Memories of Party Train Wrecks: 1972; 1980; 2000; 2016. The Party of Many Causes but no Imagination, no "Audacity" - no Left Economic Populism and no Ability to Communicate, Failed Again. I'm Leaving.

After more than a half-century (1972-2024), I'm leaving the Democratic Party for Maryland's "Unaffiliated" status. Here's why:

Yup: that’s how democracy and the Republic as we have known it may well fare post November 5, 2024. The cover “Tightrope” is by Barry Blitt.

Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:

Preface:

Let me begin with the personal, and then work my way up to the “universals,” so missing in terms of ideas and policies within the party. And not without their own dangers for democracy.

For the first time in half a century, I will not have an automobile to drive, having sold my 25 year old yellow VW Beatle hatchback for $380 in cash from a national “Cash for Junkers” online program. I was the sole owner and the car was paid off, in the good old times, on the day I bought it, and had been in no accidents, which didn’t seem to make much of a difference in the auto insurance bills I received. Nothing “Progressive” about them. Or so it seemed to me. This is after spending more than $4,000 since 2014, when I arrived in Western Maryland, for credit card funded repairs of all types.

Let me keep the good news flowing. Those auto repair expenses form a good part of the credit card debt I have today on my cards, the debt evenly spread by me deliberately to keep the balances under control, and the monthly charges too, with the interest rates between 21-31%. In part from “due diligence” and also sheer economic curiosity, since I still write about broad economic topics, I have had conversations throughout the fall with some non-profit rescuers of credit card debtors, the famous national brand “consolidation” programs, and for profit operations, and yes, of course, my own bank. At my current bank, where I haven’t “emigrated” in ten years but new banks keep coming in as part of the great national financialization process, eating each other up, big fish swallowing smaller fish - it’s all for the best, right? I always enjoyed the sarcasm of Voltaire’s Candide, as unpolitic as its sexism would be today. It turns out that the price of rescue from both the non-profit Good Samaritans and the purely commercial minded “consolidators,” was to give up all my credit cards with the slim hope that if I were “good,” a special card - which I had to “chase” - would bless me with a $350 credit allocation limit - if I put $350 dollars into it as beginning collateral. Other programs said that I would have to wait, cardless, until some issuer decided I was credit worthy again. “What a deal,” in an age when in rural America, one is more dependent than ever on shopping and deliveries online, not the local stores. There is a lot of moral lecturing going on in these dialogues, built into the national assumptions and economic structures. The affluent top 40%, the understanding goes, merely use the card as a safe, convenient way to make purchases without carrying cash or a checkbook. They then immediately pay off the bill at the end of the month and voila, those most able to afford the usurious rates don’t face them, it is the undisciplined poor who abuse these financial privileges who rightly suffer the higher rates, which, of course, merely reflect the risks of the solid, righteous lenders. Just protecting their generosity from the “takers.”

In that tale, the whole economic history of the American working class's lagging wages and lack of economic representation by a powerful union movement since the 1970’s is concealed, the unwanted but necessary role of credit cards to fill in the huge earnings/wealth gaps dissolves in the incense of an old Catholic morality sermon.

The commercial operations all had pretty poor terms, of too little lent and too high monthly paybacks to make it worthwhile, and my own bank turned me down entirely, despite two initial sketches of possible deals at between 13-17% over 5-6 years for the money owed, under $15,000 - just to put some scale on it. At those rates they still made plenty of money. But the face-to- face and over the phone loan officers have to delay a bit to run you and your data through the company algorithms which govern them. I said to the officer “it was probably my age of 74 which made me a bad risk” in the later years of paying back (even though they would have still done quite well coming up a year or two short if I unpardonably croaked short of my loan full repayment.) She said, “oh no, legally, we can’t consider your age.” I said “Yeah sure, you’d be fools not to, even an non-usurious person like myself can understand why that makes sense in such considerations and situations.” “Oh no, it’s the law.” Sure it is.

