Political observers can’t help but notice the Democratic Party’s massive generation gap, a gap brought to light by the last two primaries, and the relative support for – or aversion to – Bernie Sanders by younger and older Dems. A simplistic explanation is that this represents nothing more than youthful idealism versus the more cautious pragmatism of elders – and there is some truth to this. And yet the candidates who usually inspire such youthful enthusiasm aren’t ordinarily angry old guys shouting about economic injustice. Or at least, they didn’t used to be. But in case you haven’t noticed, things aren’t like they used to be.
To understand this gap, one must recognize and consider its fault line. Bernie is supported by an overwhelming number of twenty-somethings, it’s true...and also a large majority of thirty-somethings. And quite a large segment of those in their early forties, like myself. In the past, people at these ages weren’t considered ‘youthful’, they were recognized as what they are: full-grown adults. With all that that implies: kids, jobs, maybe a mortgage, and a whole host of worries.
As one of those early forty-somethings, let me attempt to explain why this generation gap exists, and why it will persist, even as we continue to age.
The bottom line is pretty easy to summarize: we are the generation that Bill Clinton spoke of when he ran for president thirty years ago, the first generation to have a lower standard of living than their parents. What makes this all the more ironic for me personally is that I’m the first one in my family to go to college. Yet unlike my more practical-minded younger sister (an engineer), I studied politics and the liberal arts – whoops! So, I should add, she enjoys a decent middle-class life. I, by contrast, have lived my entire adult life in poverty.
Lest one think I’m whining, the truth is I have a generally hopeful outlook, and I have faith that one day all my work will be richly rewarded. What’s more, I spent my twenties having a lot of fun. But at this point, at the age of 42, life has been pretty damn serious for exactly 12 years now (remember 2008?), and I have very little to show for all my efforts.
To say the last twelve years hasn’t been easy would be like saying “Dead Man Walking” was a bit sad. Thankfully for myself, I know there is a higher power, and have a bit of the Irish humor to see me through the darkest of times. For my ex-wife, however, to say the last 12 years has been hell, would truly be an understatement. I won’t go into all the gritty details at this point, but suffice it to say that when I found out she was paralyzed in a car accident, I wasn’t a bit surprised. Not because she was a bad driver (she wasn’t), but because, truly, it was just her luck. Due to the opioid epidemic, few doctors will prescribe her the medicine she needs to live without constant, horrendous, debilitating agony. With all that she’s suffered and continues to suffer, she has often wished for death, and, truly, I can’t blame her. For our son, who just turned 7, my ability to stay cool and remain hopeful in the most dire of situations hasn’t shielded him from the kind of pain that no child should have to feel, but it has, I think, at least given him the space to still be a kid.
Maybe this is all too personal to be useful for a theory of generational discontent. But consider the case of my ex-wife. Before 2008, she was a nurse –the kind of nurse that every patient wants. Heart-on-her-sleeve compassionate. Incredibly hard-working. Raised an autistic child by herself. Kept a nice house in the suburbs. And then, in the span of four months, through no fault of her own, it was all taken away. It wasn’t just the housing crash, although that’s what spurred her landlord’s bank to kick her out of her house (she was given two months to vacate a home that she’d lived in for years, despite always having paid her rent on time). There were other unrelated tragedies that struck at nearly the same time, and within those four months, she had lost her health, and thus her job, as well as losing her home, her car, custody of her son (don’t even get me started on that one), and her beloved dog. Since then, it seems that her life has been defined by tragedy, one following upon the other.
But back to my point: her struggles, while singular and extreme, are indicative of the struggles of my generation. For the last twelve years, we have worked, we have raised kids, we have done our best under some tough circumstances, and what do we have to show for it? A house? Some lucky few, like my sister. Savings? Ha! A strong sense of community among one’s neighbors? Again, if you’re lucky. Happy children? Let’s hope.
More than likely, if you’re my age or younger, right now you’re hoping to God that Congress will grant enough relief to make up for the money you’re losing staying home right now. Right now, you’re worried that you won’t be able to pay your bills, because you were barely making ends meet before this crisis. You might be praying you get a call from the Census Bureau, to earn some extra income. You might be desperate, because you know that uber drivers aren’t likely to be compensated for lost income like regular workers might be. Right now, you’re sick of worrying that you might lose what little you’ve earned. But in a way, you’re used to it. Living on the edge of desperation is the new normal.
It’s understandable that in such times, people look to a leader who represents stability and normalcy, leaders like Joe Biden.Personally, I like Joe Biden, and I will heartily support him when the primary is over with.
