The American Promise is Broken

Rebranding Liberalism in the Nearly-Post-Trump Era

In our lifetimes, it’s never been this bad, but we’ve also never been so abundantly poised to make things better.

Looking back, however, it’s not hard to figure out how we got here. The mileposts are dotted across the landscape. Back in 1968, the head of a household could work a minimum wage job at $1.50 an hour and support a family of three above the poverty line, according to a 2014 study by the Economic Policy Institute. The numbers today are likely far worse.

That means one income could support a family. They could celebrate birthdays, take vacations and at the end of the month, they didn’t have to worry about buying food or paying the rent or mortgage. People may not have been rich, but they were comfortable — a word that doesn’t apply to the more than 60 percent of Americans today who say they cannot afford a $1,000 emergency.

That’s not right. That’s not proper. That’s not American. The promise of America has always been that if you worked hard, paid your taxes and stayed diligent that you would not only have a good life, but that you’d also be able to give your children better than you had.

My point is simple: The American Promise has been broken, and liberals are the only ones invested in restoring it.

I know this because every single act that has eroded that promise emerged from the Republican Party. After liberals passed legislation like Medicare, Social Security, The Clean Air Act, The Clean Water Act, The Civil Rights Act and The Voting Rights Act, Republicans were working on reducing the top tax rate to only 37 percent, gutting the mental health safety net and paving the way for managed care to increase the cost of healthcare to support their hunger for profits. The rich stopped paying their fair share — or practically any share — as Congress opened up tax loopholes more numerous than the lies the GOP told us as they did it.

They told us all the wealth being redistributed to the wealthiest robber barons would “trickle down” to the working class. Of course, we now know from dozens of studies and statistics that was a lie so big, it tanked the economic opportunities for two entire generations.

Even today, as liberals passed, without any votes from the GOP, the most sweeping economic stimulus and poverty reform bill of the century, conservatives are desperately attempting to distract their base with mindless culture wars about Dr. Seuss and Pepe Le Pew. Worse, it’s working, because of the GOP’s endless campaign since the days of Lee Atwater and the Reagan Administration’s strategy of telling a lie loud enough and long enough that it becomes the truth. Today, with the help of Russian hackers and other digital ne’er-do-wells, the GOP has made facts and even reality itself irrelevant.

As a consequence, while the majority of Americans welcome stimulus checks and other benefits, the core GOP base is awaiting the re-emergence of Trump as president from the depths of evidence-free conspiracy theories that have included President Biden working from a movie set while the military arrests Oprah and executes Tom Hanks for imagined acts of immorality.

But we should not be daunted, because this is what it means to be a liberal in America today. It means we must work to make facts, science and reality relevant again, never bowing to the unreality promulgated by conservatives and their buffoonish GOP standard bearers.

The watchword of our democracy must be vigilance, just as our efforts to undermine the GOP’s greedy, evil cabal must be relentless. We must vote in every election, local, state and federal. We must shout louder and longer the truth of our society, which has marginalized all but the wealthiest of white families. We must not bend to the will of those who would elevate themselves by standing on our bodies.

The America we want — the America we NEED — is closer to our grasp than it has been in the last 50 years. We must not allow this opportunity to restore the Promise of America to pass.

(Tony Panaccio is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Narrative Coalition, jotnc.com, and a longtime liberal political consultant and columnist.)