Regulations, Protections, and The American Brain

It’s all been one long, ugly fight against the New Deal.

Every right-wing economic policy of the past half century favored primarily by Republicans, but also, tragically, Democrats, has whittled away at the working and middle class gains – the economic rights – brought to bear in the New Deal. Capital has slowly shaken loose of the chains applied to it in the landmark legislation, passed in a time of societal calamity that animated an entire generation of Americans, and is now ready to bust the last remaining locks and bolts and expand and expand and expand, at any cost. 

Because capital doesn’t know what’s good for it. It is but an animal that grows and consumes everything until there is nothing left. Americans understood this at some point in the 20th century, but no longer. 

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Billionaires have taken over the United States government if you haven’t noticed. Not indirectly – not through traditional means like funding puppets who will do their bidding once in office – but through direct action. Having their carefully-coiffed foot soldiers run the government wasn’t getting shit done. The billionaire class, including the world’s richest man, an avowed fascist, powered Donald Trump to a second presidential term and are now filling his administration, including various Cabinet appointments. You can almost see the drool dripping from the corners of their hideous mouths when they talk about what’s to come under our government by the richest and worst among us. 

There will be, as I’ve stated in a Bad Faith Times essay from shortly after Trump’s 2024 election win, political opportunity for those who oppose fascism in the coming months and years. Most of that opportunity lies in Trump’s government-by-oligarchs that will try, and perhaps succeed, in obliterating whatever remains of New Deal regulations that helped to civilize the nation in the wake of the Great Depression. People are going to hate this shit if they are helped to understand it. 

Precious few Americans alive today lived through the Depression; now we live with depression because we can’t stop scrolling Instagram, where everyone is hot and happy and Better Than You. Probably no one younger than 30 years old has even heard of the Great Depression, what brought it on, and what happened in the aftermath to create a strong economy for (white) working and middle class Americans. So when a zoomer or reads something on their various social feeds about the incoming second Trump administration planning on killing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), they either don’t think much of it or see it as another one of those burdensome federal regulations Elon Musk – our foreign-born shadow president – is always posting about. 

Capitalism Is Enclosing On Everyone And Everything

We see it every day and don’t notice it. In our digital lives, where Twitter Blue offers to artificially inflate your reach, for a monthly fee. On vacation with our families, where theme parks allow you to skip long lines, for a price. In our political lives, where bad

Bad Faith TimesAnthony Reimer

Trump advisers are reportedly asking candidates who might lead the FDIC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency whether the president has the authority to abolish the FDIC, which was created via the Banking Act of 1933 to insure the money held by banks and create trust among Americans that their money would not vanish into thin fucking air when the economy – and the banking industry – hits a rough patch. 

Bank runs – where people flock to banks and demand all their money – were commonplace in the years before Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt strongarmed Congress into creating the FDIC. More than a third of U.S. banks had failed during the Depression. Taking your money out of the local bank and putting it under your mattress was increasingly seen as a common sense financial maneuver with no guarantee cash would be safe in the bank. It’s something FDR warned about in an address promoting the New Deal and its backing of banks that had collapsed time and again in the late 20s and early 30s. 

The FDIC charges banks insurance premiums based on the risk the bank poses and monitors banking institutions for financial soundness, especially in times of economic turmoil (such as the 2008 housing market collapse). It is not funded by the federal government. Most of all, the FDIC – you can hear it in your head from all those bank commercials: “FDIC insured” – offers peace of mind for Americans who don’t want to even imagine their banked money going up in smoke because Wall Street gamblers pressed their luck too hard one day. 

There is political opportunity here for Democrats, but only if they talk about these wonky issues in ways that appeal to someone who had no idea the FDIC even existed before Trump’s Project 2025 stormtroopers waxed poetic about killing the agency and letting banks regulate themselves. Language is going to be important in the coming years, perhaps more important than any time in recent history as the right wing seizes control of social media platforms and intimidates media outlets into treating Trump and his allies with kid gloves. They have the megaphone now.

First, we have to stop using the term “regulation.” Most Americans’ brains turn off once “regulation” has been uttered because the right has so successfully demonized the mere concept of government doing its job in regulating industry that has no concern for the well being of people, or even the continued existence of humanity. An American brain hears “regulation” and they hear “a bad thing that hurts me and my family.” It is perceived by the American brain as a restriction on one’s freedom, a violation of liberty, a legal limitation, not as a necessity brought on by the horrors of wanton corporate greed. You can’t tell me what to do, the American brain says. Don’t regulate me bro. 

