I♥New York. Mandani is taking on the rich and New Yorkers are taking to Mandani. Long ago I picked up my wife after her tax class. She was crying because she had been “dressed down” for suggesting that an actual, not simply nominal, progressive income tax would be a good idea. She was told that what they needed to learn was to how to save the wealthy’s money with the tax code that was in place. Not design a better one.
The Democratic ‘establishment’ needs to go after the filthy rich and the fascism, racism and sexism they are funding. Let’s hope it does not take another depression. History does not always repeat itself or rhyme. We need to make it what we want it to be.
Last Monday, October 27, right-wing personality Tucker Carlson interviewed white nationalist Nick Fuentes for more than two hours, mainstreaming the podcaster whose praise for Hitler, vows to kill Jews, denial of the Holocaust, and apparently gleeful embrace of racism and sexism has, in the past, led establishment Republicans to avoid him…….
The modern Republican Party was always an uneasy marriage between business interests who wanted tax cuts and deregulation, represented by lawmakers like McConnell, and the racist Dixiecrats and religious traditionalists who wanted to get rid of equal rights for racial minorities and women. “Traditional Republican business groups can provide the resources,” Republican operative Grover Norquist explained in 1985, “but these groups can provide the votes.”
But while business got its tax cuts and deregulation over the years, the base voters of the party—especially the evangelicals who had come to see ending abortion as their key demand—did not see the country reorganized in the racial and gender hierarchies they craved. Trump promised to deliver that for them. When establishment Republicans fell away from Trump after the August 2017 Unite the Right rally—after Congress had passed and Trump had signed the 2017 tax cuts into law—Trump turned to the base, using the threat of their wrath to keep the establishment figures in line.
Now members of that base are strong enough to tie the party itself to Nazism, a line establishment figures like McConnell, who is 83 and retiring from the Senate in 2027, finally seem unwilling to cross.
-Heather Cox Richardson: November 2, 2025