Goodbye to Hillary, the Third Way, and Howard Schultz.

      "Liberals and the left have absorbed key lessons from the Trump insurgency. One of them is that a progressive movement seen as speaking primarily for affluent metropolitan areas will never command a durable majority."

                                     E. J. Dionne, Washington Post

Bill and Hillary Clinton are the past. Howard Schultz is not the future. 

The past.

Democrats have moved left because they realized they had a problem.  


This blog has summarized the Democratic formula for success: go to graduate school and get a degree. Parents know this. If ones son or daughter becomes a doctor, lawyer, accountant, etc., the parent can breath a sigh of relief. The child will be OK, financially at least. This is a secure path to the solid middle class. But a child who isn't college bound, or who drops out, has an uncertain path, and may be stuck in an underworld of financial struggle.

Third Way Democrats after 1980 hitched their star to free markets and competition in the global economy. They were socially liberal, fiscally conservative, i.e. the economic status quo. Like Hillary Clinton. Like Howard Schultz.

That world works for a lot of people--especially well educated people who live in affluent coastal cities. Democrats do well there. Those are the economically vibrant, productive areas of the country.

Meanwhile there is the rural heartland, described dismissively by some as "the rust belt" and "flyover country." Red America.

People who look at politics as a single left-right axis miss what is going on. There are multiple axes, among them race and gender. But there are two axes that are salient in what is happening with Democrats, in response to the Trump revolution.

Culture axis. One is social conservatism in the Trump mold, which means nativism, nationalism and white Christian identity. What were hints and suggestions of this in the Nixon Southern Strategy, but it became overt under Trump. On the opposite side are the anti-racists, anti-xenophobia, anti-misogyny: social liberals. The anti-Trumps. Democrats.

Areas "making it" voted Democratic

Economic axis. The other axis is economic populism. Both parties under Clinton, Bush, and Obama had made peace with market capitalism. It was justified morally by sorting the rewards of the economy by presumed individual merit, by hard work, by playing by the rules of the new modern global economy, which mostly meant getting specialized training to command a superior income. Some will do better than others, but the prosperous were presumably deserving--they had stayed in school. 

Both parties shared status quo economic policies, but there were minor differences. Republicans tended toward defending economic privilege (eliminate the inheritance tax, oppose minimum wage laws) but Democrats had their own version, defending educational meritocracy and the economic privilege of the professions over blue collar work. 

Trump, however, re-made the GOP. He added to his overt nativist social populism an economic populist message. He talked about coal jobs, auto jobs, good blue collar jobs, and loving the uneducated. Meanwhile,Hillary talked about advanced education. Clinton,with her speeches to Goldman, Sachs, and prominent billionaire allies, had no credibility as a leader of a populist America.

The result: Trump won.

Hillary won in affluent cities and suburbs, but Trump won the socially conservative heartland plus the economically stressed upper midwest. House Districts won by Democrats created GDP of $10.2 trillion dollars, while House Districts won by Republicans had GDP of $6.2 trillion. Democrats.  Click.  Trump was the economic populist.

Democrats learned something. The next president--Democrat or Republican--will have an economic populist message, not a meritocracy message. That is the way for Democrats to claim back their share of votes among the financially insecure lower and middle income voters.

To win an electoral college majority Democrats need to be a populist party on both axes, the party that secures the social liberals in the cities and also makes credible claim to the struggling poor, working class, and middle class Americans. They do it by a message that says the status quo economic system is rigged in favor of the financial elites and against working people and the middle class. 

Those votes were available to Obama in 2012. He had saved the midwest auto industry and Romney had said to let it die. But that marked the end of the old Democratic Party. By 2016 voters realized that Obama had protected the financial industry executives from prosecution and that Hillary Clinton was pals with Wall Street. Democrats lost the economic populist vote and the election.

They need those voters back.

This time they will run to Trump's left on taxes and and the power of economic elites. Democrats will be the economic populist party.