In my parting pitch to all these unsuccessful negotiations I left the the officers - women in each case (I think I spoke with five in all) - with the thought that I would go to my grave without regrets about what I owed all these fine American institutions loaning me credit card spending opportunities at those usurious rates in the twenties and thirties. After all, I had repeatedly supported the few erratic public blips on the Neoliberal policy radar for reducing the rates charged to a more humane 10-15%. (And it’s easy to see how the numbers on a loan of $15,000 at 10-15% for 5-6 years with compound interest still makes good money for the lenders.) But oh no, Biden said, it was the late fees that were hurting poorer “hard working Americans.” I’m retired, and I’ve never had a late payment - well, maybe one during the great Covid mail delivery foul ups. But only one. Even Trump mentioned, for a whole week, a “ten percent” limit on credit card interest…it evaporated into thin, non-populist air I guess.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that the offers I keep getting by Email from the “consolidation” lenders all ask for collateral: a car, boat, vacation home…they didn’t seem interested in my generous and sacrificial offering of the Oxford Classical Dictionary - it weighs a lot.

And now for some historical perspective, which does have something to teach the economics profession, and wasn’t the announcement of Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman’s retirement from the NY Times this December - fitting, timely news, he insisting all along the economy was great and the pain people described was due to their lack of understanding how good it was under Biden. Ditto for Heather Cox’s Richardson’s column from December 11, covering Biden’s farewell justification, along Krugman’s lines, in a speech at the Brookings institution. Well, I was reading a bit of a heretical history by conservative scholar Niall Ferguson about “the Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power” - the subtitle to his book “Empire” (2003). It’s candid about the nasty side of Britain’s colonial power, including the money earned by British slavers before the antislavery movement triumphed. What caught my eye was the return on investment, annual return, of the slaving voyages between Africa and the British West Indies and their money making, human slaughtering, sugar plantations: “those returns from slaving voyages during the last half century of British slaving (that would be the 18th) averaged between 8 and 10 percent.” And the further context was that despite the brutality involved, and the high risks of disease, shipwreck and slave mutinies, this was considered a good rate of return for the risks involved. Should we conclude that the risks that our grand credit lenders run with we the working and retired poor justify rates double and triple those of the infamous slavers?

Additionally, there are scholars, leaning towards possessing “populist” sentiments on the issues I’m raising here, illustrated by my own circumstances but belonging to tens of millions of others who have had to turn to credit card spending they would have preferred not to - in order to try to lead at least a decent working class, if not lower-middle class lives. Those scholars would include classical ones writing about why the Gracchi Brothers of the decaying Roman Republic revolted (133-121 BC) even before Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and the modern ones like Michael Hudson and the late David Graeber who place the debt mechanism and its political dynamics at the center of contemporary finance, with the debt apocalypse always just around the corner, and in an unwitting sense helping libertarians and other fiscal conservatives place the blame on public spending and federal debt, not private debt, like the new leader in Argentina, Javier Milei, who is drawing the praise of Trump and Musk.

I’ve written before in my essays that my Social Security retirement pension, a modest one stemming from my late “post Christian” ideals having taken me not into the highest paying private sector niches, but rather serving as a social worker and then environmental advocate for 25 years or so, in two distinct but related in motivation careers, leaving me in the lower end of the payment system in SS; that’s based on how much you earned and how long you worked. And when one chose to retire. As Bernie Sanders has repeatedly stated, many millions of recipients are living on less than $20,000 per year, and I’m just over that, supplemented by a very small NJ pension from those ten years of social work. Ever the tax revolt state (RIP Jim Florio) in which elected Republicans Tom Kean, Christine Todd Whitman and Chris Christie, rather cynically but not entirely without cause, placed Dems and their spending in the leading villain’s role in NJ’s long running fiscal drama, tax cuts, not tax increases being the golden brick road to a better state economy. NJ has thus passed a law a decade or so ago to not index their state retirees benefits to inflation. Add that to the fact that Social Security hasn’t raised its base line payments since Richard Nixon, and you have some tight budgeting which is part of that great transfer of wealth upwards since the mid-nineteen seventies.

