Lisa McCormick’s crusade to resurrect the American Dream

The American middle class is not dying—it is being murdered. And the assassins wear suits, sit in boardrooms, and stroll the marbled halls of Congress with impunity.

For decades, they have wielded tax cuts like scalpels, gutting the New Deal’s promise of shared prosperity, leaving behind a carcass of debt, despair, and dwindling opportunity. But in New Jersey, one woman is refusing to let the dream be buried without a fight.

Lisa McCormick, the progressive firebrand who stunned the political establishment by winning nearly 40% of the vote against indicted Senator Bob Menendez in 2018, is back—and this time, she’s not asking for change. She’s demanding revolution.

Her message cuts through the political noise like a knife: The Democratic Party’s leaders failed. It’s time to replace them with champions who will outlaw bribery, dismantle Reaganomics, and restore the America that once lifted millions into the middle class.

"From 1933 to 1980, America proved that a government could tax the rich, invest in its people, and build a society where a single paycheck could buy a home, send kids to college, and secure a dignified retirement," said McCormick.

"President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words—'The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little'—were not just rhetoric. They were policy. And they worked," said McCormick. "But then came the economic assault—the great lie of trickle-down economics—and with it, the slow strangulation of the working class. Wages stagnated. Unions crumbled. Corporations shipped jobs overseas while hoarding profits in offshore tax havens."

Democrats, McCormick argues, became complicit. They learned to raise money off the suffering instead of ending it.

McCormick’s fury is not abstract.

Look at New Jersey’s own political decay—the $14.5 billion in corporate welfare doled out by Governor Phil Murphy, a man who campaigned against such handouts only to embrace them once in power. The same Murphy who bought the 2017 election. The same Murphy who, despite lofty rhetoric, allowed New Jersey’s tipped workers to earn a starvation wage of $4.13 an hour.

McCormick recently lambasted Senator Cory Booker for backing Senator Brian Schatz—a Democrat who helped Republicans pass a stopgap spending bill that she calls “a surrender to Trump’s tyranny.”

“Spineless Senate Democrats betrayed our trust,” she declared, her words dripping with disgust. “They fear a shutdown more than they fear a dictator.”

She also said Booker's 25-hour speech did more to distract the party's base from the betrayal led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer than it did to hinder any part of Trump's tyrannical agenda.

"Democrats must reconstitute our team, because right now we have a bunch of losers raising money from mega-donors, who also finance the other side of this battle," said McCormick.

The McCormick Doctrine is not a declaration of class warfare—it’s skimply recognizing that the combat has already been waged, and the working class lost.

For forty years, the wealthy have rigged the system, and McCormick says it’s time for the 99 percent to fight back. She proposes outlawing the legalized bribery that masquerades as campaign donations, reversing the Reaganomics that hollowed out the middle class, and enacting a new New Deal that guarantees healthcare, education, and living wages for all.

The tragedy of modern America is not that prosperity is impossible—it’s that we know how to achieve it, and yet our leaders refuse to act.

McCormick’s crusade is a direct challenge to that paralysis. “We did it for 50 years,” she reminds us. “We can do it again.”

But the clock is ticking.

With Trump’s second term bulldozing democratic norms and Democrats still clinging to “bipartisan” fantasies, McCormick’s warning grows more urgent: “If we don’t replace these failed leaders, the American Dream will be erased.”