The political situation in the United States is bleak. The next president is an authoritarian who has promised mass deportation, the escalation of catastrophic climate change, and the replacement of public health experts with quacks. He is planning to collaborate with the richest man on earth, a delusional conspiratorial transphobic union-buster, on eviscerating the federal government (while making dumb jokes in the process). Trump has started making appointments, and they are dreadful. Immediately, his posture as an anti-war candidate was revealed to be a sham, as foreign policy hawks like Mike Huckabee and Elise Stefanik were offered key roles. He is putting a climate change denier in charge of the environment, a Fox News host who lobbied for pardoning war criminals as the new Secretary of Defense, and vicious, hateful bigot Stephen Miller as the new Deputy Chief of Staff. Trump is only getting started. And as my colleague Alex Skopic has pointed out, you can’t count on #Resistance types to successfully challenge Trump as he tries to enact the Project 2025 agenda, because many are more committed to the rules of decorum than to stopping authoritarian governance from taking hold. (That’s why Democrats are today congratulating Trump on his victory despite yesterday calling him a fascist!)

The possibilities for a second Trump term are alarming. Further rollbacks in abortion rights, a war on the labor movement, a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests, the deportation of families who have been in the U.S. for decades—we don’t know exactly what we’re going to see, but we know it’ll be bad. Given Trump’s rhetoric about “internal enemies” and his vice president’s warmth toward outright fascist thinking, people are right to be scared about what could happen. But if there is any silver lining here, it is that Trump’s election may well actually open up a remarkable opportunity for those of us who aim to build a powerful socialistic alternative to establishment politics.

Here’s why: First, Trump is incompetent at actually running a government. His first term showed that. He is not a strategic thinker. He watches cable news all day, and makes impulsive decisions based on what he sees. He accomplished little in his first term. He might be more effective in his second term, but Trump seems more unfocused than ever. He’s the same age as Joe Biden was when he became president in 2021, and we know that the rigors of the presidency proved very difficult for Biden to handle at his age, and he rapidly declined in his capacities (a fact that was carefully concealed from the public, which is part of why we’re in this mess). We also know that Republican policies are deeply unpopular. The American public did not want Roe v. Wade overturned. They don’t want environmental protections gutted. They don’t want to face an escalating climate catastrophe. They don’t want the rich to get richer while their own wages stagnate, which is what the Republican party stands for. If Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy do succeed in gutting the federal government, public services will be in shambles and people will be upset.

In this way, Republicans are now like “the dog that caught the car.” The dog chases and chases the car, but if it ever catches it, it realizes immediately that it has no idea what to do with a car. Republicans thrive in opposition, where they can denounce bureaucracy, call everything socialist,and promise that if elected they will bring about a glorious era of greatness and plenty. When they are elected, however, it rapidly becomes clear that they can’t govern. The Bush administration launched a disastrous war and ended in a massive financial crisis. The Trump administration proved totally incapable of handling a public health emergency and rapidly became unpopular as it became clear that Trump’s “populist” agenda was a fraud, that he in fact operated in the interests of his fellow billionaires rather than the “forgotten men and women” he had spoken of in his 2016 RNC speech. 

So I do not think there is much of a risk that Donald Trump is going to build a lasting, popular right-wing government. I think he’s going to be a bit like Jair Bolsonaro was in Brazil; in other words, a hot mess. Trump has thin Congressional majorities and Republicans easily descend into squabbling with one another, meaning that it will be tough for them to put through major legislation. There are Congressional elections again in two years. I do not think an aging, meandering Donald Trump is going to succeed in abolishing American democracy in two years, although I do think he’s going to put through a lot of awful regulations and send this country into chaos. I also think Trump sets a terrible tone for the country, because he encourages us to be paranoid, unthinking, and hateful toward one another. I’m worried what a generation of young people whose role models are Donald Trump and Elon Musk are going to be like when they grow up.

But Trump’s failure gives us a window to build the alternative. The Democratic Party establishment has completely discredited itself. It forced its preferred candidate through the primary successfully in 2016, and then she lost to Trump. It thwarted Bernie Sanders again in 2020, and only barely squeaked into the White House (partly because Trump started killing his own voters via pandemic negligence, a lucky break for Biden). Then Joe Biden’s presidency proved spectacularly unpopular. This year, the Democrats flopped miserably, even losing the popular vote. They have failed us all and should never be listened to again. 

There is an alternative: a powerful social democratic coalition that speaks to people’s real needs, that talks plain English rather than in “word salad,” that takes the fight to the ultra-rich, and that encourages people to “fight for someone they don’t know.” Bernie Sanders showed this kind of inspiring political program in action. It’s branded “radical,” but that’s complete nonsense. Sanders was talking about offering people basic things that are already realities in countries around the world, like free healthcare and paid family leave. This kind of politics, which is grounded in the labor movement and puts working people’s needs at the center of its agenda, can win. 

Some Democrats are starting to wake up to this fact. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut explained the basic revelation that he had: 

“When progressives like Bernie aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists. Why? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base… Real economic populism should be our tentpole.” 

Now, the Democratic Party is so captured by corporate interests that it will be very hard for it to change course. Even Medicare For All makes them jittery, because they would have to fight with the private insurance industry in order to get it done. But Medicare For All should be the starting point of a political movement that can win again. Free healthcare is the baseline. A new politics not only guarantees that people’s health will be taken care of, but promises to end homelessness, reform our grotesque criminal punishment system, pursue peace and justice internationally, and make sure that nobody has to live in deprivation and despair in a land of abundance. A new politics speaks in inspiring, unifying language that is backed up with concrete proposals that will help people build power in their workplace and feel more in control of their lives. As historian Harvey Kaye has pointed out, we don’t need to look to the Nordic countries for inspiration here. We have an inspiring homegrown American social democratic tradition that stretches from Thomas Paine to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The philosophers of solidarity, like Eugene V. Debs, provided the model. We need to look back at how they talked, what they dreamed of, and start anew building something worth believing in that will make right-wing political views look as ugly and insipid as they are. It will be a big project. It will require building new organizations, new media outlets, new unions. It will require a hell of a lot of work by millions of people around the country. But we are at a unique moment in history, and we must seize that moment to create a powerful alternative to Trumpism. If we don’t, as George Orwell warned, the human future will look like nothing but “a boot stamping on a human face forever.” It doesn’t need to be that way. We can do this.