We Need To See More Pain

The cushy trappings of modern life have tricked us into believing the conflict between labor and capital belongs to a bygone era. You’re not working fourteen hours a day in the pitch black of a coal mine so you might put food on your family’s table. Your boss

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

So no more talking about regulations. Instead we’ll say protections. This serves a twofold purpose: It avoids the “regulation” trigger in the American brain and it instantly creates a narrative of conflict, something 21st Century Americans love and the way they interpret reality thanks to a quarter century of never-ending superhero movies. If you want people to pay attention to something, you must inject conflict. We all think of ourselves as main characters in the movie that is our fleeting earthly existence. There’s no fighting that, so why try? The American left has to stop pretending people aren’t driven by drama and conflict and see everything through the lens of movies and TV shows. 

We have to embrace this: Yes, you are the main character, you special snowflake, you perfect rise-and-grind warrior, and here is the latest dramatic turn in your life as a U.S. citizen in the third decade of the 21st century. 

The pitch becomes easy once you ditch “regulations” and deploy “protections”: Trump and his billionaire henchmen are planning to destroy protections that keep your money safe in the bank. These protections have existed for nearly a century because your grandparents or perhaps great grandparents lost everything during a period of economic hardship that Trump and his people want to bring back in full force. The only way they can accomplish their evil little scheme is to destroy the protections that have safeguarded your family’s money for generations. You have, whether you know it or not, been protected from the greed of bankers. 

Now Donald Trump wants to undo those protections and allow those bankers to play fast and loose with your savings, with your paycheck, with your rent or mortgage. They want you to no longer be protected. It’s us (regular folks with some money in the bank) against them (the richest people alive who still want more). 

Substituting “protections” for “regulations” can extend well beyond Republicans’ push to destroy the FDIC (this would take an act of Congress, something that seems to go unmentioned in the discourse). It should be easy to seed liberal/left messaging around Shadow President Musk’s desire to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a pain in the ass of our oligarchs, almost all of whom mysteriously have the hairline of a 17 year old. Those who created the CFPB were early in the use of “protections” as a way to avoid the “regulation” trigger deep within the American brain. 

Selling the CFPB to Americans should be easy (please remember that everything, including democracy itself, must be sold to people). Democrats long ago should have made commercials positioning the bureau as the last stand against corrupt businesses trying to get over on the Average Joe. Don’t mention “government” or “regulation” or any other term or word that could shut down one’s inner discourse. These ads would need to get right to the point: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is your last and best weapon against corporate vampires who would bleed you dry if given the opportunity. We won’t let that happen. We will fight for you. We are your protectors.

This is the conflict people crave so desperately. This is how they understand life, as various people and countries and interests clashing over and over again in an eternal struggle between good and evil. What constitutes evil is up for grabs though. For far too long, liberals have allowed the right wing to define what is evil (government regulations) and what is not (good, hardworking corporate raiders). People have to be told what to hate if they are to process the world through the lens of nonstop conflict. Again, this should be terribly easy to do as long as you’re not using the language of the right. 

The words we use in politics matter more than anything except for hair, which remains paramount and the reason why Bernie Sanders could never be president. Adopting "marriage equality" instead of gay marriage or even same-sex marriage was a crucial step in winning mainstream support for expanding marriage rights to LGBTQ Americans. While those opposed to expanding those rights continued to use "gay marriage" in arguing that only men and women should be allowed to marry each other, "marriage equality" cloaked the effort in the tradition of the Civil Rights movement and eventually won the day.

Obamacare, a term conceived by the right wing in its holy war to stop Democrats from passing a corporate-friendly Republican healthcare plan through Congress, has always polled poorly, even among those who get their healthcare through the Obamacare (ACA) exchanges. Call it something else – Kynect, as they do in Kentucky – and Americans are all about it. Back in the Obamacare battles of 2009, I was certain the law would have had overwhelming support if Democrats had relentlessly labeled it FreedomCare or USACare or some shit like that. Intellectual giants we are not.

Telling Americans we will protect you against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bringing polio back to the United States is a winning message. We will stand up and protect your children from RFK’s pro-polio agenda. We are anti-polio. RFK wants your children to get polio as soon as possible. While we’re at it, we want to protect you from getting sick from pollution or poisonous food or whatever else Trump and his allies want to make a part of your everyday lives. 

There are Bad Guys out there, a bunch of big, bad Thanos types who want to destroy you and your family. The Bad Guys are not drag queens reading books at the local library or the professor teaching young people about the Civil Rights movement or the woman seeking abortion care or the trans person asking for healthcare. There are people out to get you, but it’s not them. It’s bankers, the CEOs, it’s their allies within the Trump administration, it’s the grotesquely wealthy who want nothing more than to vacuum up whatever you’ve stored away in hopes of survival. They want what you have; we won't allow it.

That should be the liberal/left message in the coming years. We’re on your side and we’re going to do whatever it takes to protect you from the villains coming to ruin your hero arc, however long that is. 

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.