Soon after the clock ticks 8:00 in California we will see a solid, and perhaps extraordinary, victory for Democrats from top to bottom, from the Presidency to Senate to the House and maybe even down to the State House in Pennsylvania.
Those of us who have worked long and hard and hoped for a revival of progressive politics in America will celebrate this victory tonight and for weeks to come.
But while this election victory is critical, what we do with our that victory will most determine what kind of future there is for progressive politics and our country.
So it is important to understand what this victory means and does not mean, and what opportunities and challenges it provides.
Big Election Victories Are Mostly About the Immediate Past
To begin with, this victory does not, in itself, constitute a repudiation of the conservative generation of American politics that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, let alone an embrace of a new progressive politics.
Obama’s victory, like most large electoral victories is more an assessment of the immediate past than an embrace of a particular future. The shift in voters from Republican to Democrat reflects the deep trouble we are in. We are at war. Our financial markets are in shambles. Our economy is tumbling into recession. And all this is happening while the Republicans have held the White House. That is why will celebrate tonight.
The same was true in 1932 and 1980. Voters no more voted for the New Deal than they voted for the Reagan revolution. What they did in 1932 and 1980, and what they did today, is to call for a change of direction. This election gives a new team, lead by a new President, the ability to make that change. But whether we build a new progressive majority that governs for a generation depends on what direction our new leaders move, with what success, and with what kind of support they receive in future elections.
Moreover, while I expect Obama and the Democratic Party to win impressively, it is hard not to see potential cracks in the coalition he brought together. To judge by recent polls, Obama will win majority support up and down the class scale. Educated professionals and managers with high incomes will support Democrats as will the poor and minorities. And most impressively, Obama will gain the support a majority, or just about a majority, of white working class of America. But Obama will gain the support of these different groups for different and partly conflicting reasons.
The Sources of Support For Obama: Professionals and Managers
Professionals and managers, who work in the government and non-profit sectors of the economy or who, like many lawyers and doctors, are closely connected to them, have two reasons to support the Democrats.
They understand, to begin with, that their long term interests and that of their children will suffer if we do not address the problems we face today in our economy and in energy, education and health care policy. In all these areas we are under-investing in public goods and undermining our future by not taking advantage of the talents and abilities of so many Americans who are detached from the mainstream economy.
Professionals and managers on our side understand that those problems cannot be solved by unfettered markets. They require government investment and direction. These descendants of the progressives of the early 20th century, who work in and for or alongside large bureaucracies, want a government that is capable of acting rationally and effectively in response to the problems before us rather than being hampered by an ideological distrust of government, taxes, and planning.
Progressive leaning professional and managers understand that support for this kind of government may cost them in higher taxes. And some no doubt hesitated to vote for Obama for that reason. But Obama’s promise to limit tax increases to those making over $250,000 diminished that threat. And the current economic crisis made supporting Obama more attractive. For many of these professionals and managers live in areas of the country—in gentrifying urban neighborhoods and affluent suburbs—that have seen a run up in housing prices in the last ten years. The recent collapse in housing prices has diminished the wealth of these people as has the stock market crash. So, those who found their progressive economic instincts in conflict with their concern about higher taxes have found it easy to vote for Obama.
Progressive professionals and managers have another reason to vote for Obama. It is no surprise that polls show Obama receiving a higher percentage of support votes from people with a Ph.D. than from any other group. Highly educated people are appalled by a government that preaches intolerance and sexual repression and by a political party that has tried to make “elite” a dirty word. The one ideal that higher education clearly does teach—tolerance—has been under constant attack by Republicans for a generation. And educated people are sick of it.
And finally, among women in this group, relentless Republican criticism of reproductive rights leads to support for Democrats. That support is diminished to some extent by the unwillingness of Republicans in the White House to back their talk with action. Still, Supreme Court support for Roe vs. Wade will hang in the balance as long as Republicans control the presidency. And that is good reason for women among progressive professionals and managers to support Democrats at higher rates than their husbands and boyfriends.
