Date: 2025-01-06 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00027714
US POLITICS
2024 POLITICAL POST-MORTEM
WP Opinion Democrats don’t have a working-class problem. America does.
Extreme income inequality and unchecked corporate power gave rise to
FDR’s New Deal — Democrats should be no less ambitious now.
2024 POLITICAL POST-MORTEM
WP Opinion Democrats don’t have a working-class problem. America does.
Extreme income inequality and unchecked corporate power gave rise to
FDR’s New Deal — Democrats should be no less ambitious now.
A worker descends from scaffolding at the U.S. Capitol in 2023.
(Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/29/democrats-working-people/
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
Simple ... simplistic ... analysis of the United States of America is essentially a 'fool's errand'. It is being done all the time, and in the aftermath of an election the folly of American media is on full display.
Trump won the election fair and square ... but landslide it was not!
Though the Democrats lost ... Harris was a serious contender even though she only campaigned for the Presidency for a rather lmited length of time.
Based on any serious analysis, the platform being offered by Kamala Harris and the Democrats was far better for the country than anything being put forward by Donald Trump and his merry band of incompetents!. I see Trump as a very effective TV personality in the world of fictional 'reality TV', but as a serious policy maker he is completely out of his depth. Frankly ... it is embarrassing!
In my opinion, President Joe Biden did the country a huge service by running for President in 2020 and for winning the Presidency after 4 years of Trump mismanagement in this high office.
My assessment of the Biden Presidency is that it has been one of the most productive in my lifetime ... better than Eisenhauer, Kennedy and Johnson combined! The fact that this is not appreciated by many people, neither in the media nor the general public is part Biden's problem ... but it is also a problem with the Democratic Party as a whole. Biden has been 'great' ... but who is aware of this? Hardly anyone!
I am sorry that Kamala Harris did not win the Presidency. The policy framework she described was so much more coherent than anything that Trump talked about ... but that did not convince enough of those that voted. She handled the essential transition from Biden to herself very well ... but in a very simplistic political world that is the USA, thiw was far too complicated!
This is how I think the electorate voted. My impression is that about 30% were completely MAGA ... about 50% voted for various flavors of Democrat ... and about 20% (with a lot of money) put their support behind the GOP because they were scared stiff of the very sound policy framework that Kamala harris had started to talk about on the campaign trail.
As I see it, there is a good reason why the US stock market hit record highs when it became clear that Kamala Harris had been defeated. There is a reason that the stock market has been at record highs for much of the Biden administration ... the Biden status quo was very good for investors ... but less good for the 80% or so that simply earn a paycheck and have difficulty making ends meet.
Not much of this is 'political policy' but very much more about 'corporate policy. In the USA 'corporate policy' comes down to one thing and one thing only ... maximising return to stock-holders!
IOf the stock market is any indicator ... Biden has done a very good job enabling companies to earn record profits.
Biden has also enabled a full employment economy ... and has made it clear tha he supported better remuneration for workers. This is not a 'government' function and he can do little directly ... but the fact that as President he appeared on a picket line with Union employees on strike sugests that he was on the right side once again!
As far as I am concerned Trump is a fraud, and should have been eliminated from any possibility of a second term as President a very long time ago!
Peter Burgess
Extreme income inequality and unchecked corporate power gave rise to FDR’s New Deal — Democrats should be no less ambitious now.
Written By Dana Milbank
November 29, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST
It’s that time again. Every election that ends in a Democratic defeat seems to produce the same breathless analysis: Democrats have lost the working class!
In 2004, we heard that “working-class Americans, once the core of the Democratic Party, are voting Republican.”
In 2016, we were told: “Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more.”
And now, inevitably, headlines over the past three weeks have been revealing the same startling discovery all over again:
“Democrats’ working-class exodus sets off reckoning within party.”
“Why Democrats lost their working-class coalition.”
“Is This the End of the White Working-Class Democrat?”
This is getting tedious.
