“I will say this,” one House Democrat said. “The Democratic Party has a major working-class voter issue. It started a decade ago as a working-class White issue. It’s now gotten even worse and spread across racial lines.” Washington Post, November 6, 2024
Throughout the campaign, Donald Trump has had supporters of many stripes. There are the rich looking for even lower taxes, the energy barons looking for the end of “climate nonsense,” the suburbanites and country club types who can’t imagine voting for a Democrat – the so-called traditional Republicans.
My concern here is not these predictable folks but the huge number of Americans who were drawn to Trump because they believe they have been shunted aside economically and socially and not helped by the Democrats.
In much of this, they are not wrong. Across a broad front of national life, the American economy and our politics are not delivering good results for average citizens or the poor. The documented truth is that the conditions of life and living in our country are deplorable for half our people or more.
In almost all measures of public well-being, the US is well behind other upper income countries. These actual conditions are among the main things fueling the widespread political disaffection in America today. When combined with extraordinary wealth concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority, the unsurprising result is widespread public anger and resentment.
This reality is one of the reasons that the Biden administration’s economic gains didn’t matter much to voters. Those gains barely touched the problems.
Recall some polling results during the campaign. This is from a New York Times news story back in mid-May. “The findings reveal widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the country … Nearly 70 percent of voters say that the country’s political and economic systems need major changes — or even to be torn down entirely.” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/us/politics/biden-trump-battleground-poll.html.
And on June 15 the Washington Post opined: “Polls suggest that several of Mr. Biden’s core constituencies — young people, Black people and Hispanics — are increasingly Trump-curious. … For the disaffected, Mr. Trump offers the promise of radical change. In the Times poll, these ‘tear-it-down’ voters — some 15 percent of registered voters — prefer Mr. Trump by 32 percentage points. For anti-system voters, what could be better than a candidate who promises to destroy that system?”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/15/biden-polling-voters-trump-election.
How, in the first place, did Democrats, and progressives generally, allow the welfare of average Americans to stagnate and decline? Aren’t Democrats supposed to be looking out for the little guy? The conventional wisdom is to decry the reality that the Democrats have lost close touch with working people, the non-college educated, and those in rural areas. There is truth there, but I think it is too easy merely to say that the Democrats lost sight of these Middle Americans.
The deeper truth, I believe, is that Middle Americans and the poor have been leading hard lives for decades because of the nature of the economic and political systems in which we live and work. Those systems prioritize many things, but the wellbeing of average citizens is not one of them.
The American polity and economy are thoroughly skewed in favor of production, profit, and power at the expense of people, place, and planet. Yes, the Democrats failed to deliver, but even when they had some power, they were quite constrained.
For example, our political economy’s growth imperative puts our politics in a straightjacket, constricting available political choices and giving real power to those who have the finance and technology to deliver that growth. It is easy to identify a host of public policies that could dramatically improve the wellbeing of working-class citizens but which are stymied because they are said to “hurt the economy.”
The Democrats did have a chance for real progressive power. Way back in 2008 David Sirota wrote a prescient book, The Uprising, about the nascent populist revolt then becoming visible. “The activism and energy frothing today is disconnected and atomized,” he wrote. “The only commonality in it all is rage.” That rage, he saw, could threaten both major parties.
If they played their cards right, the Democrats were the natural beneficiaries of the gathering storm, and the natural leader to make it happen was a new senator from Vermont named Bernie Sanders. Sanders almost gained the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, but that now seems like a distant pipedream.
Our system of political economy has greatly narrowed policy options, and Democratic leadership has not been willing to challenge the system. Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have all been establishmentarians unwilling or unable to pursue the paths opened up by Bernie.
Here are two data points that further help to explain today’s politics and the progressives’ failure to deliver for average folks. Between 1973 and 2020 the private sector unionization rate in the US declined by two-thirds, from 25 percent to 8 percent. And today US military spending is about half of discretionary federal spending. In other words, half the pie has already been eaten, and average Americans have been greatly weakened in the slicing up of what’s left.
And, of course, Trump and the Republicans exploited the Democrats’ failure. Sadly, Trump’s victory demonstrates that in our politics it can help to be unscrupulous and shameless. For years, what average Americans have been fed for their pain by Republicans, Fox News and others is a diet of lies, misinformation, and scapegoating, now to such an extent that a close cousin of brainwashing appears to have occurred. Trump and the Republicans have skillfully exploited the mother lode of latent American prejudice, fear, frustration, misogyny, and racism, including endlessly blaming immigrants for a host of real and imagined ills.
The question, then, is what is to be done? The Democrats should be reaping the political benefits of the 70 percent of voters who believe serious changes are needed in our economy and politics, but it is Trump at the table, eating progressives’ lunch. Something must change.
