Dear America,
While listening to Morning Edition on NPR this morning, I heard an interview with the organizer of a liberal PAC talking about what the Democratic Party should be doing to win the next election. The interviewer kept coming back to the same, now-familiar refrain about white middleclass voters feeling abandoned by the party, and the interviewee kept resisting the attempt to make that the central issue for his party to address. His point, one that I have concluded to be salient myself, was that there isn't a single class of voters or a color that needs to hear policy planks on a particular set of measures and then see the party trying to manifest them. He felt that no one or two demographics was the key to the next election either. His contention seemed to be--at least this is how I interpret his remarks--that we have to find a way to cause wealth to actually trickle down rather than positing means of doing so that never seem to work like tax cuts for entrepreneurs and big business. But along with his seeming contention was the underlying observation that our new insistence on dividing the voters into discrete groups to whom we have to pander is a misguided approach. What are needed is policies to effect change in our socio-economic framework so as to address social ills that affect our society as a whole, and I agree. We have to accept at some point that our divisions are chimerical at their cores because the monster among us isn't immigrants taking jobs that Americans could...or would...want. It isn't members of certain ethnicities getting a free ride. We have been divided, and thus politically conquered, and we have to direct or attention to the real problems, one in particular, and insist that our politicians address them...for the benefit of each of us, not just what each of us perceives to be someone else. We have to be specific and reject the hypotheses of those whom we have trusted in the past to identify our problems for us, and that includes the news media.
You certainly noticed if you watched election coverage two weeks ago that the subject of the conversation on the air was the fragments of our society: white voters under thirty, voters with college degrees, blue collar voters, blacks, whites, Asians...Martians. But in the final analysis, we are all just Americans, and the problems we have as a society are not indigenous to the lives of single social groupings, because the effect of our ills on one group spill over onto members of other groups, and thus become universal ills rather than white ones, or rural ones, or ills specific to any group, class, creed or ethnicity. They all have one thing in common: they devolve from the distribution of not just wealth, but something far less dramatic: opportunity to prosper. Not everyone wants to be rich, but everyone wants a good roof over his head and decent food to eat as well as presentable clothes and reliable transportation, just to name a few indicia of prosperity. We don't all want to be free from the obligation to work in order to have those things, but we all want to be able to get them if we do work for them. In other words, tax policy may be useful in redistributing the wealth that exists now, but it is remediation of a symptom, not a cause. The pilots at the airline Lufthansa have declared a one-day strike for today because they haven't had a raise in three years while members of management have gotten raises totaling 30% or more during that period, and the members of the board of directors have received even greater raises, and those raises were just for going to a few meetings a year. All the pilots are asking for is 3.7%, and management, which includes the sybaritic members of the board, is resisting. Of course, airline pilots do alright as it is, but the principal in operation in Lufthansa's case is the same as that in operation two weeks ago. Donald Trump, a sybarite himself, pushed the issue of lost opportunity as a central issue, veiled in various subterfuges that will in the end amount to more of the same support for the moneyed oligarchy in the United States. No Trump supporter realizes that yet, but they all will eventually. It was the same ploy used by Ronald Reagan in 1984. "Are you better off today than you were four years ago," was his subtle mantra. Implicit in it was the claim that he was responsible for it, which is a matter open to debate on several levels, including the fundamental question of whether a president can do anything but stop congress from doing bad things and make suggestions. Congress frames our society, and in the end, congress runs it as well as is evinced by the argument of Trump and the current Republican leaders of congress. In eight years, President Obama has vetoed only twelve bills. If nothing good has happened it is because congress hasn't passed anything that redounded to our collective benefit, not because, as Trump claimed, Obamacare or the Democrats...or President Obama himself was a disaster. We are where we are because congress didn't rein in business exportation of our jobs and obscene executive compensation. It didn't give shareholders any power to control the leadership of corporations at annual meetings where corporate by-laws make it virtually impossible for the shareholders to be heard. Congress didn't change the tax code, nor did it offer up a bill to render our immigration laws rational and advantageous to us as a nation. And it did nothing to encourage a fair wage for the people who do the work in this country.
So Democrats, here's the task for the next four years, assuming that the goal is results rather than hegemony. Make taxation fair. Constrain corporate management. Increase the wages of those on the bottom of our economic ladder, that is, increase the minimum wage, and do it adequately rather than as a token effort, etcera. Forget about tailoring the message to the various percentages of our population and issue one message to all. I hope the party gets the message because Trump will be a disaster, whether anyone uses the word or not, and it will be for the Democrats to find a way to fix it.
Your friend,
Mike
Leave a comment