studies examining the psychological harm disinformation can cause from increased anxiety, stress, and behavioral consequences such as rejecting medical treatment (e.g., anti-vaccine movements). 

Disinformation influenced who participated, and who did not, in this election. It sowed distrust in democratic processes, and more specifically, a distrust of the Democratic Party. 

What’s next?

History dictates that being governed by a fascist leads to devastating outcomes. Trump wants to appoint a white supremacist to lead the Pentagon as his defense secretary and has proposed a cabinet that will be “the least diverse cabinet this century.” Trump has always told us who he is—a self-interested white supremacist. 

Democrats made the mistake of relying too heavily on legacy media for public education, to impress upon Americans that Trump is an existential threat to the nation and our democracy, and to report policy differences between the two parties. Of course, that did not happen in large part because Democrats assumed many of us still consume the majority of our news from legacy media. We don’t. 

A journalist posted on Threads: “The general silence of most elected Democrats right now is unacceptable. We need to hear them expressing their opposition to the danger loud and clear.” It was our responsibility to elect Democrats into power and give them the majorities they needed to pass legislation to aid us. Much of the body politic tried, despite the multiple obstacles, but we came up short. Kamala Harris offered solutions, but Trump offered enemies. Kamala Harris talked about how to move our nation forward, but grievances and racial resentments were louder. Democrats aren’t silent, they’re just not in power—to the detriment of us all. 

If the Democratic Party wants to survive this shameful moment in our nation’s history, we’ll need to rebuild from the foundation up. We must center the voices who’ve consistently shown up for the party, promote new leaders that have a proven track record of winning elections, and understand that the consultants who knew how to win elections in the 1990s don’t understand how elections are won in the current environment. We’ll need a plan to counter the right-wing echo chamber with our own robust media. That won’t be easy or cheap. Above all, we should never compromise our values. We’re the party of Healthcare, Civil Rights, and Voting Rights. Our party—indeed our “forged unity” needs to to be the party of Human Rights at home and abroad.