Democrats: "Careful you don't go too far and do what the people want"

Happy New Year. It’s going to suck. 

We’re already gearing up for the 2020 presidential race. As Elizabeth Warren throws her hat into the ring, and as a bevy of Democrats line up for inspection by the establishment, we’re bound to see posturing and defensive tweeting from our president, not to mention diatribes and scrambling from the Republican Party as they simultaneously try to convince us that they’re “not like that guy” while tipping a wink to their base that “yeah, we so are.”

But as if the right weren’t enough to deal with, the Establishment Left is gearing up to be its own particular brand of headache. The New York Times reports that establishment Democrats are wary of Senator Warren running for office in 2020. They write, “She is regarded with anxiety by much of the Democratic political establishment, including some Senate colleagues who complain that she has pursued an inflexible agenda on matters like bank regulation at the cost of party unity.” 

Good. Let them wet their pants. They deserve it. 

Bad enough the Democrats sold out the working class decades ago, pursued crime laws that wreaked havoc on the poor and minorities, cozied up to private power and screwed our public services up. (See Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal!) Bad enough they blew it in 2016, losing an election to a Cheeto-colored bag of hot wind, ignorance and racism. Now they’ve got a chance to ride a wave of popular discontent, and what are they saying? “Well now...let’s not be hasty...”

No. Let’s. Let’s be hasty as fuck. 

Don’t rock the boat? What boat? The public supports things like national health coverage, free college tuition and, yes, bank regulation. They have for years. Decades.

The Pew Research Center reported in 2017 that 49 percent of Americans said the government “has not gone far enough in regulating financial institutions and markets, leaving the country at risk of another financial crisis.” The Credit Union Times came up with even more striking numbers, finding that 91 percent of survey respondents said it was “important to regulate financial services.” When things like Dodd-Frank and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were explained to them, the majority of respondents supported them very strongly. 

And the Cato Institute survey results found anywhere from 75 to 80 percent of the people distrust financial institutions and believe they “allow political biases to impact their judgment.” 

But Democrats are worried that a candidate pushing for these kinds of reforms won’t get enough votes? Please. They’re worried about their own ties to power.

The lesson is clear: Democrats claiming to be “the party of the people” who don’t know what “the people” think, or don’t care, are not to be listened to. Ditto columnists and editorial boards grousing about federal overreach (more on them another day).

This disconnect between the voters and those who supposedly work for them, or the media that covers them, has been a topic of no small amount of research in certain circles. Writers like Matt Taibbi have pointed out that one reason Donald Trump won in 2016 was because the media spent so much time talking to themselves, they didn’t bother to talk to actual voters across the convention center from them about what they cared about and what they thought. That helps explain phenomena like why someone who would vote for Barack Obama in 2012 would turn around and vote for someone like Trump four years later. I’m really not interested in going through all that yet again.

So let’s make this one resolution for the New Year. It’s certainly mine, at any rate. Whenever we hear rhetoric from our leaders, pundits and talking heads on television lecturing us about the public's attitude about something, be it big bank regulation, concrete walls to keep out brown people or how flipping' awesome privatized public schools are, let’s be judicious. Let’s be analytical. Let's look into the proposal and find out what we can about how it’s actually viewed. Odds are someone is talking out of their ass.

Brief comments on Thomas Frank's new book

Once I read an excerpt from this book on Salon (highlighting some of the more egregious affronts of the Clinton presidency), I suspected two things: 1) I wouldn't be abe to keep from reading it, and 2) it would tremendously piss me off. Done and done.

Because I remember full well the vitriol Republicans were throwing at Clinton throughout the nineties, and I remember finding it impossible not to defend the guy against some of the more ridiculous claims, and I think it's important to highlight the danger of this kind of dichotomous thinking. (We could make a similar argument concerning the Obama years as well.)

Thomas Frank starts by discussing the Democratic Party's courting of the "professional liberal" who worships at the altar of ingenuity while turning a blind eye to the mass of Americans' real needs and issues. He leaves no stone unturned in his investigation of the Democrats' departure from traditional liberal values: the financial crisis, the collapse of unions, and the deregulation craze of the 80s and 90s all receive even handed dissection, laced with a wry tone that accompanies his more enraging observations quite well. If you're a liberal, it will be tough to get through some of the earlier passages castigating Democrats for things like courting power or delivering bailouts to Wall Street without screaming, "But what, you think the Republicans are any better?"

That's not the point. The point is, Democrats (at least, the Democrats Frank has in mind here--he's careful to qualify the party and point out there are plenty who don't fit this mold) count way too much on such thinking. As his title indicates, this is supposed to be the "party of the people," aligned with the working class, unions and the poor. If we can't count on them to hold to these principles in their ever-more-perplexing quest for that "political center" (translated: further to the right), who exactly can we count on?

Frank critiques Bill Clinton's gutting of welfare, his punitive crime bill (passed in an era of declining violent crime rates) and deficit reduction carried out on the backs of the needy, and moves on to critiquing Barack Obama's deaf ear to many of the same issues. Ditto Hillary Clinton. (Strangely enough, he doesn't even mention Bernie Sanders, who, you would think, would be a good candidate to investigate in terms of sympathy for the working class.) Over and over, he reminds you (and the attentive reader can't help but realize) that this was pulled off by Democrats. Yes, Republicans love to dismantle unions and the "nanny state," but they couldn't have pulled this off in the nineties. Not without the party on the other side of the aisle.

Frank is short on prescriptions for the problem of a disengaged liberal political party, but it seems obvious to me: change has to start with the American people. We've been atomized, never mind the occasional Occupy Wall Street movement or the (hopefully) more permanent Black Lives Matter. Such movements are so ritually castigated in the mainstream press, you know they must be doing something right. We need to keep at it, get the Democrats' ears and get them back on our side. It took decades to get where we are today; it'll take a long time to get where we need to be. Feel the Bern and everything, but that activism cannot disappear if he loses (or even if he wins). That's our hand, and we need to play it.