The Democratic Convention Platform Committee is facing a political situation which is very different from the one that existed in January of this year. This new situation is illustrated by Trump and the Brexit vote. Obviously, the serious and widespread discontent felt by many voters in the US was existent in January, but it has now become so noticeable that it can be ignored only at ones peril. A key lesson which the Platform Committee needs to take away from Trump and Brexit is that if you don’t provide an accurate explanation for peoples’ discontent, less responsible people will provide an irresponsible and self-serving explanation which will be unchallenged and, therefore, seen by most people as correct.
The very real danger for the Democratic Party is that it will adopt a Platform which focuses on the narrow requests of various interest groups and miss the very real concerns of the public as a whole. To face up to these issues requires the Platform Committee, in the first instance, to articulate the economic concerns and insecurities that most people have and to provide an explanation for where those concerns come from. To do this, the Committee needs to boldly address the fact that Republicans have been misleading the country on economic issues for decades and to call on the voters to reject those lies and move into the light of actual factual analysis.
First, the Platform should forthrightly acknowledge the existence of the large and growing economic inequality in the country. People feel the effects of it and already believe that it exists, so for Democrats to act like it’s something that can’t be discussed because it will offend Republicans and the 1% is silly, as well as self-defeating. Polls show that people are not aware of how bad the inequality is and how long it has been going on. There is every reason to educate them.
The Platform should include a complete set of figures, graphs and analysis describing the economic inequality. Since Republicans have conspired with their wealthiest contributors to create the inequality, they cannot mention the problem in any detail, but Democrats can and should. The Platform should make clear that Democrats know there is an inequality problem, which has lots of bad effects on people and that they, unlike the Republicans, want to take the difficult actions that will be needed over time to fix the problem.
The Platform further needs to explain that the economic inequality is not caused, as the Republicans claim, by women, African Americans, Latinos, or immigrants and that trade agreements are only a small part of it. In fact it is caused by laws drafted, supported and enacted by Republicans at all levels of government and legal rules created by Republican judges. The Platform should also face the fact that Republicans, on behalf of their largest contributors, have spent decades trying to convince that country that any economic inequality is the result of the 1% being smarter than everyone else and working harder. It’s time for Democrats to reject this lie. It makes no sense for Democrats to allow these nonsensical explanations to continue to have their support or their silence.
Likewise, the Platform should debunk the Republican theory that making the rich richer will help everyone else get richer, as well. Just showing people the economic inequality figures starting with the Reagan administration will provide clear evidence that this theory is false. There are several laws and regulations that have the effect of making CEO’s richer if they cut employees’ wages, out-source their employees to low wage companies, eliminate employees’ pensions which they have earned (this is done with the help of Republican judges), out-source jobs to foreign countries, and provide shoddy goods and poor services to customers.
The Platform must reject the Republican/conservative idea that creating economically efficient businesses through unregulated “markets” is the highest goal of our society. In the first place, there really aren’t any “markets” in the economic sense and allowing what passes for “markets” to be unregulated only makes CEO’s and Wall Street types richer, but does not help anyone else. More importantly, it’s time for Democrats to address the fact that a country cannot long endure if its economy does not produce a fair outcome for the vast majority of its citizens, including providing jobs at good wages for everyone who wants to work. Republicans have structured an economy which provides more and more and bigger and bigger yachts, houses and toys for CEO’s and Wall Street big shots at the expense of everyone not part of the 1%.
Equally, the Platform should state the clear economic truth that big corporations don’t create jobs; demand for goods and services in the economy creates jobs. The fact that the Fortune 1,000 are sitting on large amounts of cash and not creating jobs is proof of this. This happens because there are a several laws and regulations that make CEO’s richer if they don’t spend their company’s money. The real the way to create the needed demand for goods and services is to put more money in the hands of the 99% and less in the hands of CEO’s, their companies and the 1%. The Platform can show that there are lots of ways to do this, but it needs to start by explaining the Economics 101 rule that putting more money in the hands of the majority of people is the only way to create more jobs and better paying jobs. Again, it is way past time for Democrats to attack the Republican economic theories for the lies that they are. No good has come from decades of not speaking out: it’s time to move from lies to truth.
In addition, the Platform needs to address the degradation of the democratic process which has been engineered by Republicans, conservators and their largest contributors. Many people correctly feel that government does not serve their interests. The Platform should discuss the facts behind this problem. The Platform needs to forthrightly insist upon a new birth of democracy in our country. It should point out that Republicans are a minority party and becoming more so and then identify the many ways in which Republicans have accumulated power despite this fact by rigging the system to limit voting by non-Republicans and by limiting the effect of votes by a majority of voters.
A key element of the problem is that Republican judges and Supreme Court Justices, over the objections of Democrats and Independents, have made into law the insane proposition that making political contributions is protected by the First Amendment and not subject to any effective limitations or controls. It’s time to call a bribe a bribe. Republicans, on behalf of their largest contributors, have been working for years to limit the ability of the 99% to influence government, by legalizing every larger payments by CEO’s and other rich people to politicians at all levels of government in order to get laws passed which make them richer and by minimizing the votes of a majority of the people. Only Republican judges and Justices would think that the Constitution prevents the people from creating a level playing field for candidates and contributors by limiting contributions and campaign expenditures. And certainly the Founding Fathers never intended that the Constitution would prevent lobbyists from handing out large contributions to politicians to get laws enacted that favor their clients.
Finally, since Trump is an ideal example, the Platform should expose the fallacy that business people have skills that make them better at running things and making political decisions than non-business people. After all, business people aren’t all that good at running businesses: just look at the number of businesses that go bankrupt or read the many business case studies put together by various business schools. There is no reason to assume that business people know anything about how to make the economy work for most people or how to make the government fair for everyone. Real knowledge about how to deal with the country’s problems can be found in a lot of places, but rarely in the business community.