The message not the candidate is the big problem

In an earlier piece, I argued that the debate about whether Biden should remain the Democratic nominee for President is missing the point.Ā  Itā€™s based on the false premise that Bidenā€™s age is why he is not running in front of a deeply flawed Donald Trump whose movement is fascist and whose economic and cultural plans for the US are terrifying. As I pointed out in that piece, there is just no reason to think the Bidenā€™s age is the problem or that replacing him with any of the likely other candidates would make it easier to defeat Trump.

Here is a rough, first draft attempt to figure out what the problem is.

Look at elections around the developed world, in France, the UK, and the EU. What do you see?

Itā€™s not that the left is losing. The Left won in the UK. Itā€™s not that the right is losing. The Right won in the EU. And itā€™s not that the Center is losing. The Center lost in France and then the Left eked out a win over the Right.

Itā€™s that incumbents are losing.

Why? The usual answer is that voters are holding incumbent governments responsible for economic problems and especially for the post-pandemic inflation.

I think that is part of the answer. But itā€™s not the whole answer.

For one thing, by most standard measures the economy is doing very well at exactly time that political sciences research shows it most influences election results, in the second quarter of the election year. The inflation rate is almost back to pre-pandemic level at it has mostly been since the mid-1980s. Indeed, the consumer price index actually fell last month. Wages have been going up going up faster than prices for the last few months. And the job market is the strongest it has been since the mid 1960s.

Given this economic success, why are not only Biden but Harris and other Democratic candidates polling behind Trump?
Perhaps people judge the economy by how high prices are relative to some earlier period in time not by the current rate of inflation and certainly not by their real wages. We live so soon after the post-pandemic burst of inflation that people remember when prices were lower and thus are distressed every time they go into the grocery store. complain when they see high prices. Wage increases are harder to see. And we are all more likely to complain about losing things than be grateful for gaining them. So even if unemployment and inflation are low, many voters are holding incumbent governments responsible for the current high prices.

This seems partly right to me. But I very much doubt it is the whole story.

People a really are not that ignorant of their circumstances. If the only problem were a burst in prices that has now subsided, I think they might recognize that this was a transitory phenomenon. They might even recognize that it was a world-wide transitory phenomenon and not hold their own government responsible for it.

Or to look at the point another way, the intense anger at incumbent governments about the economy seems historically disproportionate to the economic numbers.

So why are people so angry?

Here is my guess. Itā€™s not just at transitory inflation. Itā€™s at forty years of slow wage growth, growing inequality, and the increase in the prices of critical goods like health care including pharmaceuticals, housing, higher education and child care.

Since World War II liberal democratic capitalism has promised economic security and a growing improvement in our standard of living. It has promised that each generation would live better than their parents. It has provided pathways for families to enter the middle class including good K-12 education and affordable higher education and workforce training.

But that promise has been broken. We have seen forty years of almost no real wage growth for any families below the top 1%, especially when you take into account that hours worked by families has increased substantially as the share of women who are working has risen dramatically

And, worse than that: the rise in education costs has made the main path to better wages a middle class life even steeper. The increase in the cost of child care has reduced the economic well-being of families that now require two-incomes to survive and thus desperately need help with their children. Even as the ACA made health insurance more affordable for many and restrained the growth in health care costs, the out of pocket costs for visits to the doctor or hospital and pharmaceutical keep going up. And the rise in housing costs since the Great Recession has also squeezed families while putting the main source of increasing wealth out of reach working and middle-class people who do not own homes.

Meanwhile the life-long job career has come to an end, really pensions have been replaced by 401ks, and automation and AI threaten even more job instability.

Liberal democratic capitalism has failed to meet it’s promise to provide economic security and economic growth.

These problems affect most working and middle class families. But they are especially severe for young people who have borne the brunt of outrageously expensive higher education and the student loans that go with it and the inability of many of them to afford a house. Even well educated young people are facing not just economic stagnation but economic decline compared to their parents and grandparents who went to college when state subsidies kept the costs down and bought houses before the upsurge in prices.

So not only is a rising standard of living mostly a thing of the past but it is increasingly hard to see how a middle class life can be sustained for future generations.

Meanwhile during this forty year period the top .1% and .01% have become incredibly richer. The gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else has grown greater than at any time since the Gilded Age. And that increase in wealth is one reason that the goods even for upper middle class people goods consume have been bid up in price.