But hey, no hard feelings here, Democrats, on stifling Bernie’s two runs, and failing to control interest rates for credit cards, or reforming Social Security baseline payments, no more harder feelings than I have for not raising the federal minimum wage to a living wage, passing labor law reform, fumbled away since Truman tried in 1948, or to pass National Health insurance which might have led me to have a hernia operation back in 2013 before I was lifting milk crates in Target’s milk refrigerator for $8.50 an hour - in Montgomery County no less, one of the most expensive areas in the country to live in. I have no hard feelings whatsoever. And had no health insurance at the time. As good old J.D. Vance wrote in his Hillbilly Elegy, some just will abuse any benefit, not worth the public programs, like some of his own family members. And I was always free to pursue a new career at age 60 or so, one kind MoCo person even offering to pay for my schooling and new career as an “accountant” - even if by essential if not existential traits, I was creation’s least likely candidate for the career of “accountant.”

In the American upper middle class view of the workforce, flexibility in careers and geographical mobility are givens, no more clinging to the old, old notions of the rural Eastern European village, and its somewhat remarkable recreation, even after immigration, in the old urban ethnic industrial enclaves of 1880-1950. And maybe this is the affluent Globalist’s view, not just the affluent American: loyalty to one’s own sense of creative independence, not to family, town, city or ethnic group. Isn’t this one of the “Major Miscalculations” of the reaction to the Neoliberal worldview, ironic for American conservatives, since the self-sufficient individualism they so demand today for the economy would seem to conflict so startingly with any earlier view of conservatives, like Burke’s.

I am responsible for sticking to the course of a public journalist, trying to keep some spark of life in a dying tradition, another competing leftie having dismissed my writing by telling me “Bill, the written word’s influence is gone, its all electronic blogging and publishing now. No one reads stuff like yours.” Yes indeed.

And of course, with this list of fumbles by Democrats for working people, it must seem like asking for a special topping on all our unearned benefits, to ask, ungrateful like, for Dental and Eye Care programs as part of Medicare. Let’s be frugal, Democrats, and be candid: how many people really need sparkling teeth and decent vision? I guess within the party of “limited vision,” that vista of “austerity” makes sense to many. And although I believe Biden had all his teeth, his last years in office were some of the most inarticulate in the history of the Presidency. And at both a practical level, his style of delivery, and in terms of the lack of depth, his inability to explain in historical terms what he was trying to do with a new trade and industrial/manufacturing policy cost him and the party dearly. Was that, in part due to his own long history through the curve of globalized Democrats helping the poor around the world as the working class in the old industrial West went under? “Saved millions of Chinese peasants from their rural poverty.” Thanks for that.

You get the idea here. This, only part of my reasoning, is the self-interested, nuts and bolts based issues, personal, to having a decent standard of living in this country, in my case of asking, even if I all these changes were made, it wouldn’t be, for a single retired person, a middle class level of existence. Something less than that. By the way, to add to my luxurious side notes, the last time I flew in a plane was to visit my wife to finish our no contest divorce in New Hampshire. The last vacation I had was to visit her in the Southwest when she was a visiting doctor at an Indian Reservation Clinic in Ship Rock, New Mexico. Both in the single digit years of the new millennium.

And all these policy “treats” for the bottom 60% of the population of earners have come, since the mid-1970’s, since the Carter administration, as 51 trillion dollars has migrated out of the bottom pockets of citizens and up into those of the top 10% of earners and wealth, in the now proverbial report of a Rand Corporation study which came out in September of 2020, a Presidential year, covered in Time Magazine here: https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/

I just recently heard Senator Sanders mention this study, but, if I may quote the only real left populist the Dems have ever produced since William Jennings Bryan in 1896: “Guess What?” The study and its glaring findings were never mentioned by the two 2020 Presidential candidates, neither by the great “right populist,” D. Trump, nor by the great hugger of the working class (fewer hugs for the 500,000 dead Ukrainians), the Democrat’s champion of the people, hard working people, retiring Joe Biden. He did mention it though, according to Heather Cox Richardson, in his farewell, justification speech at Brookings.

