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.
