Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
That’s the electric question posed by several articles I’ve just come across, but especially one by Krystal Ball, an entirely a new voice to me, a reporter working at The Hill, here on November 27, at thehill.com/
And if she’s new to you too, here is her bio at Wikipedia, which convinced me that her “take” was worth taking seriously, being someone who has been a Congressional candidate and, by origin and education, from Virginia, would therefore usually not be found baiting the centrist bulls of the Democratic Party. Here at: en.wikipedia.org/… But she seems to have come out on the Green New Deal template side for the Democratic Party, which speaks well to me of her outlook.
She based her critical piece, critical of former President Obama both for his cautious centrism and his potential intervention against the left, on a longer piece by Ryan Lizza at Politico, which appeared the day before, entitled “Waiting for Obama” : www.politico.com
The subtitle of the article is worth mentioning too: “The Democratic establishment is counting on him to stop Trump and, perhaps, stave off Bernie as well. But can his cerebral politics still galvanize voters in an age of extremes?”
Now that’s a good match, the extremely cautious Lizza, whom I used to read at the New Yorker magazine, and see on CNN: ever calm, detached and wearing heavy black framed glasses, an “in the mould” insider journalist in DC, writing about all the cautions the former President is taking in his West Side, DC office, so as not to predetermine the increasingly unpredictable Democratic Presidential Primary. And still biding his time while many centrists hopefully contemplate his actions suggested in the title of this posting — if necessary.
Yet at three different places in the article Lizza raises the specter of Sanders haunting the convention, not winning outright on the first ballot, but being in the driver’s seat nonetheless — which is such an alarming thought to so many Clinton-Obama Democrats. Klobuchar and Buttigieg ones too. It would be “Unthinkable” to let the situation get that far, says an unnamed source. They would would have to act. And there is no better barometer of Centrist Democratic worries about a fading Joe Biden — and accompanying ones over a still viable Sanders and Warren — than the entry of former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and former NY City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, into the race in November.
However, let me make some things crystal if not krystal clear. I am not a political “horse race” writer. I am more interested in the ideas behind the two parties, and their candidates, and the deeper causes of the growing fault lines in our very troubled Republic.
This inclination of mine is very disturbing to the Democratic Centrists who don’t want to contemplate how far the entire Republican Party has gone to the Right, precluding the amiable deals of less “extreme” times. The ones Joe Biden and Bill Clinton used to pull off, but which President Obama could not — but which he was always ready to wheel and deal on, ready to weaken the legacy programs from the New Deal and the Great Society (Social Security and Medicare) to get to his “kitchen table” economic wish of budget balancing, the federal budget being just a larger version of the family one, with the same rules. In other words, in good Neoliberal fashion, “austerity light.”
“If only we could rid the nation of Trump in the White House, we can get back to normal times” is the Centrist wish. So no need to alienate moderate swing voters, Republican suburban women whom we might persuade to “jump ship” from Trump and risk that opportunity by running too far to the left economically against the basic American political template, which leans conservative by philosophy (but liberal operationally, it has been said.) But this is a hope based on the Right pushing the culture wars to new levels of vulgarity, the Trump tongue (backed up by policies in that area), not on a more egalitarian economic stance (or an ecological one either.) This broad template shows that conservatives still outnumber liberals: 35% to 26%, with moderates coming in at an substantial 35 percent. Keep in mind that these 2018 Gallup poll numbers are an improvement over Bill Clinton’s days, when it was Conservatives at 43 percent, Liberals at only 17 and moderates 36. Cited by Michael Tomasky in the New York Review of Books in an article I will talk about in greater detail below.) Could that change have been driven by traction gained by the economic left, mostly Bernie Sanders, but Elizabeth Warren too? Does it suggest that polls are not concrete, immobile walls of eternal values, but influenced by what voters hear, see and witness in major events, and what Clinton and Obama rarely ever did, take the Presidential educational, bully pulpit role seriously. FDR did, especially in explaining his 1944 Second Bill of Rights. Bill Clinton seemed to feel his job was to adjust working class Dems to the new cruelties of Globalization, the race of life being now endless retraining, new careers right up until the edge of the grave, an edge coming earlier and earlier via “Deaths of Despair.”
But do these centrist compulsions and Conservative-leaning poll numbers, accurate as they might be, describe the new underlying realities, stark ones, of the major forces acting on the citizens, quite independent of whether the parties/candidates want to recognize those forces openly or not: the growth of massive Inequality in Wealth and Income; stagnant wages; a long declining union “movement”; longer work hours; the startling concentration of economic power, oligopoly in sector after sector, with the major American banks having greater asset share today than before the complacency shattering Great Recession which they caused, that of 2008-2009; the shocking numbers of citizens who don’t have the savings to meet a minor economic crisis of $500; the rise of China and decline in American manufacturing; and the alarming reports pouring in from scientists on all aspects of Nature and The Climate, that stopping the downward species spiral and climbing CO2 numbers will require economic changes in kind and scope that are unprecedented in modern history?
