Lots of interesting insights and ideas! I think my thoughts and questions are split into two main categories: policy and messaging. On the policy side, I think highlighting that there are significant problems that have arisen in the past forty years is critical. And I think that it's really insightful that there is a policy agenda in Trumpism and that it's worth genuinely understanding why that policy agenda is important and worth potentially taking on board. You've convinced me that figuring out meaningful policy options that help people who have been hurt by globalization and wage inequality should be a major priority. My sense is that the Biden administration has tried to include solutions to some of these issues in some of the big bills that they have passed or have tried to pass, but I would be interested in hearing your evaluation of whether it is being prioritized at all on the policy side. As a non-expert, globalization feels so massive and inevitable to me, so figuring out how to undo some of it is hard for me to get my mind around, but I think there are natural alignments between the democratic agenda - local manufacturing with ethical, domestic labor laws, new green infrastructure, etc. - so I'm excited to learn more about policy approaches we could take on. I would love to learn more about effective policy solutions that could make a difference to help with quality of life for the working class in general and for rural Americans specifically - could you maybe make another post on that? Are there policies or approaches that have worked on a local scale anywhere that we could learn from? On to messaging. First, I'm interested in the idea of starting with an apology. I like it in a lot of ways, but I also think that it could be tricky to pull off. It could be brushed off as not real, could be leveraged by Republicans to claim this is all our fault, and / or could come across as pitying, which the NYT article highlights as a problematic lens. So I'm open to it (you've written it very well) and generally interested in thinking about having our language center people who have been hurt by globalization, but interested in your thoughts specifically about the pros and cons of leading with an apology. Also, in terms of general strategy for winning elections, I'm interpreting you to be arguing for trying to bring in people who are currently Trump supporters to join the Democratic Party. I am curious about your thoughts on that strategy versus leveraging and rallying the Democratic base. There are a lot of Republicans, but there are also a lot of Democrats. And a lot of Democrats who don't vote. Particularly in light of some of the social policies that the Republicans are pushing, like abortion bans, it feels strategically fruitful in the short term to energize the left to win elections, rather than trying to win over the right. Thoughts? Would we ideally do both, or is it worth reorienting ourselves to prioritize trying to win over Trump supporters even if it takes a long time to fully take hold, in the hopes that it's a better long term strategy?
Wow, Lots of good questions here and easily grist of many posts. And I will be working on those. In the meantime, let me give a couple of shortish answers to get started. As to your first category of questions on policy, in general, globalization was in some sense inevitable, but it didn’t have to be anything like as devastating to our working and middle classes as it was. There were many policy choices along the way that could have been made differently, starting with President Reagan’s “Trickle Down” economics (a concept that they made up from whole cloth) that was built on the assertion that if you skew tax policies and wealth accumulation in favor of the rich, so they get much richer, the rich will then use all this new capital to invest and create great new jobs. But at the same time, the Republicans also attacked what little there already was of the “safety net,” beginning to more and more restrict benefits and create, for instance work requirements as part of the eligibility for benefits.
In addition, because of global competition for markets, the tax system and international trade system also were reformed to enable and reward foreign investment in new ways, especially with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was the bane of organized labor’s -- and millions of working peoples’ -- existence. There are thousands of articles and books about all of this.
So, just as national economic policy was being completely recast for global economic competition and domination, the Republicans managed to capture and obfuscate the national policy narrative such that they had middle America believing that Democrats had weakened America nanny-state policies that favored immigrant workers and “welfare queens” (people taking welfare and buying Cadillacs, etc.). And so wealth was simultaneously being shifted to the very rich at the same time that the whole idea of a helping hand and public assistance was being cut way back. All of this justified by an ideology that claimed that desperate people were more likely to seek work rather than laze about suckling the public teat; while also claiming that rich people were better stewards of the nation’s wealth.
All of this led to moving millions of jobs overseas, causing both urban and rural communities to be reamed-out, and reducing people to scrambling for welfare while being required to find a minimum wage job. Obviously, I am generalizing here. There’s so much more, including the horrific epidemic of “deaths of despair” that still continues.
My thesis has been that Dems put up a very lame fight on all of this and defaulted instead to a sort of play along to get along posture, especially as our economic and technological engines were running at a very high level of return for those of us with college degrees and other privileges. Democrats essentially turned a blind eye to the working and middle class as we picked up suburban voters happy with their newly fortunate circumstances. But Republicans dominated presidential elections and used their success to create and execute a sophisticated strategy to take control of state legislatures (with the financial support of the Koch brothers and other right-wing billionaires who are opposed to the entire modern administrative state and want to see it dismantled so that business can go back to the Gilded Age of no regulation, etc).