I am sure the Democrats will be tempted to try a version of Trump lite. Why not learn from a winner and play the identity politics game? And I am also sure I am unable to provide an adequate prescription for Democrats. But there is an honorable and honest path forward, and I hope the Democrats will use it as part of their strategy.
Democrats could unite behind and fight for programs of major change addressed to America’s deep problems: income insecurity and social injustice, climate change, democratic failings, immigration policy, failing education and health care systems, the emergence of a multi-polar world, and, most basically, the imperatives that drive our currently failing system of political economy. We need profound changes in these areas, not superficial adjustments. History, we must believe, will be on the side of those who stand for real answers to real challenges.
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Harris offered no policies for the working class. The story of her defeat is the smaller turnout compared to these voters in the states Biden won in 2020. America's decline should accelerate with a Trump presidency and now is the time to organize for real change to the political economy when the markets and imperial policies fail catastrophically. Democrats cannot respond to this disaster they made. Obama failed to use the opportunity of the 2008 financial crisis to remake the political economy to reduce inequality and regulate the plutocrats. Obama did the opposite of what was needed and the result was the rise of a fascist demagogue.
That is a rather astute post. From well outside the US, we watched Obama bail out the banks post 2008, but not the people. In fact, at the cost of the people. From then on, it has been a game-over-in-waiting. Hillary Clinton came across as bent, and an Elite. Harris, straight and Elite (and a word-salad specialist, at no cost – what did half of that stuff even mean?).
But, also from outside the US, there is the obvious military/industrial tie-up with the Elite and the neocons. Harris left Kiev in 2014, what, 3 days before Putin 'invaded'? Victoria Nuland was in Ukraine when? And she's married to who? And Hunter Biden was there because? And the pipeline was blown up by who? In whose Presidency term? I'm very sure this is both major Parties; too many dogs and not enough without fleas. And the major bully, globally (for all the internal 'bringing them freedom and democracy' propaganda) is the US.
For how much longer, is the 64-whatever question? The biggest hegemony the world will ever see (there isn't enough planet left for another to get as big) is in its twilight; the only variables are the speed of decay, and the grace, or confusion, with which it is managed.
As our industrial civilisation staggers down the winding road to oblivion, this is probably what it looks like; increased political instability, increased wars, increased migration of people in all directions for all sorts of reasons, decreased standards of living, environmental degradation, and a general feeling that things are worse for the present generation than they were for previous generations. It is probably beyond the ability of any party (Republican, Democrat or Green) to fix it. Joseph Tainter ("The Collapse of Complex Societies") nailed it.
How right you are! What Speth and most other pundits miss about "working class rage" is that this, right now, is as good as it gets. It's all downhill from here, and at the bottom is mass death. We humans have built a gigantic global civilization on a foundation of finite fossil fuels. It's a foundation of sand that is just about to give way. Irreversible and rapid economic decline will make today's world, and today's politics, seem like paradise compared with what's coming.
There is a tiny bit of triage that might be attempted, an effort to save as many people as possible for a world without industrial civilization, but that effort can't even be attempted unless the powers-that-be realize that modernity is doomed. How many pundits and politicians from any party are likely to recognize the fragility of modern civilization, much less talk realistically about it? None.
Not only did Tainter nail it, Limits to Growth told us decades in advance when it was coming, and virtually nothing has been done to prepare for it. It's only going to get more and more ugly from here.
Actually, almost everyone in China is unmistakably better off now than they were even just a decade ago, and India's economy grew 7% last year too. Because they haven't been doing much about climate change and other environmental problems either (though China has at least essentially halted its previously rapid population growth), collapse is almost inevitable within this century. But it does appear that Amerika has jumped the gun!
The growth imeprative is that money is created by the banks in the loan process but they only create the principal, the interest on that debt must come from the principal of another loan. Thus everyone competes to pay the interest on their loans to avoid default and lose their real-wealth collateral used to secure the loan. When loan payments (money destroyed) exceed loans being made (money created) the system crashes. Or, if banks simply stop lending, the system crashes. Every crash is a transfer of wealth from the many to the few as the few pick up the collateral for pennies on the dollar. All the problems we have today stem from the private for-profit monetary system which is why we need to change it to a sovereign (public) monetary system that issues all money exclusively for the common good as its first use. That would create an economics of care (love) instead of the economics of greed (fear). To allow money to be a source of revenue to private issuers has created a secret and illicit arm of the government and a rival power strong enough ultimately to overthrow all other forms of government. Bascially we need to reverse the money system, instead of a centripetal system that violently concentrates wealth and power to the center, we need a centrifugal system that distributes wealth and power broadly outward. monetaryalliance.org