But I feel it’s imperative that all Democrats understand why the movement surrounding Bernie Sanders won’t, and shouldn’t, just step aside. Not right now, nor ever.
And here’s the essential reason: the Democratic Party was complicit in the decline of America’s great middle class. Yes, the Republicans were the main culprits, that we all know. But all the other reasons that are often bandied about for the middle class’s decline (globalization, mechanization, the shift to a service economy, etc.) all mask a disturbing truth.
The truth is that many (not all) leaders of the Democratic Party stopped prioritizing the needs of working class and poor people back in the Nineties, and until Bernie (and yes, Trump) came along, they didn’t care enough to know just how bad things had gotten for so many. And yes, Biden was among those leaders.
But the principal figure in this story was one Bill Clinton. In fact, it’s fair to say that Clinton did more to undermine America’s middle class than Ronald Reagan. And to understand the generational divide in the Democratic Party, one must understand Clinton’s actual legacy.
Clinton has long been warmly regarded by most Democrats, and it’s easy to understand why. He presided over a period of relatively widespread prosperity, and nearly full employment. He paid off the deficit. He was incredibly charismatic and charming, and spoke to our greatest ideals. He came from humble roots, and represented the best America had to offer: immensely intelligent, caring, visionary, handsome, and even pretty cool. And his wife was just as smart, just as capable. He was, it seemed, the second coming of JFK. We loved him.
I loved him. His campaign in 1992 was the first time I paid attention to politics. And I remember the key themes. In ‘92, America was in a recession. Clinton campaigned on a populist message. He spoke of the evils of “trickle-down economics,” and the declining prospects of the “forgotten middle class”. He sounded, in fact, a lot like Bernie Sanders. To wit: “One percent of America’s people at the top of the totem pole now have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.” He called this “the biggest imbalance in wealth since the 1920s right before the Great Depression.”* As I mentioned, he talked about the lowered prospects of the next generation – my generation. The irony is that his policies helped make that prediction a reality.
The clearest example of this betrayal of the working class was Clinton’s (and Biden’s) support for NAFTA. In short, everything that labor unions feared would happen as a result of this bill, happened. Good, middleclass jobs were lost – at least 700,000 according to a 2010 study. Perhaps more importantly, unions lost bargaining power as their companies threatened to move to Mexico or overseas. Wages and benefits were frozen or went down. But NAFTA’s biggest victims were the millions of Mexican farmers and ag workers left destitute, unable to compete with American agribusiness (subsidized by U.S. tax dollars). Many of them flocked to the U.S. for work, and undocumented immigration soared. As these workers compete with the least affluent native-born American workers for low-skilled and construction jobs, it drives down wages for those jobs. And NAFTA was just the beginning. Later on came another great victory for free trade: the normalizing of trade relations with China.
Despite what Clinton and most pundits said, there was nothing inevitable about the deluge of pro-business, pro-Wall Street policies emanating from the Clinton Administration. Clinton proudly deregulated industry after industry in the name of the future and the ‘New Economy’ and globalization: there was Telecom, banking, and – wait for it –financial derivatives. In case you didn’t know, each and every one of these deregulations led to ordinary consumers – in fact, pretty much everyone – getting seriously screwed. The ‘96 Telecom Act gave away the public’s digital broadcast rights to incumbent broadcasters, an act of corporate charity worth $11-70 billion. It also allowed a handful of industry giants to buy up most local radio stations, one of the main reasons why most of today’s popular music of every genre is so uniformly, relentlessly godawful.
But it was Clinton’s deregulation of the banking industry, and the financial derivatives market, that led directly to the great crash of 2008.This is a truth of which far too many Democrats are unaware. Here are some facts: the origin of ‘too big to fail’ banks was the result of two bills which deregulated banking under Clinton. The first, in1994, deregulated interstate banking, allowing a handful of giants to swallow up smaller local banks. The second, in 1999, got rid of the law that enforced the separation of investment banking from commercial banking – a law enacted during the New Deal in order to prevent commercial banks from making the kinds of risky loans that would blow up the global economy in 2008. But the law that really opened the floodgates to Wall Street’s orgy of fraud was signed in Clinton’s last month in office, a law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. This bill literally prevented regulation of the financial derivatives market. I must emphasize that these were not Republican bills, but initiatives of the Clinton Administration.