It’s not that the conclusion is wrong as much as it is woefully outdated. Working-class voters, roughly defined as those who aren’t college educated, haven’t been reliable Democratic voters since the New Deal coalition dissolved — decades ago. So why do political analysts keep concluding that the Democrats have, all of a sudden, lost the working man and woman?
I asked someone who has studied the voting attitudes of the working class as much as anyone alive: Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO and a prominent figure in progressive politics. He said political analysts have been claiming that Democrats have just lost working people “every election for the last 50 years,” based on the “idiotic assumption” that all workers without college degrees, or nearly two-thirds of the adult labor force, can be lumped together into a single category — “working class” — with the expectation that they have a shared identity as workers and will vote accordingly.
“The idea that working people would vote for Democrats goes back to the New Deal era, when being a worker was an actual identity that [Franklin D.] Roosevelt and the Democrats appealed to by saying that when corporations want to do bad things to you, we’re on your side,” Podhorzer noted. Back then, Democrats did get about 80 percent of the working-class vote, because they emphasized the class conflict. But “in the current two-party structure, where both parties are dominated by billionaires and corporations, there isn’t an actual place for working-class identity.”
Working people no longer vote their interests as “workers” but cast ballots for all kinds of different reasons. They shifted several points away from Democrats between 2020 and 2024 — but so did many different groups across the electorate, mostly because they were unhappy with the Biden administration’s performance on inflation.
The reductive analysis of working-class voters abandoning Democrats is particularly maddening because it misses what’s actually happening to those voters, which is a crisis much bigger than the temporary fortunes of a political party. This is less a Democratic problem than an American problem — but Democrats have a fresh chance to try to fix it.
For nearly a half century, and particularly over the past two decades, corporate America has plunged workers ever deeper into job and income insecurity. Employers, benefiting from weakened labor laws and lax enforcement of those that remain on the books, have been forcing workers into erratic schedules, hiring them as contractors or temporary or gig workers and stealing their wages. It’s no coincidence that all this happened while labor union membership, which peaked at one-third of the workforce, shriveled to the current 10 percent.
With the decline of unions and collective bargaining, pay has stagnated and pensions have disappeared. Wealth inequality has soared, earnings have become less dependable, and most workers report that they feel stressed, unappreciated, disconnected and distrustful of their employers. They are surveilled on the job, sanctioned for expressing themselves and subjected to dehumanizing workplaces. “Here most of us are, toiling under the authority of communist dictators, and we do not see the reality for what it is,” wrote University of Michigan philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson. The financial collapse of 2008 and the coronavirus pandemic only deepened the insecurity and misery.
Voting patterns, not just this year’s but this century’s, reflect the discontent and instability. In nine of the past 10 federal elections, one party or the other has lost control of the White House, Senate or House. Voters, desperate for a fundamental change, punish the incumbent party and then, inevitably finding no relief, punish the other party two years later. Politics has become a depressing game of ping-pong, with no enduring wins.
“We’ve never had a period since at least the late 19th century where there have been so many knife’s-edge elections,” Podhorzer told me. “So, coming out of every election, Democrats assume all we need is fine tuning, because we barely lost. We have to get past thinking we’re going to message our way out of this moment. It’s so much bigger than that. And it ignores the fact that, for all of the 21st century, we’ve been seeing that voters just want a different system, a more profound change.”
Even some on the right have begun to argue for a revival of labor unions and New Deal-style government intervention to undo the damage of the past half-century of neoliberalism, the era of the unfettered free market that began with President Ronald Reagan. The conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari argued in his 2023 book, “Tyranny, Inc.,” that the current “domination of working and middle-class people by the owners of capital, the asset-less by the asset-rich,” has “drained the vigor and substance out of democracy, facilitated massive upward transfers of wealth, and left ordinary people feeling isolated and powerless.”
