The title says it all: Social Security: A Time for Outrage.
In case you missed it, Musk is still trying to trash Social Security at every opportunity. Acting Social Security Administrator Leland Dudek, threatened to shut it all down if the courts won’t allow him to let DOGE access all the personal data they want. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claims only fraudsters will be worried if their Social Security checks don’t show up.
Krugman goes on to note that the people most dependent on Social Security overwhelmingly voted for Trump. He has a couple of graphs showing that dependence on it correlates with how much education they have — and how that correlates with voting for Trump.
He then goes on to say that he normally avoids the temptation to say “Democrats should do this” but…
...But I can’t help noticing that the inverse correlation between how Americans voted in 2024 and their real interests makes it clear that two of the main factions in the intra-party debate about Democrats’ next moves are talking nonsense.
On one side there are relatively conservative Democrats and Democratic-leaning pundits telling us that the party must move to the center. But when it comes to Social Security, which is really important to most Americans, Democrats — who want to preserve the program — are very much in the center, while Republicans — who want to kill it — are extremists. Yet last November, the voters who have most to lose from this extremism didn’t notice.
On the other side there are progressives who argue that Democrats are in trouble because they abandoned the working class. But even if you think that Democrats have been too friendly toward globalization, or deregulation, or low corporate taxes, the Democratic Party has been far more favorable to workers than the Republicans. The Biden administration was especially pro-worker. But working-class voters didn’t notice.
What all this says is that the priority for Democrats isn’t to pursue whatever you think is a better policy mix. It is to get voters to notice.
emphasis added
He takes Schumer to task as one of the tired careerists running the party, whom voters have no confidence it. Instead of trying to navigate through the political landscape with careful calculation, what’s needed is vocal, visible outrage to motivate what’s left of the Democratic base and to get the attention of other voters.
It’s a short piece, but well worth reading.
Brian Beutler at Off Message has a good, longer piece that complements what Krugman is calling for:
Move Fast and Build Things. He’s riffing off a book — Abundance:
...Progress requires facing up to the institutions in life that are not working as they need to. It means, for liberals, recognizing when the government is failing. It means, for conservatives, recognizing when the government is needed. In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance. At a time when movements of scarcity are gaining power in country after country, this is an answer that meets the challenges of the moment while grappling honestly with the fury so many rightfully feel.
Beutler goes into why the Affordable Care Act is such a kludge, and why the far simpler Medicare for All would be an impossibly heavy lift. He uses them to explain why and how tackling the raft of serious problems facing the country are going to require the Democrats to make some big changes in the way they do things.
I argued recently that Democrats and liberals should try to make as much peace as possible with the ongoing, illegal demolition of government. Yes, of course, they should try to stop it when they can, but they should also accept that many things they prize will be broken or abolished by the time they’re back in power. This is a mind-trick for preserving sanity, but also part of rebuilding the Democratic Party into a more attractive entity.
To my mind, the correct formula is one Democrats ought to have applied before [January’s mid-air collision]:
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Warn ominously about the kinds of catastrophes we can expect when a degenerate like Trump fires capable servants and replaces them with compromised amateurs.
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Mount a rapid public response when those consequences come to pass.
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Promise, in open and defiant terms, to rebuild quickly once voters run these vandals out of office.
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If democracy survives this president (as we should always insist it will) and Democrats reap the benefits of a backlash (which seems very likely) they must enter office in 2029 committed to dismantling the kleptocracy quickly.
That will mean firing many people—a purge to match Trump’s; it will mean rehiring people who left government, or enlisting them on a temporary basis to turn over their priceless knowledge; it will mean doing whatever’s necessary to heal the breach of trust between true civil servants and their government—including, most likely, through pay increases. Yes, future Democrats will probably have to vote to give bureaucrats in Washington a significant raise. It will probably mean filibuster abolition and court reform. It will mean lightning-strike rebuilding on the scale of Trump’s lightning-strike destruction. These Democrats will be expected to support the whole endeavor, even if they fear it’ll cost them their jobs.
Read the whole thing. For those of us frustrated by Democrats who spend all their time ‘keeping their powder dry” and always being on the back foot because they allow Republicans to dominate the narratives, reacting to them rather than embracing their own agency, it’s an attractive vision.
...We need to transform a party of timid overanalyzers into a party of fearless actors and reactors in an incredibly short span of time. Ezra and Derek have written a good book, but this is the graveyard they whistle past. And so I’d invite them to lend their voices to the cause of building a Democratic Party that fights: for abundance, sure, but more proximately to defeat the authoritarian right and lock it out of power indefinitely, so that their vision, or any similar vision of progress, stands a chance.
Any progressive agenda needs more than ideas. It needs power and the will to use it. There’s no abundance, let alone old-fashioned safety-net liberalism, without something like Project 2029 as a predicate.
“The world is made by the people who show up for the job.”