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has defended the Federal Reserve’s remarkably large ($29 trillion loaned out in the crisis years) and inventive tool kit to fight the Great Recession this way: “Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.” I agree and so do the Sanders and Warren supporters, but not the moderates in the party. For them, and they conducted the 2016 campaign on this assumption, we’re back to normal economically. For them, the extraordinary thing is the Trump presidency; end that, and everyone will be reasonable. I disagree, and we’ll look at why below. (This was originally going to be one essay, but there will now be a Part II: “Who Can Unite the Democrats. Stay tuned, will run the following day, or close to it.)
If you want to get a head start on the deeper fault lines in the dominant economic assumptions, the governing ones that are becoming less and less convincing - for example, why interest rates have stayed so low for so long with such a significant federal deficit and debt - or labor’s share of the income pie that hasn’t grown much now ten years into the longest expansion in economic history — you can begin here, with David Graeber’s article, “Against Economics.” His article/book review is also advertised as the lead on the cover of the December 5, 2019 print edition of the New York Review of Books” as “Economics vs Reality,” with a picture of a “house on fire” right below it. Here at www.nybooks.com/…
This configuration is very uncharacteristic for the The Review: to lead with an economic story, much less to “inflame” the coverage with such an illustration.
It is conflict over “The Economy,” though, and the motivational fires which drive it that lie beneath the troubles in America and the broader democratic West. This globalized and financialized economy is the great engine of Inequality and destruction of Nature, and is now a prescription for working and middle class pain, an endless treadmill — until death do we part from it — with portions of the working class being thrown off entirely, headed for Deaths of Despair.
They have been offered emotional salvation through Trumpism. His center ring distraction is quite a circus act, and a cruel one: shifting the focus from who has power and who doesn’t, economically, that is, to those job stealing, budget busting immigrants pouring over our Southern border, with Democrats willing to offer them the proverbial free lunch via the Green New Deal and its explicit rights…with just enough truth to effectively divert attention from the main act of how the pie is sliced and who’s stuck with the shrinking portions.
Graeber’s article begins to get at those troubles within the field of economics, the profession and its world view via his review of Robert Skidelsky’s 2018 book, Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics. It’s been out since November of 2018 — in seemingly good step then with the protests from the Sunrise Movement and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, outside the Speakers office, and the Green New Deal Resolution which followed in February of 2019 — and in time for all those Democratic debates. And yet its sweep, announced in the title, doesn’t seem to have had much of an impact on the questions which journalists are asking on the economy — or better put, aren’t asking. I’ll have more to say about it future writing, when I flesh out in print a talk I gave on “How We Will Pay for It — A Green New Deal”, back on October 24th, at Howard County College, near the planned city of Columbia, Maryland.
I have written here, at the Daily Kos, more than once, that the Democratic Party suffers from a severe case of Bi-Polar identity disorder, torn between its corporate, Neoliberal wings, and the now emergent, resurgent left, a Green New Deal left, represented by Bernie Sanders and in a slightly lower key, by Elizabeth Warren.
It is ironic that the NY Review of Books, which has been so conventional in its coverage of the “political economy,” when it has covered it at all, now does cover stories with a “House on Fire” image. It is no less ironic that it appears in the same edition which places their chief political interpreter — I would call him a centrist “gatekeeper” — Michael Tomasky, at the very bottom of the front page, barely noticeable, posing the question of the year, and likely of 2020 too: “Who Can Unite the Democrats?”
Upon further reflection, it is no accident, and indeed, quite revealing, that the economic lead and the political challenge are separated on the cover. It has been another obsession of the last 30-40 years for the economics profession to want to keep central bank and money questions as far apart from the “Demos” as possible. Fearing a left populist like Sanders, they got a Right egomaniac masquerading as a populist instead.
It’s a very fair question - “Who Can Unite the Democrats?” that Tomasky poses - given the underlying disease of Bi-Polar identity troubles, — because riddling the “Who Can Unite” question is the deeper one: what does the Party Stand For?
(And in that spirit I came across a very strange “endorsement” from conservative NY Times columnist Ross Douthat, which portrayed Sanders as the “Uniter” the party has been looking for. Douthat believes Sanders will not be as much a cultural warrior as Warren will, perhaps even less than other moderates long in the running, or just entering. The column appeared on November 30th, here www.nytimes.com/…)
Stay tune for part II of this essay, “Who Can Unite the Democrats?”, which should follow the next day or soon after.”
Best to you all, here, on the edge of impeachment.
Bill of Rights,
Frostburg, MD