Republican success at gulling middle class Americans into voting for their own economic destruction has baffled me for years. Why, when Republican economic ideas are so ruinous for all but the wealthy, do working class Americans vote for them in such depressing numbers? And most especially why do so many older Americans vote for the party that wants to destroy Social Security and Medicare?
Thomas Frank put his finger on some of the reasons in his funny yet depressing What's the Matter with Kansas. But my ever-brilliant wife this morning pointed out what strikes me as one of those obvious-in-retrospect ideas that may be the key to turning older Americans away from the Dark Side and back toward the light of FDR and progressivism.
Follow me past the squiggly thing.
There are lots of offensive stereotypes about older folks. Heck, as I've gotten older I've come to resent many of them even as I've come to reluctantly recognize them in myself. Dang it.
One truism about older people is that we tend to fear and resent change. After long years of effort and struggle, we don't want the rules of the game to suddenly change just as we approach the final inning. That's not fair, dammit. This manifests in many ways, not all of them admirable. There are plenty of folks who fondly recall a halcyon past when African Americans "knew their place" and when women spoke only when spoken to. But it also manifests in a very understandable desire for things that worked well in the past to keep working today.
This is a long-winded way of getting around to the most critical economic and budgetary issue of our time. America is running colossal budget deficits because of George W. Bush's goliath tax cuts for billionaires. (Okay, and because of two catastrophic wars, disastrously underfunded infrastructure, lack of coherent industrial policy and....). Republicans have been shockingly successful at demagoguing any attempt to correct this atrocity as a "tax increase" and "class warfare".
So how do Democrats pitch this in a way that Seniors can embrace? It's stone-simple. When was America at its greatest? Its most prosperous, successful and powerful? Most folks would vote for somewhere in the 1945-1970, which not coincidentally is when most current older Americans were in their youthful prime. And what's the biggest difference economically/budgetarily? Back then millionaires paid a marginal income tax rate of 50%, even 70% depending on the details. Now they pay 15% on their investment income, if that. And there was a reasonably effective estate tax that limited the constant accumulation of wealth at the top.
So my wife says, "Pitch it not as a new tax, not as soaking the rich. Pitch it as returning to the past. We're going to return to what worked for nearly a half century of prosperity. We're not changing anything; we're undoing a disastrous give-away to the billionaires. We're going back to the rules you played by. Fair rules. Honest rules. Rules that aren't designed to enrich the already rich."
My wife should be President.