The sad truth is that none of these laws, though supported by Republicans, could ever have been passed under a Republican president. Democrats in Congress would never have allowed it. It took a Democratic president to destroy the regulations that kept Wall Street and the big banks from preying on ordinary Americans, and committing massive, systemic fraud that would blow up the global economy. It took a Democrat to pass free trade deals that badly depleted the power of unions – power which enabled working class people to enjoy a middle class standard of living. It took a Democrat to kick thousands of impoverished mothers off of welfare. It is therefore fair to say that Clinton was not, as many Democrats will say, “the lesser of two evils.”
This was the great legacy of the Clinton administration, and the Democratic Party which followed in his wake: the sell-out of the poor and working class to corporate interests. Lest one think I’m being too one-sided, this wasn’t just the opinion of critics, but of many of his high-status admirers. Of course, they didn’t describe it in exactly this way. Instead, they spoke of the “end of the New Deal consensus,” which they thought was somehow a good thing. Clinton biographer Martin Walker was gladdened by “the degree to which [Clinton] explicitly repudiated the traditions of the Democratic Party,” while Daniel Gross, author of the pro-Clinton book Bull Run recounts in great detail the incestuous, mutually-beneficial relationship between Wall Street and the Clinton Administration, suggesting “one of Clinton’s most enduring legacies may be his party’s accommodation to...the ‘moneyed interests.’” (p.21) To put it bluntly, Bill Clinton was Wall Street’s guy. And if you think ‘sell out’ is too strong a term, recall that he ran on a populist campaign to fight for the little guy.
Then came the Bush Administration. Here we saw Democratic leaders, including Biden, equivocate and capitulate to the most dangerous and disastrous presidency in American history – until our current one. Most readers needn’t be reminded of the gut-wrenching details, but suffice it to say that sending other people to war doesn’t make one ‘tough’ or ‘resolute’. It took a measure of courage to oppose Bush’s illegal, obviously ill-fated war – more courage than far too many Democratic leaders were capable of.
Now let us examine the record of the next Democratic president. If you’re audacious enough to hope for a better world, then you were probably as profoundly disappointed with Obama’s presidency as everyone else I know. The question isn’t whether Obama failed to fulfill the ‘hope’ that so many voters put in him. The question is why.
In case you’re unconvinced that profound disappointment with Obama’s presidency was widespread, Exhibit A would be the improbable rise of Donald Trump, who won over many working-class voters who had voted for Obama (including my ex-housemates, both truck drivers). Exhibit B: the equally improbable rise of Bernie Sanders. I’m not suggesting Obama is to blame for Trump; I am suggesting that 2016 revealed a widespread, unprecedented rage toward the political elites of both parties that would have been greatly lessened had Obama fulfilled his explicit promise to be a transformative president.
The question is, why did he so clearly fail to fulfill that promise? The standard answer is that Republicans are just awful, and wouldn’t let him do anything. This explanation is perfectly reasonable, so long as we ignore the first two years of his presidency, and the many things he could have done without Congress.
Yes, Obama did pass three important, beneficial bills during his first two years in office: the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank, and the Stimulus. But a close look at these bills are suggestive of Obama’s preference for overly complicated, have-it-both-ways compromises rather than straightforward, effective, but controversial (among the elites) solutions. Indeed, the Obama Administration can best be likened to a smart, caring doctor who is generous in offering pain pills, pep talks, and complicated surgeries, yet never gets to the root of what’s making you so damn sick.
Obama’s failure is all the more agonizing when one considers how relatively little he accomplished when compared to what was within his grasp. Obama had everything an ambitious reformer could ever dream of: overwhelming popularity, a clear mandate for change, a majority in both houses of Congress (including a super-majority in the Senate), and an economic crisis that exposed the failures and corruption of the status quo. And yet, after Obama’s first two years in office, the status quo emerged largely unscathed, if a bit patched-up and smoothed-over in certain places.
What’s more, there were a number of bold, effective steps that Obama could have taken without Congress. For one, his administration could have prosecuted some of the banksters whose crimes helped cause the crash. Not only did Obama’s administration let these criminals off the hook, but his Attorney General Eric Holder essentially declared them to be above the law.* Not only would such prosecutions have been popular, they would have been good policy, and in every way the right thing to do. Today we lament Trump’s blatant attacks upon the rule of law; rarely do liberals acknowledge how much the seeds of public cynicism were sewn by this decision to allow the banksters to walkaway scot free (with bonuses and bailout money!) after committing massive fraud and wrecking the global economy.