And then the housing/mortgage crisis hit in 2007-8. This resulted primarily from the desperation of people without jobs to take equity of of their houses by refinancing in order to pay their bills. Some of the biggest players in the mortgage industry saw a huge gold mine here, especially because bankers and Wall Street were able to bundle these very risky loans into appraently quite attractive packages and sell them to others. But, of course, this all finally fell apart when it turned out that people were defaulting at huge rates, in part because the mortgages themselves were written with all sorts of provisions that essentially made this inevitable in the aggregate.
With the collapse of the secondary and tertiary market in mortgage loans, banks or mortgage holders called in their loans, causing millions of people to lose all of the equity in their houses and, often the houses themselves. Their houses where their main or only “savings,” having paid on mortgages over many years; and when they lost them almost all hope for the future was lost with them. When Obama was elected, this crisis had just erupted and the Republicans were determined to not let Obama achieve anything, so, while an initial bailout of the major banks passed through Congress, Obama was never able to get another round of relief through to the people who really needed and deserved it: those who had lost their houses. Talk about doubling down on creating resentment . . . 1/2
2/2And then your second category: Messaging. I understand why you or anyone would worry about starting with an apology. But, given where we are, I feel like it’s the right and bold thing to do. Of course it would have to be done thoughtfully and not abjectly; but Biden is the type of person who could pull that off. He is great at comforting people and has real, authentic empathy for those who need a helping hand. I believe that so many of the disaffected working and middle classes have gone with Trump and Trumpism because he has given them a glimpse of how they might get to have someone represent them and have some say-so. He tells them and shows them that in everything he does in a way that the monotonous ramblings of “career politicians” just hardly ever do.
Right now, in this moment, I think we as Dems and as people who care to preserve our democratic experiment, have got to speak in plain English and from the heart as well as the head, and not just promise but do. Biden and his advisors I think misjudged the mandate they got and tried to push through an enormous catch-all of “promising” programs that sounded no different from all of the “promising” programs that have been rationalized for decades to advantage the advantaged. Not only was passing all of this not possible because of our slim majorities in House and Senate, but also, these initiatives were too amorphous and conventionally packaged and sold. And I don’t believe we would be in a better place had they passed, because people would not have understood or felt their effects and they would not have a framework for understanding how these were going to “Build Back Better” for them any more than other programs had.
SO, that’s why I think Biden and Dems have to be all-in on centering working and middle class priorities, and you would really get their attention if you were to say something to the effect that, “Well, I know you’ve been neglected and I’m here to fix that and here’s exactly what we are going to do and how, and here’s how we can work together and that you can hold me and us accountable. . .” And this particular promise would be led by the kind of directed and emergency funding that a President can initiate, followed by very particular legislation to effect programs and policy in ways that are clearly pro-“Heartland” or whatever you want to call it. There are lots of examples of programs and areas, like jobs programs, etc., that can be enumerated. But MY point is that none of these will matter unless we can intervene in the Authoritarian juggernaut and convince enough middle-Americans that we have the better path forward.
So, while, yes, we want to galvanize our own voters, this was clearly not happening. Younger voters are disillusioned just as I recall being when our leaders wouldn’t stop the war in Vietnam. And the suburban voters who got Biden past trump and got the two Senators from Georgia elected have too been decidedly unenthusiastic. The SCOTUS decision is going to galvanize a lot of what might otherwise have been unenthusiastic voters. But there’s too much chaos and uncertainty still and the new Republican authoritarians who have taken over the party have a far more focused message of empowerment for disaffected voters that is easy to understand and get behind. And, as you can see from their rally’s, they have fun being a part of something like that.
I don’t think most “Trump” voters are rabidly about a particular issue. What they are rabid about is not being discarded as white trash, is being seen, heard, valued, respected, having opportunities to make a decent living and take care of their families. I think they are rabidly done with the political status quo and want leadership that matters to them. Are there real issues to deal with around racism, etc. Hell yes, But we can’t do that if we are seen as an enemy. The authoritarians always can easily promise and demonstrate that they can “make the trains run on time.” That’s because they are thugs. But the thug model is the only alternative that has been presented to millions of disaffected Americans and we need to present a real, authentic, cathartic, and impactful alternative.
Unfortunately, I don’t think our leadership has caught up to this. That’s one reason why I feel compelled to speak out and put something up into the political ether that might help get them there.
