The Big Democratic Opportunity and Challenge

Making America the Land of Opportunity.

The Democratic Platform for jobs

This week is the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin's getting onto a rail car in Zurich to go to Russia to foment revolution.   It was the idea of Arthur Zimmermann, the foreign minister of Germany, that it might be a way to take Russia out of the war.   This idea worked. 

Russia was ripe for revolution.  The Russian Revolution was a way to deal with the frustrations of people locked in the Czarist class and economic system that gave them no realistic path to opportunity  Lenin and a classless dictatorship of the proletariat was a proposal for a way out: everyone would be equal, their will expressed and embodied in an all powerful party and its leadership.

The new order replaced the old order.   It was still tyranny, but it was a new tyranny.

Meanwhile, in the USA.    The economic system of the industrial West has created extraordinary wealth and opportunity and it has created enormous pressure on the the evolving social order.  Most of the great political battles of the past 200 years can be understood as attempts to adjust the social order to the changing economic order.   People with something to lose don't want to lose it.   The civil war was a fight over the status of labor--free or enslaved--with an old guard trying to hang onto a social order and its traditions. The battles over wages and hours, over child labor, over public education, over Social Security and Medicare, over progressive taxation, over the estate tax, over the various tax rates on wages versus dividends, can all be understood as--at least in part--the struggle to accommodate new economic realities in the context of the interests of people with a stake in the status quo.

Democrats under Bill Clinton, Barrack Obama, and candidate Hillary Clinton generally accepted the bi-partisan globalist solution: free trade between highly educated work forces in advanced economies like ours with manufacturing done in low wage countries.  We would exchange mass commodity agricultural crops like corn, wheat, and soybeans with vegetables grown by Mexican farmers in Mexico and Mexican farm workers in the US.  America would specialize in high wage sectors like technology and finance and we would trade with low wage countries that specialized in assembly.   

This blog has summarized that prescription to America on how to achieve prosperity as the "go to graduate school" plan.  Become a highly skilled worker.

Florida Trump rally:  immigrants are the problem, he said.

Donald Trump had a simpler plan for opportunity: blame our foreign competitors for taking the manufacturing jobs that we want back, or that we want to keep.  He targeted foreigners abroad with their factories and foreigners, legal and illegal, who came here to take "our" jobs.  He appealed to a patriotic and ethnic definition of "our", assisted by Hillary Clinton's campaign appeal to a coalition of the oppressed.  Trump adeptly seized the backlash and the larger half of the ethnic divide.   White Americans closed ranks in response to Muslim terror incidents and Hillary's campaign against the deplorables.  White women voted their race, not their gender.

Donald Trump still has a plan:  reduce immigration, deport criminal illegal immigrants, build a wall, conspicuously fight to preserve American manufacturing, nominate Supreme Court justices who will defend traditional social customs, increase use of American fossil fuels including coal, publicly celebrate traditional observances like Easter Egg hunts, and change the tax code to push taxes toward newly earned money (wages) and away from divided, interest, rents, and estates (capital) justified as being good for job creation.  The net result, as Trump describes it: America is great again and working people will reclaim the jobs lost to foreigners.  America becomes once again the land of opportunity.

Democrats need a plan.   Hillary Clinton never articulated one anyone can remember, other than urging white racists and xenophobes to end their prejudices and for "middle class tax cuts."   The problem for industrial workers is not taxes on the middle class; it is getting into the middle class.   Bernie Sanders had a plan: tax billionaires and a $15/hour minimum wage, thus bringing workers out of poverty.  He wanted to tax billionaires at a higher rate and use the money to make public colleges tuition free.  In some respects the Sanders plan was an affirmation of the Democratic plan: "go to graduate school."    The Democratic Platform list for jobs was long, utterly immemorable, and it never had credibility or political traction.  Readers today would have a hard time listing any of it.  (Hint.  Lots of job training and lots of concern for discrimination against black, immigrant, LGBTQ employees.)  Click on the link below the "Platform "graphic at the top of the page to read the whole 73 pages.  My expectation is that no one will because not one has.