Another significant failure was Obama’s decision not to enforce the many anti-trust laws that are already on the books, yet have gone mostly unenforced since Reagan’s election. To reiterate: there are countless anti-trust laws on the books that were meant to stop business consolidation and monopoly. Since 1981, these laws have basically been left to gather dust (with the notable exception of the late ‘90sMicrosoft case, which was settled with a fine). Not surprisingly, the result has been a massive consolidation of corporate power, a consolidation that continued under Obama. There were many examples of anti-competitive business consolidation under Obama, but the most significant occurred in the tech industry, where a handful of tech giants now rule the virtual world.
The dangers posed by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon in particular go well beyond the realm of economics, into literally every aspect of our lives. The disturbing truth is that, whether we use their products or not (and it is hard not to, given their monopoly power), Google, Facebook and Microsoft are constantly watching us online, in a program of mass surveillance that beggars the imagination. While Obama was palling around with Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook was allowed to buy up Instagram, cementing their place atop the social media hierarchy. The 2016 election woke many Democrats up to the danger posed by Facebook’s unchecked power, but suffice it to say this was only a small preview of the havoc these monopolies will continue to wreak upon our democracy and our basic rights as citizens – unless and until our elected officials do something about it.
Obama’s refusal to deliver “change you can believe in” by making popular, practical, and necessary reforms had disastrous consequences for his administration and party. Though he won reelection, his time in office was marked by landslide Republican victories throughout the land. Democrats lost both houses of Congress as dispirited Democrats stayed home in the mid-terms, no longer believing real change was possible. I watched this play out first-hand in Nevada’s Democratic-leaning 4th Congressional District, where Democratic turnout in 2014 was so pitiful it allowed a Republican to take the seat of a great, up-and-coming young incumbent, Rep. Steven Horsford, Nevada’s first African-American Congressman.
The best analysis for Obama’s failure is found in Thomas Frank’s 2016 polemic, Listen, Liberal: Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? The short answer is: elite groupthink. Obama and virtually all the people surrounding him were from the top ranks of what Frank dubs the ‘Ten Percent’: the professional-managerial class. They were all winners in America’s meritocracy, and they couldn’t help but respect and defer to other sophisticates in the meritocracy, including the very bankers and financiers who had sabotaged the global economy. Indeed, the people tasked to lead Obama’s Treasury and Economic Council were emissaries of Wall Street. The few Obama officials who stood outside or dared to challenge the elitist orthodoxy, like Elizabeth Warren or Van Jones, were soon cast out of the administration with the connivance of corporate Democrats and fearful Republicans.
Frank’s assessment of widespread, myopic groupthink is convincing, given the evidence that none of Obama’s people ever seemed to consider doing anything ‘controversial’ like break up the banks, or prosecute the banksters who had committed fraud, or rein in runaway prescription drug prices. Of course, these ideas were only controversial among the Washington elite. Among the general public, they weren’t only popular, they seemed like common sense. But for the Democratic elites, anything that smelled of populism was anathema. Enter Donald Trump.
I was 14 during Clinton’s campaign in ‘92, and I was the nerd in the family. I was in Honors classes, and got A’s all through middle and high school. I went to college. But I got a degree that didn’t give me many career opportunities. My point isn’t to lament my fate (for I have no regrets about this), it’s to poke a hole in the theory of the middle class life offered up by Clinton and most Democrats since his time, the theory that underlies their elitist groupthink.
That theory is best summed up by Clinton’s own dictum that in the future, “how much you earn will depend on what you can learn.” He said this in 1993,and many times after. On its face, it seems a simple, mundane truth. Yet when one thinks of the implications of this slogan, it’s clear that Clinton tacitly accepted and indeed encouraged an economic system in which one’s educational attainment was the fairest determinant of one’s socioeconomic status. It was at this point that the leadership of the Democratic Party began to prioritize the mores of meritocracy and the needs of the ‘New Economy’ (i.e.corporations) over the needs of working people.
Their faith in America’s meritocracy blinded them to the reality of class struggle. To Clinton and his cohort, the meritocracy rewarded talent, and poverty could be solved primarily through increasing education. This faith still persists among the more prosperous member of both parties, despite decades of evidence to the contrary. As Thomas Frank puts it,
“Before the late1970s, productivity and wage growth had always increased in unison...But by the early 1990s, the two had clearly separated...The real problem was one of inadequate worker power, not inadequate worker smarts. The people who produced were losing their ability to demand a share in what they made. The people who owned were taking more and more. Today the separation of productivity from reward is a feature of nearly every sort of work– white-collar, blue-collar...but because it happened to production workers first, it was possible for Democrats like Clinton to look at the situation and conclude the real problem was those workers’ lousy educations...In the Clinton view, which would become the standard Democratic view, the only ones who had to change their ways were the victims themselves.”
