The negative agenda
I wrote this almost 6 years ago, after Biden’s November 2020 victory:
And that brings me to the question that is the title of this essay: who would want this job? Republicans break the government over the course of four or eight years, making nonpartisan jobs into partisan ones, stocking the courts, spending profligately, ignoring the needs of working class people, and enriching themselves and their wealthy benefactors. And then they spend the other chunks of four or eight years gumming up the government, eroding public trust, and positioning themselves to win the next election. It is entirely cynical, but also entirely effective. We have to break this cycle, or we will never accomplish anything worthwhile. And this is all on the shoulders of Joe Biden. Joe Biden! The man who thinks that this election was a “battle for the soul of the nation”, as if the nation has a soul to save, and that “it’s time to put the anger and harsh rhetoric behind us”, as if we were even capable. But the point is that, even if we didn’t have a president-elect who believed in the Obama-era bullshit of “bringing the country together”, he or she would face an almost insurmountable challenge. I am glad my fellow revelers could forget about all that, at least for one day, but on January 20 they will be rudely reminded.
Things haven’t gotten better since then. We face the same doom cycle that we faced in 2020. It’s easier to break government than it is to fix it, and Biden made less progress in “building back” the country than Trump has made in destroying and looting it. Even if a Democrat trifecta is elected in 2028 — and that’s a very big if — we will have had 4 back-and-forth elections in which the incumbent party was thrown out. That bodes ill for making long-term progress.
Ryan Cooper at the American Prospect wrote, in an article titled “How do we rebuild after Trump?”
In the Age of Trump, the idea of discussing policy seems rather hopeless. What is the point of trying to, say, identify the best way to untangle the mess of Obamacare subsidy formulas when Donald Trump and the Republicans are slashing funding for the program, not to mention tearing the entire government to ribbons? “What can men do against such reckless hate?”
It all seems dispiriting and hopeless. Obama and the Democrats passed their signature healthcare legislation, after decades of missed opportunities, and Trump and the Republicans spent another 16 years “slashing” it to bits. Biden increased funding for the IRS to go after rich tax cheats (and reduce the deficit by doing so!). The Republicans clawed back much of those increases. The justice system sentenced hundreds of Jan 6 rioters for participating in a coup. With one stroke of his pen, Trump wiped away their crimes. (As of December, 33 of those pardoned have been “rearrested, charged or sentenced for other crimes” — 6 of them for child sex offenses.)
I don’t mean to suggest that Democrats should not try to “rebuild after Trump”. We should refund the IRS and Obamacare, restore the NIH and CDC, rid the government of cranks, prosecute white collar crimes and crimes against humanity, fund the Green New Deal, and so on. But the nature of the government makes those reforms short-lived, especially under “thermostatic” electoral politics. One cannot write a funding bill that cannot be undone by future Congresses, or prosecute federal crimes in a way that’s immune from future pardons. One can’t keep winning “the most important election of our lifetimes” for a generation. One has to imagine a world in which the Republican Party wins elections, and passes legislation, but its ability to damage America is contained.
One idea is to build up the power of the system to restrain bad actors, and to make democracy more democratic. Admit DC and Puerto Rico as states. Abolish the Senate. Encode more guardrails into the U.S. constitution, like restrictions against gerrymandering and campaign finance limits. These are worthy ideas, but they require supermajorities of support.
Building back (the “positive” agenda) suffers from the short timelines of American thermostatic politics, and the destructive tendencies of the opposition. It is time, instead, to think about a negative agenda, in addition to a positive one. The Democrats have no shortage of “negative” ideas; after all, they are the party of regulations and taxes. But what Democrats haven't fully grappled with is how to make regulations and taxes work in a world in which they likely won't last more than 4 years.
In short: what are the actions one can take to cause short-term, irreversible damage to the Republican Party, right-wing billionaires, fascists, Nazis, and their global allies — actions that might create space and time for a generational project to rebuild America?