Now fellow Democrats, what reason on earth would I have to part with the party, which has been so good to me in my time of need? And I still have a roof over my head, heat in winter and AC in summer, and the chance to walk still, and see where the latest forest clear cut, of 3-5 acres, has taken place in my neighborhood, with no re-plantings in sight. All in legal places, more or less, slated for an industrial park, but where the practice is that not even the adjacent business owners get any notice of the logging operation, nor whom the site is being prepared for. Much less “the public.” Just a little correction for our notions of small town “neighborliness.” (I’ve written about this here at Substack in January of 2025, and send around quite a few Emails, but to this day, no details, explanations or enlightenment was sent my way on what I didn’t understand.

Now let me close the Introduction with a few words about “Universals.” Ideals that is. From the Christian ideals of the Middle Ages if not earlier, all God’s children beyond race and nation, (not yet, certainly, “all God’s creatures”) to the value of the individual conscience from Luther’s great challenge to a decayed, late Middle Ages Catholic Church, to the secular leaning but still mostly Christian Enlightenment, full of universals about the dignity of man, freed from arbitrary and capricious imprisonments at the hands of tyrants, monarchs, the bane, Church and King were, of the dissenting Philosophe Voltaire, and this grand movement of learning and universal human ideals, of enough intellectual influence to cross the Atlantic, landing them right into our Declaration of Independence, more so than the Constitution, passing on into later generations the ideals of human rights, humane treatment of prisoners in war, and all sorts of international humanitarian institutions, the United Nations and its Declaration of Human Rights, (echoing perhaps the greatest moments of the French Revolution in 1789) including Economic Rights, these stemming in part, good part from FDR’s grand but practically phrased Second Bill of Rights, (and nursed at the UN by his wife) eight rights which our founders did not get to with their politically focused Bill of Rights, but were necessary, in FDR’s view, in defense of the American Dream, not yet named as such but called by him, Roosevelt, in the year before his death, those necessary but missing economic rights needed to even have a chance at a fair “race of life”…(that race pretty close to the later American Dream’s meaning…Jefferson’s pursuit of happiness) with Republicans ever since calling him a socialist for apparently, supporting a fairer competitive “race” for living standards, a equal starting block from some basics…no guarantees of equal outcomes and none intended to be sure with Roosevelt…or any way to make up for the cultural disparities that go with income…which even such a modern legalistic Democratic such as Cass Sunstein picked up (legalistic like the Clintons and Obama, and Biden, and Harris) in 2004 with his thoroughly ignored book: “The Second Bill of Rights from 2004: Why We Need it Now more than ever” with of course, homage to the times, meaning it would have to rely on “Market Forces” to be implemented, as if the mainstream market forces of that day wanted to have anything to do with the egalitarian aspects of FDR and the New Deal - no matter how conservatively they were framed. And so of all the recent books about universal rights and economic rights, that one may be the most ignored. Bob Rubin and Larry Summers and of course, the Dems favorite Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan didn’t speak much about Sunstein’s book, market friendly though it was. That leap - the contradiction of Democrats of the old New Deal party embracing an early Ayn Rand follower like Greenspan, says so much.

Did I leave out of my “universalisms” the attempts at a unitary world monetary system, closest ever in modern times being Bretton Woods, also of 1944, also the year of two other great books on economics…now thoroughly broken apart as China has captured, by fair or foul, too much of the “free trade and manufacturing” - but who was there apportioning shares? The Market would sort that out.

