Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Michael Tomasky, the main New York Review of Books (NYRB) political commentator, writes in “Who Can Unite the Democrats?” (December 5, 2019 print edition) that the unfulfilled party task so far is for a candidate to re-assemble the “Obama” coalition, defined this way by Ruy Teixeira, a well known Democratic analyst-pollster:
The Obama coalition “’...is broadly understood to include not just nonwhites, young voters, unmarried and highly educated women, professionals, urbanites...but also 40 percent or so of non-college whites in critical states’”… Here’s the full article: www.nybooks.com/...
Yes, the Democrats are a party haunted by the desertion of large numbers of white working class voters, men especially but not exclusively, deserters who have helped build the counter revolutionary conservative Republican Party since Goldwater. That’s a party built around: anti-statist Austrian economics; anti Keynesian — anti-New Dealism-Great Society programs; anti-1960’s morality; and anti-secularism.
This is a Democratic party haunted by desertion from its own former New Deal ideals, succumbing to the idea that the private sector is now so all consuming, all “achieving” that the era of big government is finally over (since “Bill’s” 1996 eulogy).
Yet it is the failures of that private sector that has driven the left revolt inside the Democratic Party and that lie behind the book reviewed in this “inflamed” edition of the NY Review of Books: the one with the image of a burning house on the cover. (See my post from Thursday, Dec. 5th, here: www.dailykos.com/...)
There is a world view among dissenting economists about the private sector, that one rarely hears at places like CNN: the lower growth rates since the golden decades of 1945-1975; the drop in labor share’s of earnings and wealth; the low rate of investment in plant and equipment, and basic scientific R&D; the heavy investment in re-arranging corporate assets via Mergers and Acquisitions, discarding millions of middle managers along the way to greater “efficiency”; the obsession with buying back already issued stock shares -”shareholder value ‘uber alles’”; the indifference as to where investment occurs, when it does, and who benefits; the willingness to see rural America fall behind as growth concentrates in selected cities, growth suburbs/counties in a dramatically stark manner; and the inability to grasp the scope of the damage capitalism inflicts on Nature and the Climate…(unfortunately Robert Skidelsky’s book, “Money and Government,” which triggered the cover image of the house on fire, is weakest on that aspect of our troubles, and surprisingly so for someone from Great Britain, whose ecological and economic left was out of the gate early with its version of a Green New Deal, right up alongside the Great Recession in 2008.)
If Skidelsky’s book doesn’t convince you of deep troubles in our economic understandings — his opening sentence reads “‘We are at a junction where the whole of macroeconomic policy is up for grabs’”—then two books by the British-American economist Mariana Mazzucato should: The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths (2013) and The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (2018). Here is a recent piece about her in the NY Times, noting that she is lending advice to Senator Warren’s campaign and to AOC’s increasingly detailed roll-out of the specifics for the Green New Deal Resolution: www.nytimes.com/…
Remember, please, at this point, if you think I am over-stressing economics at the expense of cultural matters (race, gender, immigration) Naomi Klein’s brutally sharp take on what happened on the day the political earth shook after Trumps election, here in her column of November 9, 2016, in the Guardian: www.theguardian.com/… : “Trump’s message was: ‘All is hell.’ Clinton answered: ‘All is well.’ But it’s not well – far from it.” And the title of her column? “It was the Democrats’ embrace of Neoliberalism which won it for Trump.”
Have things changed so much in the way Michael Tomasky looks at it now, three full years later, in “Who Can Unite the Democrats/A Dem for All Seasons?” (The NYRB likes to put one title on the cover and a different one inside for the same article.) Not really. His constant emphasis is on how conservative and cautious the general electorate is — outside of the Sanders and Warren supporters in the Party (which ignores some of the findings in Ross Douthat’s column, which we linked to in our first article about Obama intervening. If you missed it, here it is again: www.nytimes.com/... ). The only concession to that left that Tomasky makes, after emphasizing that this probably won’t resonate with the electorate at large , is this:
“For thirty -plus years, Democrats have been careful not to be too this or too that: too liberal, too aggressive, too angry at the ‘malefactors of great wealth’...Warren is utterly incautious about such matters...Bernie Sanders does that too, of course, but while Sanders usually seems to be lecturing — basically his only emotional gear — Warren comes off more as someone who is jousting and enjoying it.”
Unfortunately, this higher emotional gear and Tomasky’s brief and only reference to the impacts of the political economy generating those feelings —“… describing and denouncing this malignant form of capitalism we’ve been living with for forty years” - belongs to just one of the very diverse camps in the Democratic Party. By implication, it’s not an accurate description of the reality that the diverse broader party sees — and which the deserted white working class sees, outside the party. Despite the pain that economy inflicts on them, they have cast their lot with the most intensely capitalist party in the world, and when they look back over the shoulder at the Democrats they have left, they hear no challenge to that economy’s main tenets — until Sanders and Warren came along. And of course, that migrant white working class is fed mostly on the culture war themes that keep the nation and the Democrats off any serious critical economic analysis of the type Modern Monetary Theory offers, or which Skidelsky broad historical portrait gives us: capitalism over the centuries.
If one combines the Sanders and Warren supporters, the “Intersectionality” of the picture widens, but Tomasky says it’s inevitable that one camp will have to make a break with the other. So far, that hasn’t happened; they’ve been tactical allies, and it might make sense for each to keep it that way right up to the convention’s possible gridlock.
In Tomasky’s view, uniting the Democrats and by implication, winning the election, comes down to a magic act, one based on rare political skills and charisma, which both Bill Clinton and Obama possessed and could pull off — but which the two lefties and the rest of the huge field cannot duplicate. An act which Biden and Warren come closest too, but who aren’t there yet, unable “to reassure the other part.”