As a teacher, I can attest that our education system is far, far from perfect. There’s no question that we could do better. There are a host of reforms that would benefit our students. But as a teacher who has taught (and lived) in the ghettos of Oakland, the heavily immigrant city of Las Vegas, and the meth-infested backwater of Oroville, California, I can also say with some authority that the reason our middle class is dying has rather little to do with educational policy, and everything to do with the old themes of capitalist society. Objectively, more students are graduating high school than ever before. Objectively, high school students are better educated in math than ever before. These are facts. Many of my students in Vegas went on to attend at least some college. Some of them are now in their late twenties. And yet of my thousands of students over the years, I would guess that a very few have a stable career, or are on track to buy a house.
The vast majority are, I suspect, struggling just to get by. For them, and so many others with and without college degrees, the ‘New Economy’ means employment is often short-term and lacks basic worker protections. And of those who graduated college, I don’t doubt that many are deeply in debt.
Put simply: the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer isn’t a reflection of individual failure, nor the failure of our school system to prepare students for the ‘New Economy’, but of the capture of our political system by moneyed interests. And as much as we prefer to blame Republicans for this predicament, the awful truth is that many among the leadership class of the Democratic Party were deeply complicit in and even championed this capture.
If you think I’m not being fair to Clinton, Biden, and company, on the contrary, I’ve barely begun to examine their legacy. Many other writers have focused on Biden’s support for the 2006 bankruptcy bill, which was nothing more than a gift to the financial industry at the expense of those teetering on the edge of financial collapse. Instead, I’ll focus for a moment on their legacy on criminal justice, and Biden’s 1994Crime Bill.
Having grown up working class, I know from personal experience the casualties of mass incarceration. Both my cousins have struggled with drug addiction, and have spent most of their adult lives either in prison or under the supervision of the courts. My eldest cousin’s case is particularly sad. Caleb is a smart, caring, creative individual, a talented musician, and a gentle spirit. His first arrest, while he was high, led to an 8 year stay in prison. Just before he was arrested, he had been crying out for help. He needed treatment for his addiction, and he knew it. He pleaded with his mom to find somewhere that could help him. She looked; she couldn’t find anything. And then, it was too damn late. When he finally got out, there were no jobs for him. Hell, few places he could even live. No one wants to rent to a convict. And I’m not getting into the emotional and financial strain his imprisonment put on his parents. For those who don’t know, having a family member in prison is exceedingly expensive.
And I’m lucky enough to have grown up white, in a loving family, in a decent neighborhood. My students in Oakland? For many of them, particularly those young black and Latino men, incarceration isn’t just a possibility, it’s a probability. Entire communities, entire generations, have been crushed by mass incarceration.
Is it fair to blame Clinton, Biden, et al for this? Not entirely. But is it fair to say they played a leading role in it? Absolutely. Recall that Biden’s1994 Crime Bill provided for the construction of countless new prisons, and established over a hundred new mandatory minimum sentences. Joe Biden himself said proudly of the Bill:
“The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties. That is what is in this bill. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties...The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new State prison cells.”
Yes, there were some good things in that bill. But here’s the thing: not only was crime already declining in 1994, but that Crime Bill made mass incarceration a growth industry. And incidentally, prisons don’t solve the gang problem. The fact is, many gangs originated in prisons. Prison culture forces people into gangs, and the high rate of incarceration among poor minority men in some ways empowers those gangs. This is partly why both Biden and Clinton have had to apologize so profusely for their role in mass incarceration.
Imagine a world in which, instead of spending all that money putting poor young men in jail, they had spent that money on jobs training and drug treatment centers. We’ll never know what a different world that would’ve been, but I suspect that for many poor and working class Americans, and maybe my cousin Caleb, it would’ve meant all the difference in the world.
So no, I’m not gonna be satisfied just because we beat Trump. I know how terrible, how dangerous Trump is. I get that. But what I’m saying is this: Trump never would’ve gotten elected if America’s “forgotten middle class” hadn’t been shit on for the last 40 years – by Republican and Democratic politicians alike. And Biden was part of that.
Bernie, by contrast, has finally, finally forced the Democratic Party to reckon with this reality, and its shameful recent history of enabling stupid, endless wars and cozying up to powerful corporate interests, while leaving the majority of working Americans to fend for themselves.
The essential truth of our modern politics is that none of the great problems we face – especially and including the dire, unimaginable threat of climate change – can begin to be solved unless the leaders of the Democratic Party are forced out of their elite bubble and directly confront – and overcome – the moneyed interests that control our politics. Until they do, things will not get much better – and we will not relent.
