03 February 20
FOCUS: Robert Reich | Why Democrats Share the Blame for the Rise of Donald Trump
Robert Reich, Guardian UK
Reich writes: "I was part of a Democratic administration that failed to fix a rigged system - I know our current president is a symptom of our disunion, not its only cause."
Robert Reich, Guardian UK
Reich writes: "I was part of a Democratic administration that failed to fix a rigged system - I know our current president is a symptom of our disunion, not its only cause."
n impeached president who is up for re-election will this week deliver a State of the Union address to the most divided union in living memory.
But why are we so divided? We’re not fighting a hugely unpopular war on the scale of Vietnam. We’re not in a deep economic crisis like the Great Depression. Yes, we disagree about guns, gays, abortion and immigration, but we’ve disagreed about them for decades. Why are we so divided now?
Part of the answer is Trump himself. The Great Divider knows how to pit native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, whites against blacks and Latinos, evangelicals against secularists, keeping almost everyone stirred up by vilifying, disparaging, denouncing, defaming and accusing others of the worst. Trump thrives off disruption and division.
But that begs the question of why we have been so ready to be divided by Trump. The answer derives in large part from what has happened to wealth and power.
In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri and North Carolina, for a research project on the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the people I had met 20 years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children.
What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, many said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – angry at their employers, the government, Wall Street.
Many had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2008, or knew others who had. Most were back in jobs but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before, in terms of purchasing power.
I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant. They spoke about flat wages, shrinking benefits, growing job insecurity. They talked about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, soaring CEO pay, and “crony capitalism”.
These complaints came from people who identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats and independents. A few had joined the Tea Party. A few had briefly been involved in the Occupy movement.
The 2016 rebellion is ongoing
With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, the leaders of the Democratic party favored Hillary Clinton and Republican leaders favored Jeb Bush. Yet no one I spoke with mentioned Clinton or Bush.
They talked instead about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up” or “make the system work again” or “stop the corruption” or “end the rigging”.
In the following year, Sanders – a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t even a Democrat until the primaries – came within a whisker of beating Clinton in Iowa, routed her in New Hampshire, and ended up with 46% of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses.
Trump – a 69-year-old egomaniacal billionaire reality-TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican party and who lied compulsively about everything – won the primaries and went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America (although he didn’t win the popular vote, and had some help from the Kremlin).
Something very big had happened, and it wasn’t due to Sanders’ magnetism or Trump’s likeability. It was a rebellion against the establishment. That rebellion is still going on, although much of the establishment still denies it. They prefer to attribute Trump’s rise solely to racism.
Racism did play a part. But to understand why racism had such a strong impact in 2016, especially on the voting of whites without college degrees, it’s important to see what drove it. After all, racism in America dates back long before the founding of the Republic, and even modern American politicians have had few compunctions about using racism to boost their standing.
What gave Trump’s racism – as well as his hateful xenophobia, misogyny and jingoism – particular virulence was his capacity to channel the intensifying anger of the white working class into it. It is hardly the first time in history that a demagogue has used scapegoats to deflect public attention from the real causes of distress.
Democrats did nothing to change a rigged system
Aided by Fox News and an army of rightwing outlets, Trump convinced many blue-collar workers feeling ignored by Washington that he was their champion. Clinton did not convince them that she was. Her decades of public service ended up being a negative, not a positive. She was indubitably part of the establishment, the epitome of decades of policies that left these blue-collar workers in the dust. (It’s notable that during the primaries, Sanders did far better than Clinton with blue-collar voters.)
Trump galvanized millions of blue-collar voters living in communities that never recovered from the tidal wave of factory closings. He promised to bring back jobs, revive manufacturing and get tough on trade and immigration.
“We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing,” he said at one rally. “In five, 10 years from now, you’re going to have a workers’ party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years, that are angry.”
Speaking at a factory in Pennsylvania in June 2016, he decried politicians and financiers who had betrayed Americans by “taking away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families”.