…Did I leave out the sound cautions about the limitations of human rights and treatment of civilians in Hannah Arendt’s complex and cautionary tale written amidst the wreckage in Europe, 1945-1950, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” where she said, looking at millions being evicted, deported, sent to detention/refugee camps even in the West, whole categories of suspicious people and peoples sent to Siberia under Stalin’s vast suspicions and powers…and now with the round up of 13 million illegal immigrants in the US pending, hear Arendt’s warning: human rights without a strong nation state to back them up, ground them in a home state’s protections, don’t have much meaning or significant protections at all in the vague “International” level…you can verify that with the Palestinians, (and the Zionists of 1900), and the Armenians, the American Indians, countless Russian ethnic groups, Syrians, Africans on the run by the millions, many Muslims, the great fear in the affluent West European lands, now Eastern Europe and the US. And now in the US itself with stateless immigrants, on the run from tyrants we supported, and drug cartels our consumer demands have enabled and enriched…Failed states to our south, everywhere you look…at least that great humanitarian Putin can step up to the plate to shelter some Syrian refugees, in the form of the most brutal tyrants the world has seen since Stalin, the war criminals of Assad’s fallen Syrian government. So fitting for the brute Putin and his Russia.

Out of the long history of the Western left comes some of these humane universals, birthed by the Enlightenment and then the French Revolution, the idealistic socialists of the 1830’s and 1840’s, Marx’s vision of the workers and the capitalists industrial science and power freeing man for once of the chains of constant labor into something like a half a day’s work, then a half day given to your “hobbies,” growing decade by decade in Western Europe and beyond into a powerful movement, nowhere more powerful than in the Germany of 1890-1932…bursting out in song with the unmatched emotional power of the International, which sounds today and evokes - a political version of singing “Auld Lang Syne”… in part it being birthed by the La Marseillaise, never to be matched again in the history of the left, the only thing being close in America to that type of “universal feeling” being Woody Gutherie’s “This Land is Your Land…” well, “universal” inside 3,000 miles - and that is modest in its emotional power compared to the international favorites. And controversial in his homeland.

And the dangers of universalisms - if you didn’t get on board with them. Lenin’s and Stalin’s bullets to the back of the heads - and worse - for millions - if you didn’t want to go along with the ideals, these permanent scars on the left’s ideals, that never should be forgiven and never forgotten…and perhaps that’s what FDR had in mind - always accused of being a socialist - in his very conservative framing for the best left ideals the US has ever put on the table, and still not even come close to achieving…in the right to a decent paying job, a roof over everyone’s head, the right to decent medical care, and note this, conservatives and Dem corporatists alike: “The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad…”

Here’s the link to the full speech, because the framing context is as important as the rights themselves: http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/address_text.html#:~:text=The%20right%20of%20every%20family,right%20to%20a%20good%20education.

And I should stop now, readers, with this Preface, the very refusal of Democratic leaders, and Presidents, to work with this Second Bill of Rights, indeed, they run away from it (Bernie did not) which to me are sufficient grounds on their own, given our current situation, for me leaving this party, here and now, with a return possible some day depending on how the party goes and events perhaps beyond anyone’s control - surprise us all with new circumstances we cannot turn our backs upon. It’s not hard for me to imagine, thinking of just the thrusts of Trump’s main policy issues: tariffs and trade, a never ending (historically, an impossibility, as Robert Kuttner has just warned) stock market run, the greatest deportation in history since Stalin’s era, and his narrow “mandate,” in generating the conditions for a more genuine, and truly left populist opening. If the American people are still interested any more in egalitarian economic arrangements. After reading “Strangers in their own Land” I’m not sure they are - and after leaving more than a decade in Trumpland myself.

I may be leaving the party, but I’ll be watching events unfold. And sometimes they do with the speed of the collapse of Assad’s Syria.

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Introduction:

Look What I found in an “Epitaph” for the old New Deal from 1995…

That would be while re-reading the late Alan Brinkley’s (1949-2019) insightful but depressing “The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War.” It was praised on the inside cover by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Kazin and in my view, the “Dean” of New Deal histories, William E. Leuchtenburg. And it seems fitting that Brinkley died in 2019, the same year in which the Green New Deal’s hopes were buried, with as yet no “resurrection” in sight. Buried as much by the AFL-CIO and other allegedly “progressive” blocks within the Democratic Party as from the outrage on the Right.