The negative agenda
Let’s start with taxes. Trump’s tariffs guide the way here. Although they have been declared unconstitutional, it’s quite difficult to totally undo them. One cannot simply turn back the clock. Consumers made purchase decisions they would otherwise have not made; refunds, if they will even happen, will go to companies, not consumers; some small businesses suffered severe distress and went under, etc.
One can imagine doing the same to the wealthy. A one-time tax of 50%+ on wealth above $1 billion, or $10 billion, and ongoing taxes of 10%+ annually on such wealth, would be enough to wipe out huge portions of the fortunes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, the Ellisons, and other oligarchs. (Even Bernie’s mooted wealth tax is too weak. The tax rate should be more than the average real return on capital. The goal is to destroy billionaires, not harvest from them.)
Republicans might undo these taxes in 2032, but it would be exceedingly challenging, both politically and operationally. Musk, for example, would be forced to sell, or give away, most of his shares in Tesla and SpaceX, which would deny him majority ownership. Without total control over these companies, their valuations might simply collapse. In other words, for companies that are essentially cults of personality, large taxes would ruin them. That wouldn’t be so easy for Republicans to fix, even if they had the political will to give Musk back his billions.
This kind of approach is a complement to campaign finance reform. That might be swept away by the next administration before it’s had a chance to make a real impact. Stealing billionaire wealth would be much harder to reverse.
The same ideas apply more broadly. Democrats should pass special taxes on unrealized capital gains from crypto, ideally of 90%+. They should ban bitcoin mining and revoke licenses for crypto exchanges operating in the U.S. They should force the immediate sale of any crypto assets invested in 401(k)s. They should immediately sell off the bitcoin stockpile of the U.S. government, the largest holder of bitcoin in the world. They should force Tether to open its books, and try to spark a de-peg of its namesake stablecoin. (The ensuing liquidity crisis might take down all of crypto.) They should also attack crypto-adjacent industries, like prediction markets (which, by the way, seem totally unembarrassed by the war profiteering they’ve enabled). These efforts might reversed by the next administration. But crypto is a confidence game, and an overwhelming assault over 4 years might be enough to kill it, or at least destroy the fortunes of its most pernicious actors (Changpeng Zhao, Brian Armstrong, the Winklevosses, and the Trump family itself) for a long time. The fact that many crypto bets are leveraged, and margin calls are often automatic, should also help.
For being a “libertarian”, “anti-government” movement, many Republican allies are heavily dependent on government largesse. Names like Palantir, SpaceX, and a16z come to mind. Democrats should give these companies the Anthropic treatment. Cut off their government contracts, and force mass layoffs and a huge deflation of their valuations. (Palantir had a peak price-to-sales ratio of over 100; SpaceX, at the proposed $1.5 trillion valuation, is in similar territory.) Programs like Starlink should be nationalized, and treated as a public utility, not a plaything of a drug-addled psycho.
Democrats should hit back against mergers that took place during the Trump administration. Some are already discussing this. As Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) put it
Once we take power, whoever the president is, we’re going to break up your companies. So all the investment you did to create these mergers are going to be for naught. Your investors are going to be pissed at you, and you’re likely going to end up getting fired as the CEO because you wasted so much money and corrupted yourself in the process.
(He added on social media, “We have to make it so painful that generations from now CEOs will flinch at the idea of business corruptly teaming up with government.”) The rotten Paramount-Warner Bros. merger should be undone. So should the Paramount-Skydance merger. And the SpaceX-xAI-Twitter shell game.
Media outlets deserve special scrutiny. There is little point passing campaign finance reform to restrict ad spending on the “airways” (broadly construed) if “normal” news coverage on those same airways is heavily biased against the Democrats and the left. If someone can buy a media platform for $44 billion, and then place his thumb on the scale for his preferred political party, the notion of “campaign finance limits” becomes moot. Instead, billionaire ownership of traditional and algorithmic media should be heavily restricted, and people like Musk, Bezos, Murdoch, Benioff, Zuckerberg, Ellison, and others should be forced to divest their ownership in Twitter, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Instagram, CNN, and other media outlets. Investments in media, think tanks, and other media-like outlets should be subject to the same rules as donations to a political party. The result would likely be a collapse of media-like organizations that can’t survive without billionaire largesse, and a democratization of the remaining outlets’ ownership. Once again, those changes — unlike traditional campaign finance reform — won’t be easily undone by the next president. We cannot simply place limits on spending going forward. We must also undo the rotten spending that has already taken place.
