When I look back on all of my work over the last 30 years, one of the projects I’m most proud of is Meltdown , an audio series I did in 2021 with acclaimed director Alex Gibney that reveals the untold story of how Obama-era Democrats turning promises of economic hope and change into more of the same created the backlash conditions for the rise of Donald Trump.
It is a miracle Meltdown ever got made, because calling its tale “untold” is an understatement. The story of Obama’s 2008 victory concluding with Trump’s 2016 win involves a sequence of economic facts and events that have been suppressed, shadowbanned, memory-holed, and censored from America’s political conversation. This is particularly true in media outlets that serve liberals, who seek comfort in the idea that Trump is an anomaly rather than a symptom of something their own political party participated in creating.
Every now and again, there are attempts to warn about this perpetual doom loop. Gibney and I did so ourselves after Meltdown debuted in the pages of Rolling Stone , where we cautioned against Democrats coming into office promising big New Deal-style economic changes, then mostly delivering only for their big donors. We warned that such a bait-and-switch would result in the inevitable backlash from disillusioned voters who would ignore syrupy odes to restoring democratic “norms” and decide once again to vote for a Joker-style candidate like Trump promising to blow up the entire system.
The piece went viral, but the message went largely unheard amid Democratic politicians and pundits insinuating that voters were insufficiently grateful for Joe Biden’s allegedly wonderful economy.
Fast forward five years and we are on the verge of the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries. For the most part, Democrats and their media outlets are still soothing themselves with the fraudulent story of Trump as an anomaly rather than a symptom and still promoting the politics of restoration rather than transformation. Indeed, the over-the-top celebration of Barack Obama’s new $800 million monument to himself was an example of this desperate pining for a return to a pre-Trump normal — even though that “normal” was what created Trump in the first place, and even though restoring such a “normal” could create the conditions for an even worse Trump in the future.
So it is time for another alarm to sound — and thankfully, a new paper has provided one. And this particular warning is backed by reams of economic data.
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The Doom-Loop Data
The paper from researchers at the Institute for New Economic Thinking is entitled “A Revolution of Falling Expectations: The Macroeconomic Roots of Popular Discontent.” It’s a wonky title that undersells what it is trying to warn us about.
The first part of the paper debunks the idea — loudly promoted by Democratic pundits — that Bidenomics was fundamentally changing America’s economic structure in positive ways. Yes, Biden’s administration did more for the working class than Obama’s, and with way less political capital. But at the end of Biden’s time in office, the overwhelming beneficiaries of Biden’s economic policy were people who were already wealthy.
According to the paper, by the end of Biden’s term, median household income was only 0.6 percent above 2019 (considerably below the pre-COVID trend), median family income only 1.5 percent higher, real compensation remained about 5 percent below its pre-pandemic trend, union coverage had declined, and the income needed to afford a median home had risen to $120,000 – 44 percent above median income. Meanwhile, the top 10 percent captured more than $21 trillion in new wealth.
These data points are a long-overdue corrective to an insidious narrative against so-called “deliverism” — the FDR-themed idea that politicians delivering for voters prompts them to support said politicians. After the 2024 election, elite pundits began insisting that Democrats should never again assume delivering material gains for voters wins elections because Biden supposedly did that, and Democrats still lost.
“Why ‘Deliverism’ Didn’t Deliver for the Democrats” read The Bulwark headline, with a subhead: “The Biden team bet on big legislation. Voters didn’t care.”
Similarly, “the attempt to make electoral hay out of well-designed policy alone must be counted as a failure,” wrote a pair of professors in an essay headlined “The Democrats’ Big — and Failed — Bet.”
The New York Times capped off the oeuvre by concluding that “the Biden administration’s deliverism strategy failed to deliver politically.”
In all this commentary, pundits pretentiously cast voters as stupid rubes so entranced by attention-economy vibes rather than the tangible economy that they will no longer reward politicians who improve things. But as the INET paper proves, this whole line of argument against “deliverism” is specious, because Biden didn’t actually deliver.
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“The ‘bad vibes’ narrative pins responsibility for Kamala Harris’s 2024 loss on ungrateful voters who do not appreciate Bidenomics’ successes… [but] Bidenomics was not in any way transformative,” note the paper’s researchers, Thomas Ferguson, Servaas Storm and Jie Chen. “In the end it was but a steady continuation of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Obama status quo that has hardwired deep structural inequalities into America’s economic development.”
This is the Democratic Doom Loop — a party that overpromises when it is out of power, then underdelivers (for everyone other than its donors) when it is in power — prompting voters to then angrily vote for a GOP that promises to destroy the whole system. And yet, discussion of this doom loop remains stifled by establishment Democrats and their media apparatchiks self-servingly promoting the notion of Trump as an outlier rather than a manifestation.
