Cross-posted from our Main Street blog.
Populist anger is playing a central role in our national conversation. Will that anger swing toward a progressive or right-wing economic vision?
If you just casually followed the news, you might conclude that the answer to that question is clear: The Tea Party gets a lot of attention and is widely portrayed as being made up of working-class people, ergo working people as a group are swinging right on economic issues. So if you thought you knew the answer, you might wonder why Working America and the AFL-CIO held a panel discussion addressing that question, featuring Congresswoman Donna Edwards, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Working America Executive Director Karen Nussbaum, Christopher Hayes of The Nation and Peter Wallsten of the Wall Street Journal.
But in fact, populist anger goes well beyond the Tea Party; Working America organizers encounter it every day at thousands of doors across the country. Union members feel it. As Wallsten noted during the panel, "the anger of Tea Party movement is the same anger as Democrats feel."
And for that matter, the Tea Party is, as Hayes accurately characterized it, "a movement of the American right," not a happenstance gathering of previously apolitical people. (Or, as Trumka pungently followed up, "a fringe movement.") Its reputation as a populist movement is also overblown. "Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class," according to an April New York Times/CBS poll. And they are overwhelmingly Republicans, a majority of whom hold a favorable opinion of George W. Bush.
This is precisely why it’s important to take a deeper look at who’s angry and why and where real solutions lie. The answer is both easy to see and often ignored, and it leaves the angry people being ignored at a tipping point—seeing problems clearly and looking for solutions. The question is what solutions will be presented first or most powerfully: progressive ones, or right-wing ones.
It’s not hard to see why working people would be angry. According to Trumka, "Workers have paid at least three times now. They’ve paid with their jobs, with their mortgages, and with their taxes" and yet they continue to struggle.
Hayes pointed to the different experiences of people at the bottom and the top of the economic pyramid—while a minor offense can destroy the life chances of a young working-class person, executives at BP and AIG never really pay for doing immense harm to society. "At the bottom of the pyramid," he said, "America is a ruthlessly punitive and accountability-obsessed society. At the top of the pyramid, it is endlessly forgiving. Before trust can be restored, accountability has to be established."
But in addition to the economic injustices done to working people, the panelists also pointed to a campaign to destroy trust in the government. Congresswoman Edwards made this point, saying "It isn't an accident that people don't trust government. Government has been beaten up for years." Hayes and Trumka both pointed to failures that happened because of government agencies and regulations weakened intentionally by the right—and which were then used by the right to argue that government agencies and regulations do not and cannot work.
So what can be done?
Karen Nussbaum argued that "the tipping point is an opportunity. We must provide a different outlook that isn't reactionary." She—joined by regional directors Jenn Jannon and Dan Heck—drew on the conversations Working America organizers have every night on the doorsteps of people across the country, in which they’ve found that, according to Jannon, "people don’t want us to tell them what the problem is. They want to hear solutions." And solutions about jobs specifically.
Edwards, too, focused on jobs—and on the need to do something about jobs, not just talk about them. When the question of the deficit came up, and the fact that so often job creation and deficit reduction are presented as being in opposition to each other, she noted that on a recent electronic town hall, "I took questions and almost every single one was about jobs. And that’s in a district that isn’t facing double digit unemployment." By contrast, her constituents were not asking about deficit reduction.
But where Edwards heard not only the question about jobs, but the silence on the deficit, other politicians don’t always really listen. Nussbaum cited Working America’s yearlong effort to get Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln to work for working people, and the outcome of her failure to do so. "One of the ways you turn around poll results is you organize...We sent 25,000 letters to Blanche Lincoln on jobs and health care and she was deaf to those letters. So we went back and organized against her, and I think she’s on her way out."
The anger is real, and widespread, and not confined to one tiny-but-loud group. It’s hitting incumbent senators from both parties—not just Blanche Lincoln but Utah’s Bob Bennett. And the answers aren’t that hard. Jobs. Accountability for powerful people as much as for average working people. Jobs. Transparency, and legislation that makes sense, not legislation that’s been bargained into incomprehensible complexity. Also jobs.
These panelists demonstrated that many in the progressive movement are paying attention and thinking hard about the tipping point—about how to make a powerful case for progressive solutions to an unbalanced economy and the jobs crisis, rather than ceding the field to Glenn Beck and John Boehner.
(The Hill has also written about the event, with a focus on relationships between unions and the Democratic party in upcoming elections.)