After reading Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us, I keep returning to the central crisis exposed by that book: We live in an era of profound crisis of social reproduction. People cannot sustain themselves or their families on the incomes we are given. The necessary minimums for American life, a home, a car, and healthcare have become prohibitively expensive. You can’t afford a one-bedroom apartment on minimum wage anywhere in the country. Americans are falling two months behind on their car payments at record numbers. A recent study found that two-thirds of millennial deaths in recent years could have been prevented with adequate access to healthcare. Is it really any surprise that a recent Gallup poll showed that Americans have the most negative views of capitalism ever recorded? This is a totalizing social crisis that our political and economic elites seem incapable of even admitting is happening. It is literally a matter of life and death for ordinary Americans. To me, this is really the basis of our modern fascist movement.

My wife sent me this fascinating poll from NBC. It shows what the definitions of “success” were to young voters in the most recent election, categorized by gender and who they voted for. What I find particularly telling are the striking differences between the top categories for female and male Trump voters; female Trump voters very clearly have their priorities in achieving financial independence and home ownership, while male Trump voters prioritize having children and being married. I find it very telling, because it seems to suggest that young MAGA women are (correctly) aware that they cannot afford to raise families in our current economic conditions, and their immediate priority is achieving that stability before they consider starting a family. For some reason, these women thought Trump was their path to that financial stability, but I still have to imagine that this has to be one of the first generations of young conservative women who don’t see having children as their first priority and a definition of successfully reaching adulthood. In a mirror of that, notice how having children is notably the lowest priority for Harris voters, as though liberals have given up on even aspiring to have children. It’s equally telling that young MAGA men still prioritize having children above all else; they are, naturally, the most delusional demographic represented. This is all borne out in US birth rates being at all-time lows; we can go in discursive circles talking about sperm counts or male loneliness, but let’s be real: It’s because none of us can fucking afford kids, just giving birth in this country costs an average of $18,000.

I just don’t think you can sustain a society where a significant portion of the adult population doesn’t feel they can safely have children. There is a fundamental sense of the future being foreclosed to you if you and a majority of your peers don’t see a path to raising kids. In such a culture, people are capable of being convinced that illegal immigrants are draining all the resources away from them. If your friends are dying before they reach 40 and you can’t afford baby formula, you’re more susceptible to believing that Venezuelans are getting free apartments because Democrats hate you. Living in such a society does make you feel like our institutions hate us. This isn’t me trying to excuse or empathize with MAGA; they are willingly drinking fascist Kool-Aid that will not quench their thirst, but I do think it’s important to acknowledge why people are thirsty.

I think this framing also helps us to crack the code of why so many people of color voted for Trump, and why, for instance, so many Latino men are willingly signing up to join ICE. Let’s be honest, any bad effects of this rigged economy experienced by white people are doubly experienced by people of color. The story Trump tells of punishing the people responsible for his follower’s pain might be a hollow one, but when all you know is precarity, stress, and pain, it’s better than nothing. The story of punishing the elites is being directly called into question by the suppression of the Epstein files, and that might be enough to crack the narrative foundation of MAGA. We should be honest too that people of color are the ones already being hit the hardest by Trump’s fascist agenda: 300,000 Black women have been shoved out of the labor force, many of them through his brutal cuts to government employment. And Black women of course have always been the demographic with the lowest support for Trump.

I think Democrats’ failure during Biden’s term to meaningfully address these existential economic concerns is a root of how Trump was able to come back into power. Sure, in some ways you could make the case that Biden was trying to steer away from the devastation that neoliberalism has wrought; the Inflation Reduction Act and the work Lena Kahn was doing at the FTC, walking the picket line with the UAW were all decent signals of trying to turn the tide. But ultimately the failure of the Harris campaign to communicate a clear plan to reconstitute the American social contract into a fundamentally fair one leads us to this. It’s why appeals to grandiose, abstract ideas like defending democracy and the constitutional order didn’t land for most people in 2024. What have those ideals done for a generation of people dying young and unable to have children?

