We’re all worried about the midterm elections because Joe Biden seems so, what?, hapless, goofy, absent-minded, as if Mr. Magoo—or, better yet, that senior professor who fell asleep during a class discussion—had been elected president. Also because the so-called moderates in his party have strangled the legislation that could, no, would, make a huge difference in 2022 and beyond (see Jamelle Bouie link below).
And this, with Biden’s apparent approval, an attitude derived from his “bipartisan” days in the Senate: instead of threatening Manchin and Sinema (and their dickheaded counterparts in the House) with retaliation, as Trump or any other ruthless politician would have, our president shrugged off his party’s electoral chances, and, not incidentally, the future of the republic, better to dither over his choice for the Supreme Court. (And yes, I mean the future of the fucking republic: the Republican Party is now dedicated to ending majority rule by any and all available means, from voter suppression to violence.)
To make matters worse, or maybe better, two new studies of the electorate demonstrate that, though its agenda is stalled in committee, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has already carried the day with voters of all kinds, particularly the working-class kind—you know, like, the two-thirds of registered voters who lack college degrees, and who now happen to be the swing voters in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In other words, Bernie Sanders has carried the day, although only 7% of polled Democrats call themselves “very liberal.”
The reports were just published by the Progressive Policy Institute and in The American Prospect. The authors of the former are esteemed political theorist (Kant and the Problem of History [1986], a great book), pollster, and Clinton adviser William Galston and his long-time collaborator Elaine Kamarck. It’s called “The New Politics of Evasion,” making it a sequel to their 1989 report, the one that caught the attention of the Governor of Arkansas. The author of the latter is Stanley Greenberg, another former academic who also made good by polling for the Clinton. His earnest plea for strategic electoral sanity is called “Democrats, Speak to Working-Class Discontent.” Links to both are pasted below.
The reports could not be more different—Galston and Kamarck counsel moderation in all things, Greenberg is gung-ho for “big economic change," the former suggest that the culture war is the field of battle, like it or not, the latter that working-class anger at corporate power is the untapped source of Democratic success at the ballot box—but they agree on four essentials that confirm Bernie’s ideological win and discredit the DNC’s fear of his programs (or constituencies)..
First, the swing voters in the key swing states are, by current measures (lack of college degree, alienated from the two major parties because they both serve neoliberal corporate interests [capital flight/mobility, low taxes, low wages], fear of the future), working-class people who, despite their distrust of government as such—which has, in fact, sold them out to the lowest bidder for 50 years—want and need public spending to keep them afloat on the troubled waters of contemporary, crisis-ridden capitalism.
Second, an increase of voter turnout doesn’t translate into a Democratic advantage. Trump cultists and Republicans in general are at least as motivated as Democrats in defending themselves against what they see as existential threats—socialism, feminism, etc.—to their way of life. Trump increased Republican votes by 11 million from 2016 to 2020, even though Biden was able to increase the Democrats’ share of white male and suburban female votes. And the 2020 election was close, like almost all presidential contests of the last half-century save those of 1972 and 1984, even though turnout among Democrats soared.
Third, Trump won in 2016 by breaking from Republican economic orthodoxy—saying he wouldn’t touch Social Security or Medicare—thus neutralizing standard-issue Democratic scare-mongering, and in effect demanding that candidate Clinton do something more than stand pat on the Obama-era policies that let the bankers off the hook, something which, as the front-runner on Wall Street, she couldn’t do. Greenberg notes this turn in passing: “Trump made clear that he was different from other Republicans” by avoiding the “usual Republican litany” on the scandal of big government spending.
Galston and Kamarck make it the pivot of their argument against the priority of economic policy over cultural issues in Democratic strategizing: “In rejecting calls for ‘entitlement reform’ in the name of fiscal responsibility, policies advocated by Paul Ryan’s wing of the Republican Party, Trump took away one of the Democrats’ best and most time-tested attacks. And by reorienting the Republican Party away from cuts in programs on which working-class and middle-class voters depended for their security, Donald Trump removed the key obstacle to a cultural appeal based on anti-immigrant sentiments and nationalism.”
Fourth, and most important, a progressive economic agenda is the winning formula for the Democrats in 2022 and beyond—you get with Bernie or you get beat. It’s the only was to render Trump’s culture war moot and reap the harvest of those swing voters in swing states. Now, Galston and Kamarck argue explicitly against this formula in trying to debunk what they call “Myth 3: A Progressive Ascendancy Is Emerging.” But the argument is undermined by all the poll data they muster, and even by their own claims, for example: “Measures to expand [public] investments in infrastructure, education, research, and technology enjoy broad public support, as do efforts to rein in the cost of prescription drugs. When economic inequality becomes blatant Americans will support efforts to reduce it—for example, by increasing taxes on large corporations and wealthy individuals.” Well, duh.
Greenberg’s polling and focus groups tell the same story. “The voters who have defected to Republicans [recall the shift in white-working class votes from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016] are still open to voting for Democrats,” but only if the party renounces the pro-corporate, neoliberal, stand-pat policies of Obama and his hand-picked, would-be successor: “They resent big corporations writing the rules at work and in politics.”
In Greenberg’s account, the Obama era was a disaster for working-class people of all colors, and they know it. “The Obama years were the critical juncture when Democratic leaders stopped seeing the working class and feeling its anger and despair.” Only “big economic change” will satisfy it, the kind of sweeping change promised in Build Back Better.
In sum: the Democratic Party of today resembles nothing so much as the Whig Party in 1852-53, which was so divided against itself on the question of slavery—its Wall Street wing had vested interests in the maintenance of slavery and the cotton trade, its still-strong Southern wing did, too, while its constituencies from Pittsburgh to Chicago believed that the “Slave Power” was writing too many rules about work and in politics—that it simply disappeared, giving way by 1854 to a new party built on resolutely anti-slavery foundations.
That new party was of course the Republican Party, which by now has devolved into a semi-fascist agglomeration of white nationalists and male supremacists. I don’t think it’s redeemable, nor even salvageable, as a vehicle for democratic debate and progress. But the Democratic Party is not much better off. If it doesn’t move forward by embracing the progressive economic agenda—Bernie’s agenda-- and retrieving those working-class swing votes lost to Trump in 2016 and 2020, it will get beat, and badly, in 2022 and 2024, regardless of how rabid the Republican candidates are. If it doesn’t move forward, toward what the party of Trump calls “socialism,” it will be a passive witness at the execution of the American experiment in popular government.
https://www.progressivepolicy.org/publication/the-new-politics-of-evasion%20%5bprogressivepolicy.org%5d
https://prospect.org/politics/democrats-speak-to-working-class-discontent/#.YgpOhiuc-H8.twitter
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/opinion/democrats-squad-moderates-progressives.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/24/opinion/defeat-trump-democrat-myths.html