Fight for the future
by Tom Sullivan
Believe it or not, there are other issues on the table besides the traveling reality show now golfing in Scotland. Serious questions of what this country does to recover from the debacle of the current administration need addressing and will likely start at home.
After years of slow economic recovery, wages remain flat even as employers struggle to fill jobs. Working people know in their guts they work for the economy, not the other way around. Wage stagnation, manufacturing losses, offshoring and other and restructuring of the economy have left their American Dreams sitting on blocks rusting away in their front yards. In 2012 and 2016, Democrats tried to convince them things had improved under Barack Obama. The recovery was slow, but it was there. Numbers might have conveyed that, but a lot of Americans didn't feel it.
Enter Donald Trump with an alternative (actually alt-right) explanation, writes Paul Glastris at Washington Monthly:
Average Americans were suffering from long-term downward mobility because elites and Washington had abandoned them to the depredations of immigrants and China, and he would put things right. The particulars were wrong, and dishonest, but the overall portrait of generational decline hit home for much of the country.What Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Trump enablers in Congress, and GOP-controlled legislatures across the country have demonstrated is, as Glastris asserts, there is "only one party committed to small-d democracy" in this country and it is not theirs:
It’s no longer acceptable for Democrats to look at politics as a way to win the next election so as to jam through a bunch of their preferred policies before the Republicans inevitably take back power. They must instead see the purpose of politics as building sustained power for Democrats, period—but, unlike the other side, they must do this in part by strengthening the democratic process, not by undermining it. If passing this or that liberal policy helps in that effort, fine, pass it. If not, don’t. The overriding aim has to be getting and holding power—not for its own sake, but to keep the flame of democratic self-government alive unless and until the Republican Party abandons its authoritarian ways or is replaced by a new, small-d democratic party.Democrats will not be defending the status quo in 2018 and 2020. What they must do, if they can, is tell a deeper story of how we have gotten here and how they expect to change it:
The most important part of that story is the concentration of corporate power. With more and more industries controlled by fewer and fewer big firms, corporate managers face little pressure to raise wages, since many workers, especially in rural America, have nowhere else to go. Combine that with the continuing decline of unions, the erosion of the real value of the minimum wage, and the spread of employment contracts with anti-worker provisions—like mandatory arbitration and noncompete clauses—and you have an economy in which workers have little or no bargaining power. A growing chorus of economists now thinks that this phenomenon—more than trade, and certainly more than immigration—is the best explanation for why real wages aren’t rising even after nine years of economic expansion, near-record-low unemployment, and record corporate profits.Democrats bear some responsibility for some of that trajectory away from an economy that produced gains not just for the top 10 percent of Americans, but for the rest as well. They should admit it and commit to changing it. It is a story few besides Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have told with any force. Their political adversaries scapegoat others for failures or blame impersonal economic forces for results that for most of us are very personal. Someone noted recently that when billionaires lay off employees, they blame the market. When they hire more employees, they take credit themselves. Voters need to know these outcomes are not simply unchangeable facts of nature or personal failures, but the results of policy choices.
Health care is obvious. Democrats are running on it anyway. I cannot speak to the merits of the “all-payer rate setting” he recommends. Medicare for all is what people know, and it ranks favorably, but the term has become synonymous with a single-payer system. It is not, Ed Kilgore argues. Ironing out the details while not watering down the goal might require expanding access without a complete overhaul and disruption that makes consumers nervous. It is a complex issue on which I'm open to options.Sean Hannity just presented this agenda as a negative pic.twitter.com/mYoByIRyr5
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) June 28, 2018
If that candidate agrees to certain limits (no money from PACs and a $1,000 cap on any donation), the federal government will match the voter’s contribution six to one. The point is to make it possible for candidates to raise all the money they need by reaching out to average voters rather than lobbyists and wealthy donors. That, in turn, would make them far more likely to do the bidding of the former than the latter.One stumbling block Glastris leaves unaddressed is the structure of the U.S. Senate. Norm Ornstein tweeted in response to a Paul Waldman essay on our age of minority rule:
By 2040, Philip Bump responds, "30 percent of the population of the country will control 68 percent of the seats in the U.S. Senate. Or, more starkly, half the population of the country will control 84 percent of those seats."I want to repeat a statistic I use in every talk: by 2040 or so, 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states. Meaning 30 percent will choose 70 senators. And the 30% will be older, whiter, more rural, more male than the 70 percent. Unsettling to say the least https://t.co/EGPD5nE4qG
— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) July 10, 2018