“Most of the Democratic establishment has reassured itself that Trump is an anomaly, a freak outlier, and that Trump’s voters are either irredeemable bigots (‘deplorables’) or gullible manipulated by social media,” the paper’s authors write. “These Democrats believe that Trump can be removed from office by exposing corruption, by fact-checking misinformation, by electing the ‘right’ charismatic Democrat and by better ‘communicating’ their otherwise little-changed economic policies, including free trade — and this will then return America to ‘normalcy.’ The problem with this narrative is that it ignores the material and structural factors that led to Trump’s rise in the first place and the long-term erosion of the social underpinnings of America’s economy. Trump is the symptom, not the disease.”
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Restoration vs. Transformation
Breaking this doom loop is crucial — both for the future of the Democratic Party and the country. But the INET paper warns that the Democratic donor class — anchored in the finance and tech sectors — remains largely “opposed to unions and any other popular movement that they see as obstacles to their goal of remaking society from the ground up through artificial intelligence.”
The continued influence of that donor class threatens to perpetuate the doom loop by preventing the Democratic Party from distinguishing itself as a genuine populist alternative to the oligarch-owned Republican Party. As the authors explain:
Because both Democratic and Republican administrations have so clearly prioritized corporate shareholders’ interests over working people, privatization over public welfare, and wealth accumulation by the 1% over economic progress and security for the working and middle classes, it is easy to understand the widespread perception that the political system is really controlled by one giant money party…
The question going forward is how the Democrats respond. Right now, money is pouring in to think tanks like the Third Way from insurers and health care companies to block Medicare for All (denouncing it as “socialism”). Major AI firms, crypto, and other finance and tech firms are also directing firehoses of cash to party vehicles to secure their ends, which include choking off efforts to raise taxes on billionaires. Leaders of the Democratic establishment in both the House and the Senate, if not the Democratic National Committee directly, also control vast war chests of money from these same interests.
Whether it is Third Way declaring “war” on the left, Neera Tanden 24-7 tweet-sabotaging populist Democratic nominees, or House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries preemptively abandoning Medicare For All ahead of the midterm elections, corporate Democrats are making clear they will not willingly surrender their power over the party, they will not accommodate a populist economic agenda, and they will not tolerate a structural analysis of their complicity in creating the backlash conditions for Trump’s rise.
This is why Democrats’ corporate faction especially fears Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed . They detest him not just because he defeated their faction’s handpicked candidate in the Democratic primary with a campaign for Medicare For All, nor only because he’s now ahead in many polls as he demands public control over AI development. No, they particularly loathe him because in addition to those ideological affronts, El-Sayed is also one of the few Democratic nominees acknowledging that his own party’s fealty to oligarchs helped birth the Trump era.
“Too often [Democrats] are taking money from the very same people who created the problem,” El-Sayed told The Real News , later telling CBS News that his swing state became “so sick and tired of the establishment bought off by corporations on both sides of the political aisle that it was willing to hold its nose and vote for Donald Trump twice."
And then last week on the campaign trail, he put it even more bluntly : “Donald Trump is not himself the disease; he is just the worst symptom of the disease of our politics. The disease is the system that allows big corporations and billionaires and special interests to buy and sell politicians in ways that leave them rigging the system against us.”
El-Sayed is effectively arguing that transformation — not restoration — is necessary to break the Democratic doom loop of overpromising, underdelivering, and ultimately demoralizing voters into believing both parties are the same, which ends up pushing them toward reactionary right-wing politics.
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That kind of truth-telling offends corporate Democrats who are perfectly happy to let the Democratic doom loop repeat in perpetuity, creating ever-more reactionary MAGA movements for the rest of our lives. And why wouldn’t corporate Democrats be happy with that? After all, they’ve gotten very rich, famous, and powerful as this doom loop has wrecked the country.
For the rest of the country, though, the doom loop isn’t working out so great. There’s an affordability crisis, endless wars, rampant corruption, an intensifying climate crisis, and a potential AI apocalypse — all enriching both parties’ donors.
The good news is that there are plenty of policy tools available to make things better. Read the INET paper or Isabel Weber’s new book Antifascist Economics to learn about them. Better yet, go subscribe to Master Plan to hear our upcoming episode featuring potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates discussing their plans for a whole different kind of politics.
The other good news is that polls show most voters — including many Democrats — now know both parties’ leadership have betrayed them.
So the political conditions to break the doom loop are finally here. But that won’t happen without an epic battle. As the saying goes, power concedes nothing without a demand. Now is the time to start making the demand — and to start ignoring those who are self-servingly insisting that the factional fight inside the Democratic Party is a divisive distraction.
It may be divisive because the stakes are so high, but it is the opposite of a distraction. It is one of the main events that will decide the future of America.
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Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at LeverNews.