In other words, I believe that people are angry at the long term decline in the well-being of working people and incredible tilt in our economies from benefiting workers to benefiting the wealthy.

But you might say, the long term stagnation Iā€™m pointing to has been building for forty years. Why is it now resulting in anger at incumbent governments?

The answer I think is that long term trends are hard to recognize. You remember the story of a frog being boiled to death in a pot of water? If the heat is turned up fast, it will jump out of the pot. But if the heat is turned up slowly it will not notice it until it dies.

What I think has happened in the last few years is that we had a sudden burst in prices at a time when people expected an economic revival from the severely painful pandemic recession. They expected that we would be rewarded after the sacrifices of the necessary response to recessionā€“just as they think people were rewarded after previous crises, such as World War II. The post-pandemic price shock not only got people angry at inflation but woke them up to the fundamental failure of liberal capitalism to meet its promise of a firm path to the middle class and gradually rising living standards.

It’s as if American votersā€”as well as those in other countriesā€”finally recognized just how our economy has changed and how much they all, and especially young people, have lost.

I donā€™t think they believe this economic crisis happened under President Biden. But they expect that political leaders will recognize and speak to it. And they are holding incumbent governments responsible because they donā€™t see any of them speaking to their concerns or channeling their anger.

This was not the first such shock that woke people up to the failure of liberal democratic capitalism. In ways too few of us recognized at the time, the Great Recession did as well. And that economic shock, perhaps even more than the current one, reminded people that their governments are not on their side but on the side of the wealthy. That, after all, was what the Obama administration showed them when it bailed out the bankers that caused the crisis while allowing millions of people to lose their homes and suffer from the sharp economic downturn and the deep recession that followed it.

I believe it is this sudden awakening of working and middle class people to an economy that is tilted toward the wealth not the workers and a political system that works almost entirely for the benefit of the ultra-rich and multination corporations, that stands behind not just the current anti-incumbent mood but the Trump phenomenon itself.

For in his bizarro way, Trump is doing so. He channels the somewhat inchoate anger of working people. He points to enemies. He threatens to blow up a system that most people believe has failed them.

This is not to deny the importance of racism and sexism to the Trump movement. As Iā€™ve pointed out elsewhere, there is more evidence that racism and sexism and a general cultural backlash against a post-patriarchal multi-cultural society drove voters to Trump than individual economic distress. But in ways Iā€™ve explained in the same piece, the general cultural backlash has become more powerful because of broad economic decline. And, as a result opposition to the advance of women and Black and brown people has become intertwined with the notion that government does not care for the economic well-being of ordinary people. Government is seen in the Trump movement as the means by which the eliteā€“whether cultural or economicā€“uses its power to elevate their own cultural ideas and economic well-being over that of working people, broadly defined. The Trump movement rejects government in all areas because they see it not as tool for their economic advance but as the tool the economic elite uses to take their money in taxes, take their jobs in trade agreements, take jobs from them to give to women and Black and brown people, as well as taking their right to express ā€œtraditionalā€ ideas about race and sex. Elite control of government is the enemy in Trump world.

If we look at politics this way, we can understand why some groups have been relatively immune to this appeal. People with college and graduate degrees, and especially the women among them, are far more likely to be culturally liberal critics of racism and patriarchy. That is why they oppose Trumpā€™s racism and sexism despite the fact that they too have not seen their standard of living rise in recent years although they, of course, still are relatively better off than less well educated working people.

However, even the education barrier to the appeal of Trump is beginning to crack among young people. The cultural liberalism of educated young people may keep them from voting for Trump. But while they were seen as the harbinger of a new Democratic majority four years ago, they are increasingly disaffected from Democrats who have largely failed to speak to their profound economic distress and thus vote for third party candidates this year, if they vote at all.

So my suggestion is that the problem Democrats in general and Joe Biden or any other Democratic candidate for president has is that they hold power at a time when recent inflation has awoke many Americans, if only somewhat dimly, to the long term failure of liberal democratic capitalism to provide the economic security and gradual increase in economic well-being it promises to an increasingly large share of the population and especially to young people.

