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VICTIMS WITHOUT VICTIMIZERS  
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Norman Solomon
October 21, 2025
TomDispatch [[link removed]]

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_ How Corporate Democrats Led to the Trump Era _

, Cagle Cartoons

 

The human condition includes a vast array of unavoidable misfortunes.
But what about the preventable ones? Shouldn’t the United States
provide for the basic needs of its people?

Such questions get distinctly short shrift in the dominant political
narratives. When someone can’t make ends meet and suffers dire
consequences, the mainstream default is to see a failing individual
rather than a failing system. Even when elected leaders decry
inequity, they typically do more to mystify than clarify what has
caused it.

While “income inequality” is now a familiar phrase, media coverage
and political rhetoric routinely disconnect victims from their
victimizers. Human-interest stories and speechifying might lament or
deplore common predicaments, but their storylines rarely connect the
destructive effects of economic insecurity with how corporate power
plunders social resources and fleeces the working class. Yet the
results are extremely far-reaching.

“We have the highest rate of childhood poverty and senior poverty of
any major country on earth,” Senator Bernie Sanders has pointed out
[[link removed]]. “You got
half of older workers have nothing in the bank as they face
retirement. You got a quarter of our seniors trying to get by on
$15,000 a year or less.”

Such hardship exists in tandem with ever-greater opulence for the few,
including this country’s 800 billionaires
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But standard white noise mostly drowns out how government policies and
the overall economic system keep enriching the already rich
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at the expense of people with scant resources.

This year, while Donald Trump and Republican legislators have been
boosting oligarchy and slashing enormous holes in the social safety
net, Democratic leaders have seemed remarkably uninterested in
breaking away from the policy approaches that ended up losing their
party the allegiance of so many working-class voters. Those
corporate-friendly approaches set the stage for Trump’s faux
“populism” as an imagined solution to the discontent that the
corporatism of the Democrats had helped usher in.

While offering a rollback to pre-Trump-2.0 policies, the current
Democratic leadership hardly conveys any orientation that could
credibly relieve the economic distress of so many Americans. The party
remains in a debilitating rut, refusing to truly challenge the runaway
power of corporate capitalism that has caused ever-widening income
inequality.

“OPPORTUNITY” AS A KILLER IDEOLOGY

The Democratic Party establishment now denounces President Trump’s
vicious assaults on vital departments and social programs.
Unfortunately, three decades ago it cleared a path that led toward the
likes of the DOGE wrecking crew. A clarion call in that direction came
from President Bill Clinton when, in his 1996 State of the Union
address
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exulted that “the era of big government is over.”

Clinton followed those instantly iconic words by adding, “We cannot
go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for
themselves.” Like the horse he rode into Washington — the
Democratic Leadership Council [[link removed]]
(DLC), which he cofounded — Clinton advocated a “third way,”
distinct from both liberal Democrats and Republican conservatives. But
when his speech called for “self-reliance and teamwork” — and
when, on countless occasions throughout the 1990s he invoked the
buzzwords “opportunity” and “responsibility” — he was firing
from a New Democrat arsenal that all too sadly targeted “handouts”
and “special interests” as obsolete relics of the 1930s New Deal
and the 1960s Great Society.

The seminal Clintonian theme of “opportunity” — with little
regard for outcome — aimed at a wide political audience. In the
actual United States, however, touting opportunity as central to
solving the problems of inequity obscured the huge disparities in
real-life options. In theory, everyone was to have a reasonable
chance; in practice, opportunity was then (and remains) badly skewed
by economic status and race, beginning as early as the womb. In a
society so stratified by class
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“opportunity” as the holy grail of social policy ultimately leaves
outcomes to the untender mercies of the market.

Two weeks before Clinton won the presidency, the newsweekly _Time_
reported [[link removed]] that
his “economic vision” was “perhaps best described as a call for
a We decade; not the old I-am-my-brother’s-keeper brand of
traditional Democratic liberalism.” Four weeks later, the magazine
showered the president-elect with praise
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willingness to move beyond some of the old-time Democratic religion is
auspicious. He has spoken eloquently of the need to redefine
liberalism: the language of entitlements and rights and
special-interest demands, he says, must give way to talk of
responsibilities and duties.”

Clinton and the DLC insisted that government should smooth the way for
maximum participation in the business of business. While venerating
the market, the New Democrats were openly antagonistic toward labor
unions and those they dubbed “special interests,” such as
feminists, civil-rights activists, environmentalists, and others who
needed to be shunted aside to fulfill the New Democrat agenda, which
included innovations like “public-private partnerships
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“empowerment zones
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and charter schools
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TAKING THE GOVERNMENT TO MARKET

While disparaging advocates for the marginalized as impediments to
winning the votes of white “moderates,” the New Democrats tightly
embraced corporate America. I still have a page I tore out of _Time_
magazine in December 1996, weeks after Clinton won reelection. The
headline said
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“Ex-Investment Bankers and Lawyers Form Clinton’s Economic Team.
Surprise! It’s Pro-Wall Street.”

That was the year when Clinton and his allies achieved a longtime goal
— strict time limits for poor women to receive government
assistance. “From welfare to work” became a mantra. Aid to
Families with Dependent Children was out and Temporary Assistance for
Needy Families was in. As occurred three years earlier when he was
able to push NAFTA
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through Congress only because of overwhelming Republican support,
Democratic lawmakers were divided and Clinton came to rely on
overwhelming GOP support to make “welfare reform
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possible.

