Fair Deal

Make America Great Again

It is a good slogan for Trump.   The Great calls for nationalism and pride.  The Again denotes change and a return to some unspoken and undefined earlier better time, perhaps before the cultural changes of the past decades, perhaps when blue collar workers were in the middle class.

Are all the good slogans taken?

Senator Chuck Schumer suggested "A Better Deal".   It is a comparative and it immediately forces on to consider the alternatives.  Better than what?  Or better than whom?  Democrats have to stop making Trump and Republicans the center of everything.  That is part of what killed Hillary's campaign.   Trump set the agenda.  I'd it is all about the alternative then go ahead and get the real thing, the alternative.

Democrats sent in alternative suggestions, among them:

The Real Deal.

We the People.

Make America America Again.

Make America Work Again.

You Deserve Better.

For the Many, Not the Few.

The New American Dream.

Better Together.

There are hundreds more.

Democrats have not yet figured out whether they are a party hoping to reform and improve the status quo consensus of international free trade, finance, and movement along with multilateral defense agreements.  It was the idea rejected by Britons in Brexit and white Americans in the election of Trump, especially by the traditional core Democratic demographic of blue collar workers.

Possibly a party realignment is underway and Democrats are the party of educated urban urbane people offended by racism, xenophobia, and homophobia.  Republicans will settle into being the party of Trump: mostly white, mostly traditional, mostly Christian, mostly blue collar, mostly suburban and rural.  It would be Public Radio vs. Country Music.   Big business might split, with fossil fuel extraction going Republican and finance and information technology going Democratic.   This would be the Obama constituency Democratic coalition.

Or maybe Democrats want to return to the constituency of FDR, except without the Solid South segregationists.  This would envision a party that reclaimed the industrial northeast.

A New Democratic slogan needs to represent a  new Democratic re-focus on including a blue collar pathway to the middle class.  They cannot re-establish the Obama coalition without a clear, persuasive policy for the blue collar workers.

My own policy recommendation for Democrats is to re-establish that the party is the party of obedience to laws, particularly white collar crime.  There will be high handed and entitled miscreants in finance and pharmaceuticals and insurance and politics to go after.  Democrats will lose some Wall Street support, but they should celebrate that and brag about that, not mourn it.

Democrats need to show blue collar workers that they want to re-establish fairness as a value and policy.  Equal justice is fair.
It has been seventy years since the slogan "Fair Deal" was used.  It hasn't been worn out.  Fairness is a bi-partisan, secular virtue.

I like "Fair Deal."