Finally, we must punish Trump’s global allies, people like Bukele, Netanyahu, MBS, and Putin. Here, the precedent set by Trump also comes in handy. We can, apparently, simply eliminate world leaders who aren’t working out for us. Better yet, we should use this threat to oust Bukele and force him to stand trial for crimes against humanity. With countries less easy to kick around, tactics must be different. But we should at least pursue heavy penalties, like sanctions and arms bans, against foreign leaders who undermine the Democratic party. And, in some cases, the positive agenda and the negative one coincide. The faster we build independence from fossil fuels, the faster the revenue streams of MBS and Putin will dry up.
Even if parts of the negative agenda are overturned, they remain important for the reason Gallego mentioned: deterrence. “We have to make it so painful” for bad actors that they think twice before attempting the same under the next Republican administration.
What might happen?
The negative agenda is not without consequences: some foreseeable, others less so. The stock market will likely “correct”, if not worse. Some capital will flee. Billionaires will renounce their citizenship and set up shop elsewhere. (If so, their assets should be seized and they should be prevented from ever doing business in the U.S. again.) Many media companies, even ones doing good work, might not last without rich donors. I think the risk-reward balance is still positive, but these are very real risks. A Democratic Party pursuing my wishlist might end up, after 4 years, deeply unpopular, having ruined everyone’s 401(k)s and perhaps even the broader economy. The reason people stick with a positive agenda is that it’s safer than a negative one. You slowly build back what used to exist, and, if you don’t succeed, you have a ready excuse: it’s the previous guy’s fault. With the negative agenda, everything is, quite clearly, your fault (in the same way that Trump is eating shit for tariffs and ICE enforcement).
One reason the Democrats’ negative agenda differs from Trump’s is that it is highly targeted, although it may not seem so. Crypto is not an important sector of the economy. Getting rid of it would not have long-term economic consequences, although it would lead to short-term market volatility. And billionaires simply aren’t that important either. (If I’m wrong about that, the entire theory of social democracy is wrong as well.) One can imagine a Facebook without Zuckerberg, a Twitter without Musk, a CBS News without Ellison. One can’t imagine an Epoch Times without its secretive wealthy donors, but I think the American media landscape can survive without Falun Gong propaganda. Quite similarly, Starlink, SpaceX, and other companies possess important technologies, but it is not essential that they are run by the people who currently run them.
Cracking down on right-wing oligarchs does not mean the end of right-wing thought. The conspiracies of the right — that all Democrats marching against Trump are paid by Soros — are simply that: conspiracies. The same is true of the other side. Right-wing propaganda works, and American politics would benefit from less of it. But it’s not as if bankrupting billionaires would mean the common man would abandon his anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, racist beliefs. It’s just that those beliefs wouldn’t be constantly coddled and reinforced by the worst people in the world.
The negative agenda is not sufficient on its own. We need stronger rules on media companies than simply disallowing billionaire ownership. Replacing Zuckerberg with Vanguard and State Street might not change much about how Instagram and Meta operate. (In other cases, like Twitter, the effects would likely be stronger.) Local news has been decimated, and needs to be revitalized, but the negative agenda wouldn't help. But, again, we have to arrest the momentum of the doom cycle before trying to change things for the better.
One final point: it’s obvious that the current version of the Democratic Party isn’t up for this agenda. It doesn’t have the juice. Every single initiative I've discussed would be struck down by the Republican Supreme Court, or blocked by the filibuster, and the Democrats don’t have the wherewithal to fix either of those, let alone abandon its bad beliefs about Israel, crypto, and so on. This essay is trying to suggest what a competent party would invest time in. I’m presupposing a competent party, though. One of the big projects of the next several years should be, as Michael Liroff said, “primaries for every Democrat”.