The welfare bill that he gleefully signed in August 1996 was the flip
side of his elite economic team’s priorities. The victims of
“welfare reform” would soon become all too obvious, while their
victimizers would remain obscured in the smoke blown by cheerleading
government officials, corporate-backed think tanks, and mainstream
journalists. When Clinton proclaimed
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that such landmark legislation marked the end of “welfare as we know
it
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he was hailing the triumph of a messaging siege that had raged for
decades.

Across much of the country’s media spectrum, prominent pundits had
long been hammering away at “entitlements,” indignantly claiming
that welfare recipients, disproportionately people of color, were
sponging off government largesse. The theme was a specialty of
conservative columnists like Charles Krauthammer, John Leo, and George
Will (who warned in November 1993 that the nation’s “rising
illegitimacy rate… may make America unrecognizable”). But some
commentators who weren’t right-wing made similar arguments, while
ardently defaming the poor.

_Newsweek_ star writer Joe Klein often accused inner-city Black people
of such defects as “dependency” and “pathology.” Three months
after Clinton became president, Klein wrote
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“out-of-wedlock births to teenagers are at the heart of the nexus of
pathologies that define the underclass.” The next year, he
intensified his barrage
[[link removed]]. In August 1994,
under the headline “The Problem Isn’t the Absence of Jobs, But the
Culture of Poverty,” he peppered his piece with phrases like
“welfare dependency,” while condemning “irresponsible,
antisocial behavior that has its roots in the perverse incentives of
the welfare system.”

Such punditry was unconcerned with the reality that, even if they
could find and retain employment while struggling to raise families,
what awaited the large majority of the women being kicked off welfare
were dead-end jobs [[link removed]] at
very low wages.

A SMALL BUSINESS SHELL GAME

During the 1990s, Bill and Hillary Clinton fervently mapped out paths
for poor women that would ostensibly make private enterprise the
central solution to poverty. A favorite theme was the enticing (and
facile) notion that people could rise above poverty by becoming
entrepreneurs.

Along with many speeches by the Clintons, some federal funds were
devoted to programs to help lenders offer microcredit
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that low-income people could start small enterprises. Theoretically,
the result would be both well-earning livelihoods and self-respect for
people who had pulled themselves out of poverty. Of course, some
individual success stories became grist for upbeat media features. But
as the years went by, the overall picture would distinctly be one of
failure
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In 2025, politicians continue to laud small business ventures as if
they could somehow remedy economic ills. But such endeavors aren’t
likely to bring long-term financial stability, especially for people
with little start-up money to begin with. Current figures
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that one-fifth of all new small businesses fail within the first year
and the closure rate only continues to climb after that. Fifty percent
of small businesses fail within five years and 65 percent within 10
years.

Promoting the private sector as the solution to social inequities
inevitably depletes the public sector and its capacity to effectively
serve the public good. Three decades after the Clinton presidency
succeeded in blinkering the Democratic vision of what economic justice
might look like, the party’s leaders are still restrained by
assumptions that guarantee vast economic injustice — to the benefit
of those with vast wealth.

“Structural problems require structural solutions,” Bernie Sanders
wrote in a 2019 op-ed piece
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“and promises of mere ‘access’ have never guaranteed black
Americans equality in this country… ‘Access’ to health care is
an empty promise when you can’t afford high premiums, co-pays or
deductibles. And an ‘opportunity’ for an equal education is an
opportunity in name only when you can’t afford to live in a good
school district or to pay college tuition. Jobs, health care, criminal
justice and education are linked, and progress will not be made unless
we address the economic systems that oppress Americans at their
root.”

But addressing the root of economic systems that oppress Americans is
exactly what the Democratic Party leadership, dependent on big
corporate donors, has rigorously refused to do. Looking ahead, unless
Democrats can really put up a fight against the pseudo-populism of the
rapacious and fascistic Trump regime, they are unlikely to regain the
support of the working-class voters who deserted
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them in last year’s election.

During this month’s federal government shutdown, Republicans were
ruthlessly insistent on worsening inequalities in the name of breaking
or shaking up the system. Democrats fought tenaciously to defend
Obamacare and a health-care status quo that still leaves tens of
millions uninsured or underinsured, while medical bills remain a
common worry and many people go without the care they need.

“We must start by challenging the faith that public policy, private
philanthropy, and the culture at large has placed in the market to
accomplish humanitarian goals,” historian Lily Geismer has written
in her insightful and deeply researched book _Left Behind_
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“We cannot begin to seek suitable and sustainable alternatives until
we understand how deep that belief runs and how detrimental its
consequences are.”

The admonitions in Geismer’s book, published three years ago,
cogently apply to the present and future. “The best way to solve the
vexing problems of poverty, racism, and disinvestment is not by
providing market-based microsolutions,” she pointed out.
“Macroproblems need macrosolutions. It is time to stop trying to
make the market do good. It is time to stop trying to fuse the
functions of the federal government with the private sector… It is
the government that should be providing well-paying jobs, quality
schools, universal childcare and health care, affordable housing, and
protections against surveillance and brutality from law
enforcement.”

Although such policies now seem a long way off, clearly articulating
the goals is a crucial part of the struggle to achieve them. Those who
suffer from the economic power structure are victims of a massively
cruel system, being made steadily crueler by the presidency of Donald
Trump. But progress is possible with clarity about how the system
truly works and the victimizers who benefit from it.

Copyright 2025 Norman Solomon

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NORMAN SOLOMON is co-founder of RootsAction and executive director of
the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include _War Made Easy_,
_Made Love_, _Got War_, and most recently _War Made Invisible: How
America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine_
[[link removed]]
(The New Press). He lives in the San Francisco area.

* Clinton Democrats; Inequality; Failure of Market Capitalism;
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