The Sources of Support for Obama: Minorities and the Poor
It is no surprise the Obama has received a great deal of support from African Americans or from the poor. While we should not conflate these two groups, they do share a commitment to new government efforts to redistribute income and wealth and extend opportunity to everyone. And despite initial hesitations rooted in the conflict sometimes seen between African American and Latino groups struggling for government support, Obama was able to win support among Hispanic voters as well.
The Sources of Support for Obama: Working People
What is somewhat surprising is Obama’s relatively strong support in the white working class, people who have been suffering since 1973 from job loss, stagnant or declining wages, a lack of affordable health insurance, and inadequate schools and other public services. My guess is that Obama will do better among white working class voters than any Democrat since Johnson in 1964. In supporting Obama, these voters ignored his race, and the latest iteration of the Republican effort to raise their fears of racial minorities, foreign enemies, Godless elites or other bogeymen.
White working class support of Obama comes in part because the Obama campaign and organized labor worked very hard to focus working people on the economic difficulties they face and in part because the news for the last few months has each day reinforced that message.
But while the white working class voted with Democrats this year, we can’t assume that they will be on our side in the next election or the one after that. It is an extremely impressive feat for an African American to be the first Democrat to win something close to a majority of the white working class in years. But polls show Obama is winning only a bare majority of this group or losing it by a hair. The 2008 model Republican campaign of resentment and racism has not been entirely ineffective even in these terrible economic times.
Why We Need To Build More Support Among Working People
It is not just leftist nostalgia that leads me to think that Democrats must do far better among working people if we want to build a long term progressive majority. For one thing, progressive public policy that truly addresses the difficulties we face is going to require new tax revenues and, if not immediately than someday, those revenues are going to have to come from people who make less than 250,000 a year. When that happens, we will undoubtedly lose some support among the professionals and managers who were with us this year.
A second reason we need to build working class support is that, at the upper ends of the class structure, our opponents remain better organized and have more resources than we do. The Obama campaign has done a wonderful job of mobilizing the professionals and managers (and the future professionals and managers) with progressive leanings. The enormous amount of money that the campaign has raised has come in large part from members of this class while their children have supplied the campaign with volunteers and energy.
The question however, is how well can an Obama administration keep these people mobilized over the next four and eight years as Obama’s proposals make their way through the long hard slog that is our legislative process. Having spent much of the last eight years of my life organizing the progressive middle class for political action, I know hard it is to keep attention focused on the details of that process.
Businesses that face new regulation or progressive taxation, however, are already organized. Their lobbyists are in place. Their campaign contributions have been delivered to the right members of Congress who are in many cases Democrats. They are a formidable opposition, one that will take a mass movement of not just professionals and managers but working people to beat.
And third, if we Democrats to work build support from working people, we will lose the support have gained in this election. If we don’t address the long term economic distress of workers in America—which is what we have to do to secure their votes on a more permanent basis—they will not vote Democratic in the future.
In the last thirty years Democrats in power have done precious little to help working people. The Carter and Clinton administrations were timid or frustrated in addressing the basic problems with our economy. While economic growth during the Clinton years did help move the incomes of workers ahead a bit—and the earned income tax credit did to a great deal for the poorest workers—those gains were not substantial enough or permanent enough to give a majority of working people reason to restore their faith in the party of Franklin Roosevelt. And the support Clinton and Carter gave free trade agreements without meaningful protection for American workers undermined their support for Democrats.
If we want to make sure that working people support progressive initiatives and vote for Democrats in the future, we have to give them a reason to reject a politics that scares them about Willie Horton, gay marriage, Williams Ayres, and immigration and a reason to embrace a politics that focuses on creating and security and opportunity for them and their kids. And the only way to do that is actually to provide the security and opportunity that a generation of Republican political economy has undermined.