Well then, it’s not about the reality of Class and Climate “Inequality,” it’s about a magic act from the best actors to convince the left and center-right of the party that their outlook is shared by the candidate of the hour. Speaking as someone who recorded four affirmative votes for these previous masters, I can write this from the head — and heart: after realizing that Bill Clinton faked left in 1992, to govern instead as a moderate Republican would have many years earlier, I listened very closely to Barack Obama in 2008. And I voted for him with no great expectations but happy to vote for the first Black President in history, which is no small milestone given our nation’s leg-iron legacy on race. However I never heard what I wanted to hear about the political economy, which I was increasingly focused on as a writer in the Beltway area — and with my eyes on the near cataclysmic financial events in the fall of 2008. I turned down tickets to his Inauguration so someone much younger and more “enthralled” than I was had the chance, slim as it was, to gain access to some of the main events. (I supported Obama over Hillary Clinton in the primary in 2008.) And although I too felt elevated by the sweep of Obama’s restrained eloquence — I never allowed myself to believe that he was a Social Democrat in the FDR mold, ready to make a break with the Neoliberal prescriptions: the Rational Expectations Hypothesis, Real Business Cycle and Public Choice theories which underlie our troubles here and in Western Europe — and beyond.
Let me be clear. Bill Clinton was very skilled and very smart, the most passionate moderate I’ve ever seen. He spent some of that passion fiercely mocking the left, and yet he did not have the economic depth himself to resist his Wall Street leaning advisers, much less unleash his passion against them, or the fabled Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, at the full flood tide of Market Utopianism. He would later have regrets, though, about having opened the floodgates for speculation with his de-regulatory financial measures. Who is that waving to us from just offstage there? Why it’s Phil and Wendy Gramm.
President Obama, the constitutional law professor, was a first hand witness to the collapse of Market Utopianism in 2008-2009. Yet he, like Bill Clinton, did not have the economic confidence to challenge the assumptions which led to near calamity, and the private sector leaders of the system which had just failed. Which reminds me that at this time in our history of the political economy, that’s what we need, and I think Sanders and Warren each have a good part of this: the ability to take on the failing economic assumptions, the causes of the House of Economics being on fire.
Essentially, then, political commentator Tomasky is asking us to back a leader yet unknown who can perform another skillful high-wire act of “Unification” without either specifying just “What Age we are in” or what our major problems are — which clearly Sanders and Warren do much more explicitly — and well. So what will the Unity be based on? “Unusual political skill and charisma?” Perhaps that can succeed again. But what happens when the next Democratic leader faces even more dramatic Climate events, worse than Paradise Lost, and simultaneously, the end of the rather anemic but longest economic expansion in Western history, ten years and counting? What then? Most likely, a replay of what President Obama, with all his eloquence, dignity and moderation confronted in the form of the red- hot ideologically driven party of the Republican Right: stalemate, shutdowns and ideological confrontations. With higher stakes. A bleak encore of the stalemates which economic historian Robert Skidelsky covers from Europe in the 1930’s...the core issues of state and market and “paying for it” still there. He pays long overdue respect to Karl Polanyi: I’m waiting to fall out of my chair if I ever hear that name from a contender in the Democratic party.
The deeper answer to Tomasky’s shallow and very ephemeral basis for unity is to seek those genuine universal values, and policies, that can transcend the different understandings that make up the very diverse movements inside the Democrat Party. To me, that means the Green New Deal, built upon the values, the rights, in FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. These eight rights all move towards greater equality, without promising “perfect” equality, which is impossible. FDR’s framing is not to aim for perfect equality, just a fairer start from some basics many still don’t have, and then, let the famous — or infamous- American competition begin anew. And the closing argument for these universals should include “Equal Standing Before the Law,” which speaks to race, gender, sexuality and immigration status, and a Standing for Nature equal to or greater than for economic “actors.” For our entire history, when protecting Nature clashed with protecting the American (economic) Dream, Nature lost. That’s how we got to where we are, and after just reading an account of a local Maryland County to better protect forests, Anne Arundel County, that’s where we still are, economics winning, hands down. Climate chaos or not.
(And I urge Elizabeth Warren to take a second, or would it be 1st look at FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. The Fourth right reads this way: “The Right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad...” That’s the gateway to a vigorous anti-trust policy, is it not, a bedrock of Warren’s world view.)
Rallying behind the Green New Deal and the Second Bill of Rights is the better bridge between the social and economic equality causes within the Democratic Party. I’m for Social Democratic economic rights and equal legal rights to go with American political rights. Hard to achieve, granted, but a sounder and more equitable basis for Unity than “political skills and charisma.” And isn’t there a rising star who embodies my preferences and Tomasky’s as well: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? And you know who she had endorsed for President at the memorable New York rally this fall.
That’s what we are fighting for, we on the party’s left, and I’m glad I came across one final article for you, which just arrived just a few days ago.
It’s well written, by someone quite different than Michael Tomasky, one Joseph O’Neill, who teaches literature at Bard College, not political science or political economy. And a new name for me, so that I am not beating anyone’s drum here. Ironically, Bard College is connected to the Levy Institute, home to one of the leading Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) advocates, L. Randall Wray, who has written, along with Yeva Nersisyan, in May of this year, the most detailed case yet for how we can pay for a Green New Deal, here at www.levyinstitute.org/… This analysis includes the full spectrum: clean energy, job guarantee, Medicare for All, Free Tuition, the package the Right claims will cost $93 trillion over ten years. That’s not the approach Wray takes. Maybe some changes are needed at the CBO.