Lots of interesting insights and ideas! I think my thoughts and questions are split into two main categories: policy and messaging. On the policy side, I think highlighting that there are significant problems that have arisen in the past forty years is critical. And I think that it's really insightful that there is a policy agenda in Trumpism and that it's worth genuinely understanding why that policy agenda is important and worth potentially taking on board. You've convinced me that figuring out meaningful policy options that help people who have been hurt by globalization and wage inequality should be a major priority. My sense is that the Biden administration has tried to include solutions to some of these issues in some of the big bills that they have passed or have tried to pass, but I would be interested in hearing your evaluation of whether it is being prioritized at all on the policy side. As a non-expert, globalization feels so massive and inevitable to me, so figuring out how to undo some of it is hard for me to get my mind around, but I think there are natural alignments between the democratic agenda - local manufacturing with ethical, domestic labor laws, new green infrastructure, etc. - so I'm excited to learn more about policy approaches we could take on. I would love to learn more about effective policy solutions that could make a difference to help with quality of life for the working class in general and for rural Americans specifically - could you maybe make another post on that? Are there policies or approaches that have worked on a local scale anywhere that we could learn from? On to messaging. First, I'm interested in the idea of starting with an apology. I like it in a lot of ways, but I also think that it could be tricky to pull off. It could be brushed off as not real, could be leveraged by Republicans to claim this is all our fault, and / or could come across as pitying, which the NYT article highlights as a problematic lens. So I'm open to it (you've written it very well) and generally interested in thinking about having our language center people who have been hurt by globalization, but interested in your thoughts specifically about the pros and cons of leading with an apology. Also, in terms of general strategy for winning elections, I'm interpreting you to be arguing for trying to bring in people who are currently Trump supporters to join the Democratic Party. I am curious about your thoughts on that strategy versus leveraging and rallying the Democratic base. There are a lot of Republicans, but there are also a lot of Democrats. And a lot of Democrats who don't vote. Particularly in light of some of the social policies that the Republicans are pushing, like abortion bans, it feels strategically fruitful in the short term to energize the left to win elections, rather than trying to win over the right. Thoughts? Would we ideally do both, or is it worth reorienting ourselves to prioritize trying to win over Trump supporters even if it takes a long time to fully take hold, in the hopes that it's a better long term strategy?
Wow, Lots of good questions here and easily grist of many posts. And I will be working on those. In the meantime, let me give a couple of shortish answers to get started. As to your first category of questions on policy, in general, globalization was in some sense inevitable, but it didn’t have to be anything like as devastating to our working and middle classes as it was. There were many policy choices along the way that could have been made differently, starting with President Reagan’s “Trickle Down” economics (a concept that they made up from whole cloth) that was built on the assertion that if you skew tax policies and wealth accumulation in favor of the rich, so they get much richer, the rich will then use all this new capital to invest and create great new jobs. But at the same time, the Republicans also attacked what little there already was of the “safety net,” beginning to more and more restrict benefits and create, for instance work requirements as part of the eligibility for benefits.
In addition, because of global competition for markets, the tax system and international trade system also were reformed to enable and reward foreign investment in new ways, especially with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was the bane of organized labor’s -- and millions of working peoples’ -- existence. There are thousands of articles and books about all of this.
So, just as national economic policy was being completely recast for global economic competition and domination, the Republicans managed to capture and obfuscate the national policy narrative such that they had middle America believing that Democrats had weakened America nanny-state policies that favored immigrant workers and “welfare queens” (people taking welfare and buying Cadillacs, etc.). And so wealth was simultaneously being shifted to the very rich at the same time that the whole idea of a helping hand and public assistance was being cut way back. All of this justified by an ideology that claimed that desperate people were more likely to seek work rather than laze about suckling the public teat; while also claiming that rich people were better stewards of the nation’s wealth.
All of this led to moving millions of jobs overseas, causing both urban and rural communities to be reamed-out, and reducing people to scrambling for welfare while being required to find a minimum wage job. Obviously, I am generalizing here. There’s so much more, including the horrific epidemic of “deaths of despair” that still continues.
My thesis has been that Dems put up a very lame fight on all of this and defaulted instead to a sort of play along to get along posture, especially as our economic and technological engines were running at a very high level of return for those of us with college degrees and other privileges. Democrats essentially turned a blind eye to the working and middle class as we picked up suburban voters happy with their newly fortunate circumstances. But Republicans dominated presidential elections and used their success to create and execute a sophisticated strategy to take control of state legislatures (with the financial support of the Koch brothers and other right-wing billionaires who are opposed to the entire modern administrative state and want to see it dismantled so that business can go back to the Gilded Age of no regulation, etc).