Building The Ideological Base For Progressive Politics
So we are not yet where we need to be in building a working class base for progressive politics. Nor have we built the ideological underpinnings of a broad reform movement. The financial crisis has called into question, perhaps for the next five years if not the next generation, the notion that deregulating markets and letting businesses make money however they choose is the path to prosperity, justice, and the common good.
But we can’t yet say that Americans have embraced our vision, our belief that we can best serve the interests of all by pursuing out goals through common action, that is, through expanded government provision of critical goods and government regulation of the private market. Survey after survey shows that the domestic and foreign failures of the Bush administration have—and a conspiracy theorist would say was meant to—undermine what little confidence the American people have in government. Nor have we overcome the distaste for taxation that has become second nature for Americans since 1980.
So how do we address our economic problems while rebuilding trust in government nd creating security and opportunity for working Americans?
There is much to be said about these questions that I can’t discuss here. But I can in a short space, first, suggest a general approach to thinking about public policy and, second, point to two policy areas where we should move first if we want to attain these goals.
Thinking About Public Policy From A Progressive Point of View
Long before Reagan won in 1980, Democratic thought about public policy has been hampered by a lack of willingness to challenge the economic arrangements created by the market.
Since our economy took a wrong turn in 1973, Democrats have by and large taken it for granted that a changing economy sets narrow limits on what progressive public policy could attain. From that perspective, the massive rise in inequality and the partial collapse of the labor movement were simply facts of economic life created by new international competition. Many Democrats believed that, given those economic facts, the only way we could restore economic growth was to stimulate business investment by keeping taxes low and deregulating markets. Democrats may have wanted to limit those tax cuts, but they did not oppose them entirely and they enthusiastically joined in the movements for deregulation. And Democrats were eager to offer subsidies of every kind to American businesses without asking anything of them.
What Democrats failed to understand, however, is that what looked like a product of market necessity was, in fact, created in no small part by the aggressive rightwing public policies pursued by Ronald Reagan and his Republican successors (and acquiesced in by many Democrats). International competition became an all-purpose excuse for Democratic inaction.
But that economic analysis was wrong. While the labor movement suffered in Europe, it held firm because European governments refused to adopt the anti-labor polices of one Republican administration after another. And while inequality grew a bit in Europe it was largely constrained by tax and investment policies that preserved the position of working people.
In other words, while Republicans were using political power to shift the balance of power from working people to the owners of big business, Democrats in the last thirty years became vulgar Marxists who believed that semi-autonomous economic events drove politics and limited what they could accomplish.
Had Democrats looked back at our history since the late 19th century, however, they would have come to a very different sent of policy prescriptions. For the unionized portion of the labor force had gone up and down and then up and down again in response not just to autonomous market forces but to the policies of the federal government. And they would have also seen that the impressive increase in economic equality from the New Deal until 1973 were a product not of autonomous changes in our economy but of Democratic public policy, including support for the labor movement,
Public Policy To Build A Progressive Movement: The Economy
What we can learn from this very brief history is that, at this moment in which we finally have a chance to exercise power, Democrats need to abandon the excessive caution of the last twenty eight years and move decisively to build support among working people as well as among progressive professionals and mangers, by enacting polices that begin to shift the balance of power in our economy back to working people.
Before he does anything else, President Obama will have to right the economy. The kind of dramatic policy change we progressive want is not going to happen when the economy is teetering and people are fearful about their jobs. And, as Toqueville pointed out long ago, revolutionary change occurs not when people are without hope but, rather, when their hopes are gathering.
Righting the economy, however, is probably not as difficult as it looks at the moment. One thing economists do know is how to avoid a prolonged recession by relaxing credit and running government deficits. The current crisis has limited the usefulness of the usual tools for expanding credit but new tools that are likely to be effective are to some extent already in place. We can expect another round of fiscal stimulus at the end of this year or early next year, one that will pump up the economy over the long term not just by cutting taxes but by new spending on transit and on energy.