Out of the policy uncertainties and very different phases of the New Deal, the year 1937 and its recession and court packing attempts marked the end of the creative first phase. And that despite the great political landslide of the 1936 election, the greatest in American history and one to make Trump’s margins and claims look vaporous. And since the Trumpian Right seems to want to dwell in the region of the American First movement of the late pre-war days, 1936-1941, (and the William McKinley world, 1896-1901, of high tariffs and chest-puffing foreign policy) and is bent on purging every last vestige of the New Deal enshrined in the federal government (except Social Security and that remains to be seen), it makes sense to revisit what Brinkley was saying about liberals own shifting views - and disagreements as the New Deal headed out of its creative first phase and into re-armament and then an all-out war economy, 1941-1945. Let’s focus then, on the framing, relevant right down to our troubles inside the party of “Liberalism” today, in Brinkley’s Introduction, from pages 9-10. This is perhaps my third or fourth reading of the book, it’s that good, and it’s even greater relevance for our Democratic troubles today just leaped off the pages for me.

“The New Deal emerged out of this diverse and conflicted tradition of reform (Editor’s note: he’s referring to the Progressive Era, 1890-1914), attached the word ‘liberalism’ to it, and set about transforming it. New Dealers had little interest in the moral aspects of progressive reform; they generally avoided issues of race, ethnicity, family, gender and personal behavior - in part because they feared the cultural and political battles such issues had produced in the 1920’s, battle s that had done great damage to the Democratic party and ones many liberals had come to interpret as a form of popular irrationality.”

To fill in a bit here, what worried Democrats was the political beating Irish Catholic and “Wet” Al Smith took in the 1928 election against Herbert Hoover. And to the growing practical disaster that the moral crusade of Prohibition had turned into.

Brinkley continues:

“But the New Deal did embrace (and indeed defined itself by) other concerns of progressive reformers. Above all (and unsurprisingly in the midst of the greatest economic crisis in American history), it embraced the conviction that government must play an active role in the economy. ‘I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were gradually regimented into the service {of capital}’, Franklin Roosevelt once said. Liberalism, he argued, ‘is plain English for a changed concept of the duty and responsibility of government toward economic life.’”

But of course “in our time” Bill Clinton said “the era of big government was over,” (1996) even as his administration took the regulatory reins off the rampant financial speculation of the 1990’s which resulted in the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, the Great Recession of 2007-2008. The fact that there was nothing close to a New Deal response, much less a Green New Deal to bring it up to date with the injuries Nature was suffering at the hands of an unreformed economy, one with far greater impacts than that of the 1920’s and 1930’s, and the de-industrialized working class alongside of Nature, tells the reader today, in good part, how we got here to the crisis of the Democratic Party - and the nation itself in 2024-2025.

And here’s the paragraph which links the later stages of the New Deal, the World War II economy and the corporate fifties, to today’s Democratic Party’s pre-occupation with all the racial, gender and sexual rights that have been the focus of so much attention in Trump’s Triumph in 2024:

“In the aftermath of the New Deal and partly a a result of it, a third form of liberalism emerged - one that has now dominated much of American political life for several generations. This new liberalism has focused less on the broad needs of the nation and the modern economy than on increasing the rights and freedoms of individuals and social groups. It has sought to extend civil rights to minorities, women, and others previously excluded from the mainstream of American life. It has also attempted to expand the notion of personal liberty and individual freedom to everyone. Rights-based liberalism has embraced some of the issues that were of importance to earlier reformers - among them the commitment to generous programs of social insurance and public welfare. (Editors note: remember this book came out before Clinton’s famous//infamous welfare reforms and policing policies and the constant attempt by the Right and Democratic Center to cut even sacrosanct programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid under “Federal Deficit Reduction rationales.” ). But there has been little room within rights-based liberalism for the broad efforts to reshape the capitalist economy that concerned previous generations of reformers.” (Editor’s Note: until Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 & 2020.)

