Getting it Right, and Still Getting it Wrong
Don’t get me wrong: I love foreign aid. I believe in the interconnectedness of nations and that we are one indivisible human family. Call me cosmopolitan, a Soros internationalist, but that’s the political faith that I was raised in, the idea that we are supposed to hold hands with one another and raise the condition of human beings everywhere.
Against that background, this administration is a disaster, a small-minded, inward-looking, fearful entity, terrified of contamination and the dilution of the race. For Donald Trump, every country is a shit-hole and, with the exception of Russia, he’d like to trash them all. Russian exceptionalism is his signature commitment. Tariffs apply to everyone else. The same for access to the crown jewels of data. If Rachel Maddow was right last night, Russian hackers were welcomed into the inner sanctum and are now de facto overlords of the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board). Where that leads is way above my pay grade.
Democrats have been right to protest this assault. Foreign aid was Musk’s first designated target, and it brought prominent Democrats out into the streets. The agency that managed soft power for decades (USAID) was quickly packed into a handful of bankers’ boxes and carried away by its humiliated workforce. Senator Warner of Pennsylvania called it a tragedy, the dismantling of an essential tool of diplomacy.
No one would say that Warner had it wrong. The problem is that it made for tin-eared politics. No similar outcry has emerged for Medicaid, or diabetes research for underaged patients, or mental health agencies in states like Oklahoma where essential programs are being shuttered as we speak. If the problem in the last election was a failure of empathy, an inattention to the status of the working poor, and the enormous burden of just getting by, the collapse of foreign aid is a secondary issue. That doesn’t mean secondary status or importance. It means that if we take to streets, we need to do so in a way that communicates all our priorities, including low-income Americans who are being slammed by their sufferings.
The alternative is to lose again. We may be right to imagine that support for the administration is slipping, but Americans will not return to the Democratic Party unless it embraces a populist agenda of supermarket politics, social welfare supports, and equitable taxes. Hating Trump, Musk, and Vance will not be sufficient.