These actions, together with the confidence that will be created by a new President who s ready to take charge of our economy, will restore first confidence in and then the reality of economic growth.
Public Policy To Build A Progressive Movement: Health Care Reform
And then we will be able to move forward to the two policy initiatives that have the best hope of aiding working people and rebuilding their attachment to the Democratic Party.
The first is to enact health care reform that provides a guarantee of quality, affordable health care for all.
Nothing else we can do will so immediately provide a sense of security primarily but not only to working people. Millions of Americans in all classes suffer from a profound fear of becoming ill without insurance. Millions more are aware that their insurance is inadequate and that they are just a serious disease away from bankruptcy. And additional millions live in fear of losing insurance when costs are increasing at three times faster than wages.
Progressives today are split between single payer solutions to our health care crisis and alternatives, such as those put forward by Health Care For America Now, that call for a new public health insurance program open to all combined with new rules on insurance companies that will force them to make money the old fashioned way, by insuring more people, rather than by denying care and coverage with
Either approach will require a dramatic expansion of government authority, one that will limits the prerogatives of a powerful insurance industry and requires all businesses either to provide health insurance or pay taxes into a public insurance program. My own view is that, until we overcome the widespread distrust of government and fear of high taxes, single payer is a political non-starter. But the Health Care For America Now program of new regulations and a new public insurance program is certainly winnable. And within a few years after this program is enacted, millions of Americans will come to have a new respect for what government can do.
Nothing else can re-legitimate government more quickly than enacting a guarantee of affordable health care for all. And nothing else we do will show working people that the Democratic Party is on their side.
Public Policy To Build A Progressive Movement: The Employee Free Choice Act
The second objective of a new administration should be to enact the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).
After a generation in which the federal government has tilted against labor unions while businesses aggressively and unfairly worked to stop and then roll back unionization, the Employee Free Choice Act would dramatically shift the balance in the other direction. It would allow working people to form unions by signing cards authorizing union representation; provide mediation and arbitration during first-contract negotiations, and establish stronger penalties for violation of employee rights when workers seek to form a union.
With EFCA, and a new commitment on the part of organized labor to making to labor a movement once again, we will see a new round of unionization, one that could equal that achieved in the New Deal.
This is critical to progressive for two reasons.
First, a strong labor movement is best way to raise the wages of working people and to make American business strong. Academic study after academic study has shown that strong unions are the best path to creating an economy that rests on high wages and a highly trained work force. Businesses with highly paid, well trained work forces become more efficient and productive.
Second a strong labor movement is critical to sustaining working class support for Democrats.
The unsung hero of the Obama’s support among white working people is the US Labor movement. The AFL-CIO and the Change to Win unions have done extraordinary work not only with their own members but with working people who are not yet unionized.
In Philadelphia, Pat Eiding the President of the Central Labor Council has been simply incredible. More than almost any supporters of Barack Obama I know, Eiding has spoken to the racism that we know is found in this country. In every corner of Philadelphia Eiding Pat has encouraged union members and other working people to ignore race; to close their eyes and listen for which candidates is speaking for them; and to forget about black and white and to think about green.
What the labor movement has been able to because of the density of organized labor in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania it cannot do everywhere in the country. And that is one reason why, if we want to build a progressive movement that can rely on strong working class support, we need to encourage labor organizing in every city and state in the country.
Conclusion
Tonight we will celebrate—and rightfully so. However I hope we celebrate not just the victory we win today, but the extraordinary opportunity we have before us to take advantage of this election to build a progressive Democratic movement.
We have a long agenda: peace in Iraq and elsewhere, new support for education, the greening of America (though having read the awful book of that title in my childhood I still cringe at the phrase.), and many other issues.
But we can best take advantage of that opportunity by moving initially and aggressively to win health care reform and the Employee Free Choice Act. With those victories we will build the strength in the working class to create progressive public policies in every other area: education, energy, the environment, and beyond.