Now I think this is very much on target to the fault lines of the Democratic Party as they stand in December of 2024, after the disaster of November 5th. And as it stands in the first weeks of February, 2025, with the party unable to come up with a unified stance against Trump’s and Musk’s assault on agencies, personnel and budgets, trashing any traditions of “Due Process” and constitutional precedents limiting Presidential powers.

Missing, and lost, perhaps not unintentionally, is any sense of how FDR’s Second Bill of Right bridges the gaps between the two alternative views/paths of liberalism’s/progressivisms future tasks: he put the language of Rights to work on the economic injustices of American life, saying you don’t have a fair “pursuit” of the American Dream (his race of life) without at least some decencies, mild gestures towards greater equality, at the starting blocks of the “race.”

It is now 45 years after Ronald Reagan began in earnest the deconstruction of the positive role of the federal government in American life since the New Deal to address the problems in the private economy, and if the work of Arlie Hochschild in her “Strangers in Their Own Land” is to be believed, and for now, I believe it, then those who would be the likeliest to gain from a revitalized New Deal and a Green One want no part of any federal government “here to help them.” And certainly not from programs from the designing boards of the hated liberal coastal elites, pretty much synonymous with “the Deep State.” And/or Ivy League colleges.

Certainly the American working class, those without college degrees, have not responded to all the good Joe Biden claims to have done for them to bring industrial jobs back to rural red state America. In part, its because the process will be over a decade, not a couple of years, if the directions survive, and the scope is limited, as is the explanation of the direction and benefits in the popular mind.

Along these lines, legislative congressional genius Speaker Nancy Pelosi missed a golden opportunity to conduct a participatory national planning process for that now hated Green New Deal when she vetoed any notion of a Standing Select Committee to work what was merely a brief press release into something resembling a national plan for a green economy, and how the benefits might be spread. It needn’t have appeared so threatening, when one realizes that any work product of that committee still had to clear the turf fiefdoms of all the other important committees - so there were checks and balances built in. In other words, in my mind, and you call it what you will, the process in such a standing committee would have served as a national planning process that we don’t have, even for such a practical necessity of laying out, or not, a new national electric grid, where and who pays, who participates in designing it?

That’s my way also of working my way back to the skeletal yet important history of “Planning” inside the New Deal itself, always tiny, with a work force under 20 and a small budget, chased from agency to agency because of the hostility to planning of the Center and the Right, yet there it was in “The End of Reform” sketching out progress in energy and infrastructure for the new South and West even before wartime expenditures fleshed it out on the ground. (And so much of it for “in the air” in Florida, Texas, Arizona and California.)

And since Reagan, and even in the 1970’s, federal notions of intervention in the economy have been limited to the destruction of Keynesianism by the Volker purging of inflation via recession and the highest interest rates in our history, corporate restructuring, the crushing of labor unions, and the reliance on the Federal Reserve to inject electronic currency into the flows of stocks, bonds and real estate held by the top 10%…and it all adds up to, and was influenced by the changes in economic philosophy and “schools” along the way, so ably summarized in Mark Blyth’s book called “Great Transformations: Economic ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century” (2002).

What I am saying, right now, is that the possibilities for new economic designs and interventions are at the lowest ebb in America since the stalemates of 1937 and the denouement of the Great Society’s anti-poverty push since 1965. Nearly an entire working class, if not including most of the middle class, is out of the economic conversation.

The collapse of affordable housing is just one good example. I commented recently on a Wall Street Journal article about a private sector firm manufacturing modular units for direct use into a 300 unit plus venture aimed for the rental market. There was no discussion at all of the design elements that went into this effort, whether it was even aware of all the Green Building Design awards and all the efforts in the field in that area, whether there would be any attempt to build to the solar and compass orientation - not the street facing tradition from years past - to save on heating and cooling by rational design. In other words, it sure didn’t sound like the result of a “Manhattan Project” of creative design for affordable housing.

