Thanksgiving Table Conversations

Read this before you sit down with your relatives.

Don’t Fall For It

Thanksgiving is two days away. We’re about to sit across the table from relatives we haven’t seen in a year. Aunts, uncles, cousins galore. There will be political discussions. Red, blue, MAGA, socialist, and the confusing “centrists” that just want common sense will all be in attendance.

This year might feel different. Maybe a little less crowing about Trump since he’s failed to deliver on affordability. You get to make fun of his love fest with Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who just became New York City’s next mayor. Shit, even James Carville is in the New York Times calling for “pure economic rage” and “the most populist economic platform since the Great Depression.”

Sounds like progress, right? The establishment finally gets it. Democrats are on the march.

Don’t fall for it.

Read What They’re Actually Saying

Carville says Trump “has done nothing to curb the cost of what it requires to take even a breath in America today.”

Curb. Not lower. Not make affordable. The goal post is slowing the rise.

He says Democrats must “rail against the unjust economic system.”

Rail against. Not dismantle. Not replace. Yell at it.

He says we should “run on the most populist economic platform since the Great Depression.”

Run on. Not implement. Not build. Electoral strategy, not governing strategy.

Then he tells his real audience, let’s call them the “elite,” what this is about: “If you’re a student of history, the French Revolution is in the American wind.”

Carville’s NYT op-ed is not a call to lead the revolution so much as a call to stifle it. He wrote a memo to the donor class disguised as a call to action. With revolution in the air Carville’s solution is to suppress it with performative populism. Relieve some pressure. Prevent it from happening. Let people feel heard while nothing structural shifts.

Booker does the same dance with better poetry. He tells the Times: “I’m one of those people who’s saying our party has failed. They’ve made terrible mistakes.”

They. Not we. Booker’s been in the Senate for over a decade. Part of Democratic leadership. But when it’s time for accountability, suddenly it’s “they” who failed.

So what’s his solution? “Hard conversations need to happen.” A “new generation of American leadership is coming up.”

Hard conversations with whom? Coming up through what mechanism? He doesn’t name a single Democrat who needs to be replaced. Doesn’t mention primaries. The torch is being passed—but by whom and to whom? Through what process? It’s all bullshit to prep a run for president.

To top it all off, after all the beautiful stories about FDR and his grandfather: “Weeping may endure for the night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

Just wait. Be patient. Joy will come on its own.

Beat me and tell me it’s a back rub.

Why I Fight Democrats

I get a lot of grief for being so critical of the Democratic Party. Back in January of 2022 I said this about Biden.

“He’s deeply unpopular. He’s old as shit. He’s largely been ineffective, unless we’re counting judges or whatever the hell inside-baseball scorecard we’re using.”

It didn’t go over well. People wonder why I’ve spent my political life trying to defeat them in primaries instead of giving them credit for being better than Republicans. Why not give Cory Booker credit for being better than Donald Trump?

Because of shit like this.

I’m not stupid. I know Booker is far less interested in directly getting rich off this system than the corrupt Trump family. The Democratic Party wants a kinder, gentler extractive system than the Republicans offer. But they are not interested in—nor do I think they believe it’s possible—to create a system that actually works for all 330+ million Americans.

What Carville and Booker are offering is cosplay populism. A message designed to let people know they feel our pain, without targeting the mechanisms that cause the pain or do the work of building an alternative. It’s a lack of vision, a lack of faith, and a lack of hope presented as an electoral strategy.

If you don’t believe a better economy is possible, what do you do? You give platitudes. You relieve some pressure. You try to prevent the revolutionary moment from arriving.

That’s exactly what this is.

The Confession They Already Made

Years ago, Carville said something that revealed what he believes in his heart: “I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”

That’s not a joke. That’s a confession.

Carville understands the barriers to transformation are structural—the bond market, Wall Street, global finance. These are the parasites that suck us dry economically and emotionally. And his assessment? You can’t fight them. Just like you can’t fight City Hall.