Democrats had occupied the White House for 16 of the 24 years before Trump’s election, and in that time scored some important victories for working families: the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. I take pride in being part of a Democratic administration during that time.
But Democrats did nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power that had rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top and undermined the working class. As Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg concluded after the 2016 election, “Democrats don’t have a ‘white working-class’ problem. They have a ‘working class problem’ which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly.
“The fact is that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate.”
Clinton and Obama chose not to wrest power back from the oligarchy. Why?
In the first two years of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. Yet both Clinton and Obama advocated free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who consequently lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. Clinton pushed for Nafta and for China joining the World Trade Organization, and Obama sought to restore the “confidence” of Wall Street instead of completely overhauling the banking system.
Both stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. They failed to reform labor laws to allow workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down majority vote, or even to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated labor protections. Clinton deregulated Wall Street before the crash; Obama allowed the Street to water down attempts to re-regulate it after the crash. Obama protected Wall Street from the consequences of its gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but allowed millions of underwater homeowners to drown.
Both Clinton and Obama turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general election campaigns, and he never followed up on his re-election promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United vs FEC, the 2010 supreme court opinion opening wider the floodgates to big money in politics.
Although Clinton and Obama faced increasingly hostile Republican congresses, they could have rallied the working class and built a coalition to grab back power from the emerging oligarchy. Yet they chose not to. Why?
There is no longer a left or right. There is no longer a moderate ‘center’
My answer is not just hypothetical, because I directly witnessed much of it: it was because Clinton, Obama and many congressional Democrats sought the votes of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determine electoral outcomes, and turned their backs on the working class. They also drank from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street and the very wealthy.
A direct line connects the four-decade stagnation of wages with the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party (and, briefly, Occupy), and the successes of Sanders and Trump in 2016. As Eduardo Porter of the New York Times notes, since 2000 Republican presidential candidates have steadily gained strength in America’s poorer counties while Democrats have lost ground. In 2016, Trump won 58% of the vote in the counties with the poorest 10% of the population. His share was 31% in the richest.
By 2016, Americans understood full well that wealth and power had moved to the top. Big money had rigged our politics. This was the premise of Sanders’s 2016 campaign. It was also central to Trump’s appeal – “I’m so rich I can’t be bought off” – although once elected he delivered everything big money wanted.
The most powerful force in American politics today continues to be anti-establishment fury at a rigged system. There is no longer a left or right. There’s no longer a moderate “center”. There’s either Trump’s authoritarian populism or democratic – small “d” – populism.
Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement. Trump has harnessed the frustrations of at least 40% of America. Although he’s been a Trojan Horse for big corporations and the rich, giving them all they’ve wanted in tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks, the working class continues to believe he’s on their side.
Democrats must stand squarely on the side of democracy against oligarchy. They must form a unified coalition of people of all races, genders, sexualities and classes, and band together to unrig the system.
Trump is not the cause of our divided nation. He is the symptom of a rigged system that was already dividing us. It’s not enough to defeat him. We must reform the system that got us here in the first place, to ensure that no future politician will ever again imitate Trump’s authoritarian demagoguery.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders greets people at a campaign field office in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Sanders is the slight favorite to win the caucuses, and he hopes it vaults him to the Democratic nomination. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Iowa Is About to Reshape the Presidential Race - Here's What You Need to Know
Domenico Montanaro, NPR
Montanaro writes: "The stakes are high in Iowa."
Domenico Montanaro, NPR
Montanaro writes: "The stakes are high in Iowa."
oting in the Democratic presidential nominating contest is about to kick off Monday with the Iowa caucuses.
The stakes are high in Iowa — the last four Democratic nominees have all won the Hawkeye State. But after about a year of campaigning and $50 million spent here by the candidates, the outcome is unclear.
The pressure is on Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who led in the polls coming in, has drawn the biggest crowds on the ground and does incredibly well with younger voters.
Former Vice President Joe Biden hopes to do well enough and that his base here — older voters — shows up.
Former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg drew the second-largest crowd here in the past couple of days and inspires a lot of people, but there are questions about the depth of his experience.
And Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren's organization is vaunted, but it's going to be tested, as will her "fighter" message, as she tries to thread a needle between progressives and moderates.
Here are some answers to key questions about the caucuses.
When are the Iowa caucuses?
7 p.m. CT/8 p.m. ET
How long should they last?
About an hour, maybe less this year, because of a rules change where there are only two rounds of caucusing.
When should we expect results?
The first results are expected to start coming in by 8:45 p.m. ET or so. It could take longer if results are close.
What is this about a 15% threshold?
A candidate has to get 15% to move on to the second round of caucusing. If they fall short, their supporters have the choice of going to another candidate, which is why caucusgoers' second choices are so important.
Second choice could be determinative with such a crowded field.
How many delegates does Iowa have?
Iowa has 41 pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention. But it's a long road to their selection.
The 1,678 caucus precincts choose 11,402 delegates, who go to county conventions March 21. That's when 2,107 delegates will be selected for the congressional district conventions on April 25 and the state convention on June 13. The 41 delegates to the national convention are chosen at the state convention. It's a months-long process, which is part of how Iowa ended up first on the Democratic nominating calendar.
By the way, those 41 delegates represent only about 1% of the total delegates to the national convention.
What are we expecting for turnout?
Crowds have been very large for most events for each of the top-polling candidates, which foretells a potentially high turnout. The number to watch is 239,000. That's the record for the Democratic caucuses, set in 2008.
The second-highest was in 2016 at 171,000, but the campaigns and state party are expecting record-breaking turnout. That would be a good thing for the party as a potential indicator of enthusiasm for this fall's general election.
What are some things to watch for that may tell which way things are going?
Much of the result Monday night will depend on the shape of the electorate. If it is a record turnout, the Sanders campaign is confident that will help him. But it will also depend on the types of people who caucus.
A key thing to watch is how moderate or liberal the attendees are. In 2008, 54% were liberal; in 2016, when Sanders nearly won, it was more than two-thirds liberal.
The older the electorate, the better for Biden and possibly Buttigieg. The electorate being slightly older in 2016 than 2008 benefited Hillary Clinton.
Age and ideology were critical to how the 2016 caucuses turned out.
The Sanders campaign also hopes that the number of first-time caucusgoers more closely resembles 2008, when a majority were first-time caucusgoers.
Maybe the most important variable is who wins those late deciders. A significant chunk of Iowans decide on their candidate late. In 2016 and 2008, a quarter or more of Iowa Democrats chose their candidate within the last week of campaigning.
In 2004, when former Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts was trailing badly in the polls a month out and wound up winning, a whopping 42% decided in the final week.
If I'm looking at a map, where are key places with the most votes?
About 40% of the vote total in the Democratic caucuses comes from two places — Des Moines and the surrounding counties, as well as the eastern part of the state, from Cedar Rapids to Davenport.
Here are the counties with the most votes in the 2016 Iowa Democratic caucuses and how they broke for Sanders and Clinton. You can play along as the votes come in Monday night (totals are approximate):
Polk (Des Moines) 23,000 — Clinton 53%-46%
Linn (Cedar Rapids) 12,000 — Sanders 52%-47%
Johnson (Iowa City, University of Iowa) 9,000 — Sanders 60%-40%
Scott (Davenport) 8,000 — Sanders 51%-49%
Black Hawk (Waterloo) 7,000 — Sanders 53%-47%
Dubuque 4,700 — Clinton 52%-47%
Story (Ames/Iowa State U.) 4,500 — Sanders 60%-40%
Woodbury (Sioux City) 4,000 — Sanders 53%-46%
Pottawattamie 3,000 — Sanders 51%-49%
Dallas 3,000 — Clinton 58%-42%
Clinton 2,300 — Sanders 51%-48%
Cerro Gordo (Mason City) 2,200 — Sanders 50%-49%
Warren (Indianola) 2,100 — Clinton 55%-43%
Des Moines 2,000 — Sanders 53%-47%
Jasper 1,700 — Clinton 52%-45%
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.