Democrats lack a larger, more comprehensive story, one that integrates what voters feel about the multiple social and economic problems we face.  This is a period of high immigration with high numbers of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants, approximately 25% of the population.   Democrats need to address that situation.  If they consider it a very good thing (in contrast to the Republican position) then they need to affirm them and simultaneously advance plans to make certain those people are integrated into the American culture and economy.  Un-assimilated groups, combined with declining industrial job opportunities, equal unhappy voters.   Democrats need an immigration policy that reduces the friction between immigrant and native born populations.

Democrats need an industrial policy and they need to recognize that not everyone can go to graduate school to become a computer or medical technician.  If Democrats' only real solution is for every worker to become a highly skilled, high wage employee then Democrats are doomed as a political party.   A great many people struggle in school.  A great many people who do well in school have children who struggle in school. Democrats had been the party of industrial workers and the "average guy."  The New Deal and the Fair Deal addressed their interests.   Modern Democrats do not.

A Democratic policy that focuses on entitlements to solve the problem is doomed to fail.  It divides the voters.  Even people who enjoy rich benefits (Social Security, Medicare, public pensions) resent the notion that others--presumedly less deserving--get benefits, especially needs based ones.   A Democratic policy needs to emphasize work, not entitlements.  Bill Clinton's formulation that he was fighting for people who "worked hard and played by the rules" is a frame that works.  It unifies.  Jesse Jackson, in his presidential campaign, spoke with respect and admiration for people who work hard, "they take the early bus", he said, to be on the job.   If Democrats give up on there being meaningful work for non-college adults then those non-college adults will give up on Democrats.  We saw it happen in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, and North Carolina: states won by Obama and lost by Hillary Clinton. 

Recommendation for Democrats:  Have an industrial policy that provides a way into the middle class for people who barely graduated from high school.  (If they don't find hope with Democrats, do not worry.  They will find hope with Republicans, who in fact have a plan: blame foreigners and foreigner-loving Democrats and abolish the EPA.)  

Great activist base, but a demanding one

What would work for Democrats?  Recognition that industrial jobs using natural resources, are here in America, and they tend to employ the least employable people in our society: non-college men.   This involves lumber, mining, energy extraction, agriculture, and construction.  These are jobs that happen in rural areas, areas currently bright red and bright red for a reason.

(Areas like my own Oregon 2nd Congressional District, a bright red rural area.)

  Environmentalist Democrats will be uncomfortable with this. They personally actually use wood, materials, energy, food and infrastructure but they are uncomfortable with the production of them.  A Democrat who can win will insist on two things: that the use of wood fiber, energy, etc are good rather than suspect, and that they can be extracted responsibly.  There is an old phrase now in dis-use:  "wise use."    Democrats can and should renew its idea and its vocabulary.   

Must a Democrat abandon environmentalism?   Not at all.  But his or her focus needs to be on redefining environmentalism as a policy of care rather than a policy of resistance, to extraction and use of natural resources.  The issues are controversial and Democrats are blessed--and troubled--because the most active and loyal Democrats are motivated in significant part by environmental concerns.  Some environmentalists will object and want to "hold their feet to the fire" and the result will be Democrats with burned feet and a public position that sends the message to a great many workers that Democrats oppose any realistic opportunity for them to find good paying work.  Democrats run a risk here.  A Democratic candidate who appears "soft" is considered a traitor and some environmentalist voters will support a Green party candidate.  The Ralph Nader/Jill Stein alternative dooms Democrats, but a true believing environmentalist believes that the earth is in the balance and compromise demonstrates bad faith. 

A policy of environmental care may provide a pathway for a Democrat, but it is a delicate one.  Environmentalists are demanding and "pretty good" is often no where near good enough.  It is bad, a sell out, a traitor.  A successful Democrat will need to sell an idea that no one on the national stage is selling, that he or she is in favor of extraction and use of natural resources and that it can be done well. 

It may not be good enough for the Democratic environmental wing of the party, in which case Greg Walden will have an easy path to victory in Congress and Donald Trump will be re-elected as rural blue collar voters get the clear message, that Democrats would rather they subsist on food stamps than allow them to do good, hard, well-paying work.