Fight the tide, or roll with it.

Can capitalism, amid globalism, produce a strong middle class?  It needs some work.

Working Americans are being displaced and squeezed by automation, world trade, and labor migration.  Republicans have a formula that works politically for them. Democrats are divided on whether to  fight those trends or try to accommodate them. Bernie or Hillary?

Two days ago this blog likened the displacement of working Americans to the displacement experienced by the Dust Bowl sharecropper farmers in mid-continent in the 1930s. Forces of climate, automation, and economics crushed those people; Oklahoma share croppers lost their farms. Today non-college workers are being slowly squeezed by the current great forces and trends of modern globalism, and they are voting for populist solutions in Europe and America.

Republican Southern Strategy. GOP formula under Trump is to join forces with traditional GOP trickle-down to defend the economic status quo, but elicit white working class support by identifying an enemy: foreign competition from trade, from immigration, and competition from formerly disadvantaged people in America, including women and people of color. Trump spoke of draining the swamp of economic oligarchs, but in practice joined forces with them, diverting attention to issues of cultural nationalism. It is a strategy of white and rural nativist resentments against coastal elites and people of color.

Democrats chose the alternative path, one of equality and full inclusion of people disadvantaged by gender, ethnicity, and race. Democrats lack a populist scapegoat to attract the support of the working class, unless they take aim at the whole structure of the American economy. Bernie Sanders did so. Hillary Clinton did not. She was the candidate of the economic status quo, with a strategy to find a majority coalition of disadvantaged minorities, plus women voting their gender. She accommodated the economic status quo, considering the forces unstoppable. She said there were bad billionaires and good billionaires, both, and she worked with the good ones.  Improvement in the lives of working people would come from inclusion of the excluded, and self improvement through education and training of a high skilled work force.

Herbert Rothschild comments.  Herbert Rothschild, a retired professor and long time peace advocate, observed the contradiction imbedded in this blog's advice over the past years.  He notes I have not advocated radical criticism of the economic status quo. However, I agree with Rothschild that the Hillary Clinton position is inadequate, both as a matter of policy and politics, yet my blog repeatedly suggested improvements to the Hillary message, not a rejection of it.

I accept Rothschild's challenge to try to make sense of what Democrats should do.

King Canute: limits of human power.

I believe we can have both capitalism and a middle class.  It starts with accepting the economic status quo, which I do. Neither King Canute nor I can change the tide. Automation will continue. People will migrate. People will buy the best and cheapest goods, regardless of source. China is a superb competitor. 

I also believe a prosperous and just America cannot continue to allow trends to squeeze the poor. Democrats need to address the problem, and it goes beyond urging everyone to go to get more training.  We must attempt to mix capitalism with income redistribution and better social welfare to attempt to achieve both, simultaneously.  How:

   1. Equalize overall "incomes" somewhat by making the great expense of health care a taxpayer-funded cost. That alone would move millions from "working poor" into the middle class.

   2. Equalize overall "incomes" somewhat by making the great expense of technical and higher education tuition a free or nearly free good. That would create pathways for personal ambition and re-establish better equity between the generations, since Boomers are drawing deeply on the resources of the nation as they move into retirement,paid for by younger working people. Young people have a legitimate gripe.

   3. Equalize somewhat after tax-incomes by maintaining progressively in the tax code and re-establishing the estate tax.

   4. implement a universal and mandatory common experience through a program of national service after high school graduation in order to re-affirm equality and shared experience as an American policy and virtue.  We need more unifying institutions, and national service would be one of them. It would pair up with health care and tuition as taxpayer funded, linking giving and getting.

   5. Implement programs to better control immigration and encourage assimilation of immigrant communities in an effort to reduce cultural friction.

   6. Emphasize the unique patriotic foundation of America, a country based on creed, not ethnicity.

Can we do this?  Apparently not yet, since the GOP-Trump victories are pushing politics in the opposite direction. Still, it would be a way to maintain capitalism and re-establish a more economical secure life for the working poor without creating an undisguised program of guaranteed annual wage. 

My suggestion for mixing capitalism and social cohesion would be criticized as "European." This is why this blog has repeatedly urged that Democratic candidates embrace patriotism as a virtue. Humans want to belong. Identity based on ethnicity and religion divides while identity based on patriotic creed unites.  Democrats need to recognize this and get smart.

Herbert Rothschild Comment: 

"I agree with your view that Trump continues to do a better job than the Democratic leadership in presenting himself as a champion of the dispossessed. I would go on to make three assertions:

1. This view, which you have expressed before, is at odds with your continued hostility to the Bernie Sanders campaign and those in the Democratic Party who believed (and still believe) he was right about where the party should go. The candidate you supported was the epitome of the Democratic self-presentation you condemn in this edition of your blog. It really is time for you to achieve coherence in the advice you give to Democrats.

2. Trump will continue to endear himself to his base for a time, but finally one has to deliver. Image without substance has a relatively short shelf life.

3. The most important thing I wish to say is that neither Trump nor the Democrats (including Sanders, Warren etc.) show the capacity to lead us out of the desperate straits we are in. The increasing failure of the current economic system to provide widespread security is endemic, not just a matter of policy choices (though the policies enacted by Republicans and Democrats under the control of the oligarchs have exacerbated the injustice and pain of our failing system). That failure and its consequent insecurity and anger and despair will only spread and accelerate. 

The temporal horizon of your blog is short--and that's your choice. But it does mean that the analysis and recommendations you are offering can only be modestly useful to your readers, and in the long run beside the point."