And then the housing/mortgage crisis hit in 2007-8. This resulted primarily from the desperation of people without jobs to take equity of of their houses by refinancing in order to pay their bills. Some of the biggest players in the mortgage industry saw a huge gold mine here, especially because bankers and Wall Street were able to bundle these very risky loans into appraently quite attractive packages and sell them to others. But, of course, this all finally fell apart when it turned out that people were defaulting at huge rates, in part because the mortgages themselves were written with all sorts of provisions that essentially made this inevitable in the aggregate.
With the collapse of the secondary and tertiary market in mortgage loans, banks or mortgage holders called in their loans, causing millions of people to lose all of the equity in their houses and, often the houses themselves. Their houses where their main or only “savings,” having paid on mortgages over many years; and when they lost them almost all hope for the future was lost with them. When Obama was elected, this crisis had just erupted and the Republicans were determined to not let Obama achieve anything, so, while an initial bailout of the major banks passed through Congress, Obama was never able to get another round of relief through to the people who really needed and deserved it: those who had lost their houses. Talk about doubling down on creating resentment . . . 1/2
2/2And then your second category: Messaging. I understand why you or anyone would worry about starting with an apology. But, given where we are, I feel like it’s the right and bold thing to do. Of course it would have to be done thoughtfully and not abjectly; but Biden is the type of person who could pull that off. He is great at comforting people and has real, authentic empathy for those who need a helping hand. I believe that so many of the disaffected working and middle classes have gone with Trump and Trumpism because he has given them a glimpse of how they might get to have someone represent them and have some say-so. He tells them and shows them that in everything he does in a way that the monotonous ramblings of “career politicians” just hardly ever do.
Right now, in this moment, I think we as Dems and as people who care to preserve our democratic experiment, have got to speak in plain English and from the heart as well as the head, and not just promise but do. Biden and his advisors I think misjudged the mandate they got and tried to push through an enormous catch-all of “promising” programs that sounded no different from all of the “promising” programs that have been rationalized for decades to advantage the advantaged. Not only was passing all of this not possible because of our slim majorities in House and Senate, but also, these initiatives were too amorphous and conventionally packaged and sold. And I don’t believe we would be in a better place had they passed, because people would not have understood or felt their effects and they would not have a framework for understanding how these were going to “Build Back Better” for them any more than other programs had.
SO, that’s why I think Biden and Dems have to be all-in on centering working and middle class priorities, and you would really get their attention if you were to say something to the effect that, “Well, I know you’ve been neglected and I’m here to fix that and here’s exactly what we are going to do and how, and here’s how we can work together and that you can hold me and us accountable. . .” And this particular promise would be led by the kind of directed and emergency funding that a President can initiate, followed by very particular legislation to effect programs and policy in ways that are clearly pro-“Heartland” or whatever you want to call it. There are lots of examples of programs and areas, like jobs programs, etc., that can be enumerated. But MY point is that none of these will matter unless we can intervene in the Authoritarian juggernaut and convince enough middle-Americans that we have the better path forward.
So, while, yes, we want to galvanize our own voters, this was clearly not happening. Younger voters are disillusioned just as I recall being when our leaders wouldn’t stop the war in Vietnam. And the suburban voters who got Biden past trump and got the two Senators from Georgia elected have too been decidedly unenthusiastic. The SCOTUS decision is going to galvanize a lot of what might otherwise have been unenthusiastic voters. But there’s too much chaos and uncertainty still and the new Republican authoritarians who have taken over the party have a far more focused message of empowerment for disaffected voters that is easy to understand and get behind. And, as you can see from their rally’s, they have fun being a part of something like that.
I don’t think most “Trump” voters are rabidly about a particular issue. What they are rabid about is not being discarded as white trash, is being seen, heard, valued, respected, having opportunities to make a decent living and take care of their families. I think they are rabidly done with the political status quo and want leadership that matters to them. Are there real issues to deal with around racism, etc. Hell yes, But we can’t do that if we are seen as an enemy. The authoritarians always can easily promise and demonstrate that they can “make the trains run on time.” That’s because they are thugs. But the thug model is the only alternative that has been presented to millions of disaffected Americans and we need to present a real, authentic, cathartic, and impactful alternative.
Unfortunately, I don’t think our leadership has caught up to this. That’s one reason why I feel compelled to speak out and put something up into the political ether that might help get them there.
To be continued.
Thanks!