There’s much dialogue in the air about how Democrats must and should recover states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, but little discussion about how they lost them. Let’s begin by suggesting that the first thing they could do is say-- “We’re sorry.”
In the 1970s, when he was President Carter’s Fed Chairman, Paul Volker raised interest rates five points (in a single day) eventually reaching 18%. It might have been arguably necessary to staunch runaway inflation and reassure overseas bankers, but no provision whatsoever was made for farmers who had been advised by every Farm Bureau to forget their parents’ advice and go into debt to buy big machinery and farm “fence-row to fence-row.” The unintended consequence of Mr. Volker’s policies was the bankruptcy of 22 million family farmers. Farmers are not like urban people who lose a flat and get another. These folks lost the heritage and legacy of their entire family history. Many were crushed with shame and a sense of failure they could not bear, and for years after this debacle, the leading cause of death on the family farm was suicide. Many of the survivors now work as serfs for the giant agro-industry firms that snapped up their farms at bargain prices.. Might have been a few Democratic voters there that lost faith then. (read Joel Dyer’s Harvest of Rage.)
For every five farms that died, a local business went along with it. Towns lost their teachers, hardware stores, Future Farmer of America coaches, bankers. The mid-west was suffering from terminal depression when President Clinton found a way to save a little money by cutting the budget for rural mental health. The people who stepped up to help were the militias and the Constitutionalists, the folks with little red copies of the Constitution in their pocket, who’d deal only with real silver money, and hated anyone who took an oath to the Federal Government. While the banks were foreclosing, they showed up at auctions to support the farmers, hold bake-sales for them, comforted them and told them it wasn’t their fault—it was the Jews, the Queen of England, the Black Helicopters—conspiracy theories run amok, but for people that now had nothing, they made more sense than Washington, and they might have just gone for a candidate that favored conspiracy theories too.
Democrats could (and should) accept the blame for these unintended consequences and craft buy-back aid programs at favorable interest, and legislation and tax packages to urge corporations to sell-back to original owners. Even the promise of such aid would catch my attention if I was a farmer—-(and I was, and lost my land to my father’s debt from other causes.) Even if Democratic candidates were unable to fulfill these promises, it would be the first recognition of the pain our party caused millions of people who shifted their allegiance because of it.
Another by-product of the Volker decision was the Savings and Loan Failure of the mid 80s to 90s. In 1979, in an effort to reduce inflation, the Federal Reserve System of the United States raised the discount rate that it charged its member banks from 9.5% to 12%. This meant that S &Ls now had outstanding long-term loans that were returning less than it cost them to borrow. Lax oversight allowed many to invest in highly speculative vehicles, that disguised their insolvency. When a third of the Nation’s S&L’s collapsed, wiping out pensions, savings, et al, (estimates range from 160 to 240 billion dollars of losses) the private savings and pensions of millions more folks disappeared without so much as an “Ooops, sorry” from the people who insured that the oversight was lax enough for their donors and patrons to make Billions.
A decade later (as if no one had ever heard the words S&L and “failure”, Clinton et al loosed the reins on the banks again, eliminating Glass-Stiegel-- the law which had prevented banks from speculating with investor’s money since the Great Depression. They shit-canned a host of other regulations as well, ensuring that banks and investment houses color within the lines. This time they damn near wrecked the entire world economy. The people who should have gone to jail had had the foresight to back Obama’s election,(nobody’s perfect), but those souls who were not connected or wealthy, took it in the shorts and most have never recovered, despite what you hear on TV.
The Democrats have never made any admissions of error, oversight, or culpability for the policies that evicted 6 million families a month, throwing their possessions out on their front lawns on television in a pandemic of heartlessness that’s still difficult to comprehend. Is it possible that a few of those millions became so disenchanted with the Democrats that they would take anyone but Hilary and her $10,000 Armani jacket?
Finally, America dedicates less money than any other developed country to retrain workers sidelined by globalism. It may be true that globalism delivers benefits to the majority of our population, but if that’s the case, then that majority should have underwritten the costs of retraining workers who lost their jobs, due to laws passed by their Congress making the exporting of their jobs legal. There might have been a couple of Trump voters in this group from theindustrial heartland as well.
For forty years Democrats have abandoned their core constituencies of farmers, rural people, teachers, and unions, to make themselves acceptable to the 1/10 of 1% that funds BOTH parties. While Democrats will allow us to put it anywhere and do it with anyone, their corporate policies have continued to increase income disparity and hopelessness among American workers. Voters have watched this shift over the years, observed the men and women with good hair and sparkling personalities chuckling on the morning shows (which never analyze fiscal policy or the probably consequences of policy proposals. They watched them and rightly deduced that no one in Washington or the major media gave a shit about them. It was their rage and disappointment (and the collusion of media, whose search for higher ratings and ad revenues led them to feature Trump every time he farted through his mouth, affording him billions of free air-time to rewrite facts to his own liking.)
Now we’re waist-deep in pig-shit. No one can agree on simple facts. The voting population has become tribalized, the Repugnants are in lock-step with this oaf who’s making them rich and unless Democrats begin to understand the social conservatism of the Midwest and the depth of their disappointment; unless we express our progressive social policies in terms they understand and respect, and unless they are in some degree made whole and included (at last) in new wealth being generated, all our fine ideas and ideals will remain memes, without political power. In that case, Donald Trump just might be re-elected and we will no longer recognize the country in which we live.