One of my favorite TikTok accounts of late has been this guy Dahmmy Hilfigger who does a series called “The United States Might As Well Be 50 Third World Countries in a Trench Coat,” where he meticulously goes through states’ statistics on poverty, literacy, incarceration rates, life expectancy, and child mortality, comparing them to supposedly poor and third world nations. Unsurprisingly, most states tend to have worse or comparable outcomes to countries like Latvia, Bulgaria, or Thailand, and a huge part of that comes down to most of those countries having universal or at least significantly more affordable healthcare. One of his best videos explores how even in states with relatively high and stable incomes like Colorado, the cost of living literally requires two adults making six figures for a family of four to be comfortable. Similarly, throughout northern California, $100k is considered low income.

This is the thing that’s so galling, right? If you make $60k a year, you’re in the top 10% of income earners globally, but that’s effectively poverty wages in a country where everything is engineered to wring money out of you. Loath as I am to give the failing New York Times credit for anything, they did publish an excellent article on how Disney World has financialized every aspect of visiting the park to essentially create completely different experiences for the wealthy and the middle class. The article points out that there are now a whopping 644,000 households in the United States worth $20 million or more; effectively, this class of people are the main class it makes sense to cater to—the rest of us who make the median income of $80k a year are barely an afterthought. I know Disney World is a luxury compared to the more existential expenses I’ve been discussing, but considering how ubiquitous trips to Disney World were for past generations as a right of passage symbolizing achieving the American dream, it feels like a potent symbol of how far the middle class has fallen. The feeling of unfairness, the reminder that there are people out there who can afford a fundamentally better life, a better experience at every turn, is enough to make Americans in particular lose their minds. I really like the term “Treatlerite” to describe MAGA voters, people whose basis for embracing fascism is that their treats got more expensive.

A huge reason our political class isn’t concerned with this crisis of reproduction is because we have such a robust class of multimillionaires who are funding their campaigns. I think the primary reason we don’t consider this era we’re in as a depression is twofold: Lots of people are technically employed even if they’re not making enough to survive, and the wealthy are doing just fine. The Great Depression was treated as an all-encompassing crisis because the rich saw huge amounts of their own wealth wiped out.

We’ve also gotten very creative as a country at lying to ourselves about our actual situation. Our billionaire class is full of people propped up by artificial promises of what their companies could one day be worth in the distant future. We have infinite financial instruments like credit cards, Klarna, and app-based side gigs to give people the illusion that they’re still able to access the good life. We honestly should be rioting in the streets like the rest of the world continuously is, but we’ve gotta pay off that pizza we had last weekend first.

I’ll close by admitting that I’m not sure what the solution to all this is. One thing I can state is definitely not the solution is Ezra Klein’s Abundance movement. Sure, I also want to see an abundance of affordable housing, solar energy, and public transportation, but those things cannot be tied to maintaining the free market, and in particular the landlord-tenant dynamic. Kate Willett has a phenomenal long-form piece about how brazenly Abundance is funded by the tech right and the Kochs; they are attempting to capture the Democratic party now that they have completely captured the GOP. Mia Wong pointed out on her podcast It Could Happen Here that allowing landlords to gain more of a monopoly on new housing will just lead to them doubling down on price-fixing rents through algorithmic-driven platforms like RealPage. This was something the Biden administration admitted was a serious problem right before they got booted from office. Ultimately what we have to do is invest massively in public housing, in housing that is not treated as an investment asset for people to extract value from.

All I can say is that we need people to commit to a politics of solidarity with the people in their immediate circles anywhere they can. We need masses of people organized into the trade union movement, but as Hamilton Nolan (probably the best labor reporter in the US) has been pointing out, the labor movement in the US has proven hamstrung in responding forcefully enough to the multi-front attacks on the working class. It’s why I think investing our time and energy locally is so essential. Investing in the specific places where we live and demanding that no one is abandoned to fascism is essential. It’s why I’m so proud of my friends in Mar Vista Voice who have been running a mutual aid campaign to support migrant street vendors impacted by ICE terror here in West LA. This is a form of continual solidarity with workers who are in acute crisis, giving out $500 grants to lessen the need to work outside when ICE could snatch them at any moment. We need hundreds of projects like this all around the country; we need creative, bold, bottom-up organizing to make sure people are kept out of the maw of our economic thrasher. We can’t fix everything through networks of mutual aid, but rooting ourselves in a politics of solidarity rather than cutthroat individualism is how we chart a better path. A better world is possible, but only if we commit to making it real.