In the short term, Democrats could change nothing and they’d still probably do well by default in the 2026 midterms as disenchanted voters once again punish the incumbent party. President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t have much of a popular mandate: The latest figures show he got below 50 percent of the popular vote, Harris lost by about 1.6 percentage points and Democrats may have actually gained a seat or two in the House. And he’s already overreaching with outlandish nominations and announced plans to start a trade war with Canada, Mexico and China.
But in the long term, doing nothing would be a huge mistake — for the party and, more important, for the country. We are, in some ways, back to the extreme income inequality and unchecked corporate power over workers that gave rise to the modern labor movement in the 1930s and the New Deal’s government-regulated capitalism, which led America to three decades of broadly shared economic prosperity after World War II. What’s needed to relieve workers’ pain this time is no less ambitious.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Wagner Unemployment Bill
at the White House in Washington on June 6, 1933. (AP)
Ahmari called for government to encourage “a labor market in which most sectors are unionized, while workers in those few industries that resist unionization enjoy higher minimum wages.” And this conservative thinker waxed nostalgic for the New Dealers: “Those leaders left behind a political map for building a better economy and a more authentically free society. They guided us, above all, to workers’ countervailing power: the indispensable lever for improving the lot of the asset-less and for stabilizing economies otherwise prone to turbulence and speculative chaos. The supreme challenge today is to forge a similar left-right consensus.”
Of course, that won’t be happening anytime soon. Trump channels populist anger, but he directs it at migrants and foreigners instead of corporations. The billionaire president-elect has chosen a billionaire commerce secretary, a billionaire interior secretary and a billionaire education secretary, and he has tapped the world’s wealthiest man to run his government-efficiency task force. This oligarchy is planning to impose more of the same policies that caused workers’ problems in the first place: extending tax breaks for the rich and further rolling back business regulation, employment law and union rights.
As Bernie Sanders can attest, Democrats, too, have long resisted a return to their populist roots, going back to when President Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and his Democratic Leadership Council recruited corporate donors to fund the party. But this moment could be different. Gallup’s latest polling shows that approval of labor unions is at 70 percent, up from 48 percent 15 years ago, after the financial crash. Sixty-one percent say unions mostly help the economy, up from 39 percent in 2009. The favorable impression of unions has grown at the same time Americans’ confidence in most other institutions — business, church, the media, the presidency, Congress — has been going the other way.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) issued a memo last week with polling from his home state showing that 82 percent of people — including large majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents — agree that one of the biggest problems facing the country is that corporations and economic elites hold too much power and government is doing too little about it. “Democrats have the opportunity to call Republicans on their bluff and prove to the American people that we are the ones on the side of the workers,” he wrote. “But that’s only possible if we have the courage to pick fights with powerful corporations and billionaires and fight against the status quo.”
That is a gigantic “if.”
The consumer advocate Ralph Nader, through his third-party presidential campaigns and his hectoring, has tried for years to push the Democrats toward a $15 minimum wage, a return to the progressive tax system of the 1960s, a revival of private pensions and the National Labor Relations Board, a hike in Social Security benefits paid for by higher payroll taxes on the wealthy, and much more. But at this point, he told me, he has no optimism that the party can change itself: “They’ve drained it out of me.”
I understand the cynicism. For ages, Democratic leaders have tried to have it both ways, calling for marginal improvements to the tax code but shying away from anything that might repel the corporate interests that are also in their coalition. But, at some point, the worsening suffering of tens of millions of workers must persuade them to take the risk.
And — who knows? — maybe if Democrats take that risk it will free them, and all of us, from the dreary cycle of the past two decades in which frustrated voters turn from one party to the other and then back again, never finding the change they are seeking. And then, for the first time in decades, maybe working people will again vote reliably Democratic, because Democrats will have restored their working-class identity.
Or maybe such an effort will fail. But isn’t it better to do the right thing for the country regardless of what it does to the party?
Opinion by Dana Milbank
Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. His latest book, 'Fools on the Hill: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theories and Dunces who Burned Down the House' (Little, Brown) is out September 24. follow on X @Milbank
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