So when he calls for “economic rage,” he’s not calling for a fight against the system. He’s calling for us to yell at the system while leaving it intact. He rightly concludes that Democrats are kinder, gentler managers of this failing system of ours. He sees no path for a reversal so a more benevolent system of extraction becomes the best option.

We’re Vulnerable

Here’s what makes this so dangerous. We’re not living in the time of the American Revolution or even the Great Depression, when people produced their own food in their communities and their own yards. When people knew how to make things.

I was talking with my Aunt Kathy yesterday. She was telling me about her Aunt Kat, who she’s named after, who used to make clothes for her—even while Kathy was in high school. That’s not the world we live in anymore.

We’re vulnerable to a system that delivers us food, clothing, and shelter. We’re dependent. Any move to unseat these parasites will require political power. You cannot fight Wall Street without unity through democratic government, because the only thing big enough to take on the bond market is America united together as a nation.

But Carville doesn’t believe that fight can be won. So he’s not even proposing it.

You Can’t Buy What Doesn’t Exist

Look at what Carville actually proposes: $20 minimum wage, free public college, universal child care, rural broadband. This is Bernie 2016, almost word for word. I’d have been thrilled ten years ago.

It simply isn’t enough.

You can’t pump cash into extractive systems and expect affordability. And you cannot buy what does not exist.

Healthcare, childcare, housing, education—these are physical things. Services provided by people. Buildings that need to exist. Workers who need to be trained. You cannot thrive with the elements of a thriving life if they don’t exist.

We pump $5.25 trillion a year into healthcare and rural hospitals close anyway. Still 80% of American counties are healthcare deserts. We pump money into higher education and tuition skyrockets. We pump money into housing subsidies and housing gets less affordable. The money doesn’t create capacity. It gets captured by the extraction machine.

We’ve been running this experiment for fifty years. It has objectively failed.

You don’t fix healthcare with subsidies. You fix it by building clinics and hospitals, by training doctors and nurses and dentists. You don’t fix childcare with tax credits. You fix it by building childcare centers as plentiful as post offices. You don’t fix housing with vouchers or contractor subsidies. You fix it by building housing.

Government as builder, not government as purchaser. Public capacity that competes with private extraction. Physical things that make life possible.

Carville’s platform fails this test completely. He’s proposing we pump more cash into the same broken systems while yelling louder about it. I picture him beating a vending machine that won’t give him the Reese’s cup while shoving more quarters into it.

The Mechanism They Won’t Name

Neither Carville nor Booker nor any Democratic leader are talking primaries against incumbents.

If you truly believe this party must change, there’s only one way, change the people in it. Put out a message, see if it resonates, take it down ballot. That’s democracy. That’s how the Tea Party took over the Republicans. That’s how Mamdani just won New York.

But Carville blames “decades of corrupt and morally bankrupt Republican economic agendas”—Republican. As if Clinton didn’t sign NAFTA. As if Obama didn’t bail out Wall Street while families lost their homes. As if Carville himself didn’t spend thirty years in the machinery that built this crisis.

They want the same people running the party with angrier rhetoric. They want the grift to be dignified again—politicians waiting until after office to cash in instead of selling out through Bitcoin in real time.

It doesn’t change the outcome. Just how we feel about it.

The Test

When you’re at that Thanksgiving table and someone says “See? Even Carville gets it now”—remember the test:

Are they building capacity, or subsidizing extraction?

Are they changing who runs the party, or just having conversations?

Are they lowering costs through public abundance, or just curbing the rise?

Are they leading the transformation, or trying to prevent one?

Carville and Booker are offering the appearance of change. Cosplay populism. A memo to the donor class that revolution is in the air—and their solution is to manage it, not lead it.

They’ve got a lack of vision, a lack of faith, and a lack of hope. And they’re trying to pass it off as pragmatism.

Don’t fall for it.

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Corbin Trent

This is the eighth essay in a 12-part series where I lay out how we got to where we are and the next steps required to move forward. You can find the others here: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh. The ninth essay will be published at America’s Undoing on Thanksgiving November 27th.

On December 9th I’ll be announcing a new initiative designed to bring power to the people.

Please join me on the journey by subscribing and sharing, and let me know what you think in the comments.