“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” -Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
We lost a close election unless the Electoral College steps in and saves us. It’s difficult to imagine the damage this country and the world at large are going to suffer as a result. This election should not have been close. But because it was close, it was able to be stolen.
We need to make sure the next election isn’t close enough to be stolen by any subtle manipulation. We need to improve our margin of victory. There’s several ways to do this, they are valid and important but I want to discuss increasing our base.
We need to maintain and improve outreach to existing constituencies and attempt to bring in non-voters. Around 50% of eligible voters did not even vote. We should try, even if unsuccessfully, to reach Trump voters, if for no other reason than to challenge dangerous ideas and discourage Pizza shop shootouts.
Let’s talk about working class voters. What if we could bring large numbers of these working class voters on board without sacrificing anything except our ties to Wall Street, Big Banks, and Corporations? There’s a way to do it by adding something back into our Party Platform that was discarded 40 years ago.
There was an article that was a subject of a diary a few weeks ago.
www.dailykos.com/...
Consider this a bump to that diary. Matt Stoller wrote an article in The Atlantic about how the Democrats, without realizing the far reaching consequences, eliminated a core principal from the platform back in the 1970’s. This policy was fighting concentrations of power. This article is not advocating rolling back every facet of society to the 1940’s. It’s not an attempt to deify FDR. Just in case that explanation is needed, there it is.
www.theatlantic.com/...
The article begins with a look at Congressman Patman, who was forced out as the Party moved away from its roots in fighting corporate and financial power.
The story of Patman’s ousting is part of the larger story of how the Democratic Party helped to create today’s shockingly disillusioned and sullen public, a large chunk of whom is now marching for Donald Trump.
Patman served for nearly 40 years in Congress, and eventually headed the Banking and Currency Committee.
For more than a decade, Patman had represented a Democratic political tradition stretching back to Thomas Jefferson, an alliance of the agrarian South and the West against Northeastern capital. For decades, Patman had sought to hold financial power in check, investigating corporate monopolies, high interest rates, the Federal Reserve, and big banks. And the banking allies on the committee had had enough of Patman’s hostility to Wall Street.
Patman was forced out by the new “Watergate Babies”. This article explained the history and motivations behind abandoning our tradition of fighting against concentrations of power, and the consequences of doing so. It would be far better to read it yourself, but I’ll try to highlight some of it.
This transition began in the post-Watergate years when the Vietnam War was the number one issue. The newly elected members of Congress were several generations removed from the Great Depression. They did not see Banks and Corporations as dangers that needed constant monitoring and trimming. They sought new allies in the opposition to the war and welcomed in Bankers and Corporate leaders, and unfortunately welcomed their agenda.
By 1975, liberalism meant, as Carr put it, “where you were on issues like civil rights and the war in Vietnam.” With the exception of a few new members, like Miller and Waxman, suspicion of finance as a part of liberalism had vanished.
The Bankers and Corporate leaders now embraced in the Democratic Party began to exert their influence. The Democrats moved closer toward the Republican’s economic philosophy. This has lasted all the way to the present day.
In their first five years, the 1975 class of Democrats categorically realigned American politics, ridding their party of its traditional commitments. They released monopoly power by relaxing antitrust laws, eliminating rules against financial concentration, and lifting price regulations.
Keep in mind these changes weren’t made for the benefit of minority groups or Civil Rights, unless you consider Bankers a group in need of protection. It was merely to accommodate the new corporate powers that were invited into the party. As a result voters had a harder time distinguishing which Party was for the little guy and against big business and banks. The rhetoric was still there but it was starting to ring hollow.
Henceforth, the economic leadership of the two parties would increasingly argue not over whether concentrations of wealth were threats to democracy or to the economy, but over whether concentrations of wealth would be centrally directed through the public sector or managed through the private sector
It’s no wonder these arguments don’t resonate with voters. It’s being argued on Republican territory. We already conceded to allowing concentrations of power. We also began to forget the lessons and remedies of the Great Depression.
Modern liberals tend to confuse a broad social-welfare state and redistribution of resources in the form of tax-and-spend policies with the New Deal. In fact, the central tenet of New Deal competition policy was not big or small government; it was distrust of concentrations of power and conflicts of interest in the economy. The New Deal divided power, pitting faction against other faction, a classic Jefferson-Madison approach to controlling power (think Federalist Paper No. 10). Competition policy meant preserving democracy within the commercial sphere, by keeping markets open. Again, for New Deal populists like Brandeis and Patman, it was democracy or concentrated wealth—but not both.
FDR issued a strong warning several decades before, and it resonates today.
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.”
That’s all interesting but what does it have to do with today? The Democratic Party abandoned its opposition to concentrations of power. In doing so it alienated people who used to identify the Democratic Party as the champion of the worker against Big Banks and Corporations. Without that striking distinction between the Parties, wedge issues, scandals (real and fabricated), and candidate personalities are elevated in importance.
The result today is a paradox. At the same time that the nation has achieved perhaps the most tolerant culture in U.S. history, the destruction of the anti-monopoly and anti-bank tradition in the Democratic Party has also cleared the way for the greatest concentration of economic power in a century.
Democrats still do a number of things to protect workers, and unfortunately aren’t credited for it. Republicans are clearly not good for worker’s interests. But it’s important to look back at how much stronger our party was on this subject. We have surrendered so much ground to Republicans and even joined forces with them in instances like the repeal of Glass-Steagall. It should not be a surprise that average voters can’t tell the difference between the parties on economics and vote on gut feelings.
Financial crises are a regular feature of the U.S. banking system, and prices for essential goods and services reflect monopoly power rather than free citizens buying and selling to each other. Americans, sullen and unmoored from community structures, are turning to rage, apathy, protest, and tribalism, like white supremacy.
Democrats would do well to re-embrace the core lesson of the Great Depression. We need to make fighting against concentrations of power a central tenant of our Party Platform, like it was 40 years ago. These concentrations of power are corrupting our democracy and hurting ALL of our citizens. Fighting these forces again in a more meaningful way, will send a powerful message to working people who haven’t voted for us recently. It will benefit and motivate our current constituency. It will help our dysfunctional democracy regain some footing. It could provide us the margin we’ll need to overcome the inevitable voter suppression and unforeseen dirty tricks we can expect in future elections. The message is popular, it’s been tested by Sanders and Warren. We need to act on it.
This is my first attempt at a diary like this, I may have over-quoted. But it’s a really long source piece.