The irony is not lost on me that the one of two main achievements of the first term of the man who is capturing this anger, Donald Trump, was as enacting at tax cut that benefits the ultra-rich and multi-national corporations. (The other was stacking the Supreme Court with right-wing economic and culture warriors.) Sadly so far, all our efforts to tie Trump to the same corporate elite by showing this is who benefited from his 2017 tax cut has not cut through this new, and unfortunately powerful, ideological formation.

Extreme political anger is, however, not usually well-directed. And as I suggested above, Trump is a master at deflecting anger to economic distress from the corporate elite to immigrants, uppity Black people and women, and foreign countries.

If this analysis of the fundamental problems of Democrats today is accurate, what can they do to stem the Trump movement and at least eke out a victory in the upcoming election.

The answer, I think, is to explicitly address the underlying issue. The initial theme of the Biden administration was Build Back Better. While I understand the inclination of Biden and other Democrats to claim credit for building back, I think it is incumbent on them to recognize that things are not better.

Democrats can take credit for a recovery but must also address the long term issue of an American economy that has been increasingly failing to give Americans a path to a gradually improving middle class life and has in fact seen more and more people struggle to sustain their economic well being let alone get ahead.

Democrats need to recognize this larger struggle and put the blame where it belongs, on an economy that deliberately rewards wealth rather than work. They must call out Republican policies that undermined the minimum wage and unions, that deregulated financial markets, that failed to break up concentrated industries, and that cut taxes ultra-rich and corporations while blocking efforts to reduce the costs of child care, health care and housing.

And then they to put forward an agenda that builds on the
policies passed during the Biden administration as well those Republicans blocked. That agenda must in a series of simple and clear ideas show how new public policies will improve the economic prospects of the vast majority of people while being paid for by new taxes on the ultra-rich and corporations. To start with they might include:
ā€¢ Raising the minimum wage.
ā€¢ Breaking up concentrated industries.
ā€¢ Encouraging labor unions to organize and seek higher wages by instituting universal card check.
ā€¢ Radically reduce the cost of both post-secondary education including college and apprenticeships and worker training programs.
ā€¢ Expanding the child tax credit to help families afford child care.
ā€¢ Creating a public health insurance option to hold down costs.
ā€¢ Expanding credits for affordable housing and subsidies for new housing starts for the middle class.
ā€¢ And taxing billionaires to pay for all of this.

Ideally all these programs should be universal or at least reach far up in to the middle class for three reasons. First, economic hardship is being felt well into the upper reaches of the middle class. Second targeted programs can and will be tagged as welfare for undeserving. And third because programs that benefit the middle class have historically had far more staying power than those target the poor.

The question we should be asking ourselves nowā€”and should have been asking for the last yearā€” is not whether Joe Biden is up to the task of running for president but which be the president who would be the best candidate to advance this agenda.
Joe Biden might be that candidate. In fact, he has already supported to one degree or another every policy idea listed above. The problem, however, is that neither he nor his campaign has advanced them in a powerful thematic way that change the race. What we really need at this moment is for the incumbent party, no matter who leads it, to run an insurgent campaign, the way Harry Truman did in 1948. We need a campaign that recognizes the true state of our economy and place the blame where is (mostly) belongs on a Republican party that has perpetuated a fraud on the American people, dividing us on the basis of race and gender while advancing the interests of corporations and the ultra-rich.

I donā€™t know whether Biden, who is both tainted by incumbency and far too enamored with talking about the genuine economic successes of his administration, is willing to run an insurgent campaign or has the capacity to advance a bold alternative to business as usual.

Sadly, I donā€™t know whether another candidate can do so as well. Kamala Harris is also tainted by incumbency and has show even less inclination to advance a thematic progressive agenda than Biden. And, sadly, that goes for ever other candidate being mentioned for President with the possible exception of Gretchen Whitmer (whose record I do not know well).

And, as someone who has spent the last eight years trying to encourage Democratic office holders in Pennsylvania to adopt a more progressive agenda, with limited success, Iā€™m worried that as Democrats get closer to higher office they run scared of advancing bold progressive economic ideas. They fear both an onslaught of corporate dollars against them and that upper middle class suburban voters will abandon them.

These reflections on the underlying economic decline that is making the 2024 race so difficult for incumbent parties in the United States comes probably comes too late. But Iā€™m convinced that what we need right now to win this election is not a new candidate but a daring new message.

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