Is the private sector capable of new solutions in the way the mass manufacturing of Ford once did; in other words, when faced with the high costs of labor, land and materials, where is the cost savings going to come from without some “breakthrough”? I’m not exaggerating when I say that it will perhaps take a Manhattan Project type commitment to form a creative, affordable housing component, and it probably can’t be done without massive federal financial support, for the creative design phase, like Los Alamos, and many other sites…involving the best interior and architectural designers from the green building world, site planners, and a lot of process engineers…but of course, the reality is that many of the best American minds have gone into Silicon Valley, genetic engineering matters, and the pursuit of AI dreams (and fantasies) - not housing the American poor and lower middle class.

Since the American Right and the Trumpian anarchists invest so much time in denigrating government, and especially the old New Deal, they seem to have forgotten that “they” have been in the drivers seat since Reagan on national directions, disposable income, and the great transfer of that $51 trillion upwards, have failed to provide national health insurance of any substance, wrecked the climate by ridiculing the scientific consensus’s they don’t like, and failed miserably to house the nation’s citizen’s adequately. But merely stating those facts won’t turn the public around: a lot of creative work and hearings amidst the citizens who are backing the Trumpian efforts are necessary…and no one knows if that is possible based on the current “state of the nation.”

The Old Henry Adams Blues, this time from the Lower Middle Class

I don’t know how much longer I can remain a registered Democrat in the Obama-Clinton-Biden-Harris “mold.” Or is that the other “mold” that grows on cheese, etc…and the socio-economic variety that grows on wealth and power and forgets the promise of the Second Bill of Rights from 1944? There must be a response to this debacle, losing the entire federal structure: the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate and before that - the Supreme Court. And perhaps the civil servants, according to the Right’s Plan for 2025. And the Constitution with it as well? Should I become a registered Independent? Most likely choice. (In Maryland, that means, “Unaffiliated - independent of Any Party.”) To risk losing a voice in the party, a voice I never really had, one that was never taken seriously, like so many of thousands, millions of others? And perhaps since I try to carry out the role of a serious journalist, Independent ought to be my parking place, and even if it’s a temporary move. Although it’s true, for the first time in my adult life, in more than a half century, I no longer have an automobile to drive and little chance to obtain another one. Maybe the only thing that will really register at DNC headquarters is a decline in registered party voters. Tony Mazzocchi’s (1926-2002) Labor Party in 1996 didn’t make a dent. It was a valiant try, but it never really took off, labor still heading downward, losing influence year by year, decade by decade within the party. And producing no charismatic voice for change. Ditto for Jill Stein and the Green Party. Admirable personal qualities and intellect, and I like her persona, but the party hasn’t been able to attract a critical mass of intellect and charisma otherwise, facing that huge historical hurdle of credibility against the big two that all Third Parties in America face. And both these efforts, Green and Labor, were way below the votes recorded by George Wallace and Ross Perot. Populists on the Right and Center-Right. We’ll see what emerges in the stewing cauldron of events and historical flux that a nation in decline will toss out. In the meantime, consider these earlier thoughts of mine.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/10/27/2060619/-Joe-Biden-is-destroying-the-Democratic-Party#comments

The date was exactly three year ago.

CNN.com, June 27, 2024. Will Lanzoni/CNN; Biden’s expression, age acknowledged, sums up what I had been saying all through the negotiations with Manchin, dealings with Putin before the invasion, and with Netanyahu since Oct. 7, 2023.

Setting all policy issues aside, which is hard for me to do, it was the projection of weakness, the appearance of pleading in the year-long Manchin negotiations, as with Putin the same year and Netanyahu two years later which had me call for Joe's resignation this July 4th. (Posted on July 3rd here: https://williamrneil.substack.com/p/the-debate-debacle-democracys-despairbiden)  I took a lot of heat for that call - an obvious one for me - from some serious academics and commentators.  That was even after the debate performance, no less.  Too bad the country’s voters didn’t share that loyalty - blind loyalty if ever there was a case of it.

Out in Western Maryland where I live, Trump country since 2016 (and yet where Sanders beat Clinton in the Dem primaries, 2016) quite a few attempted political persuasions on my part abruptly ended with the direct mention of Biden: the citizen’s face would crinkle, even those I otherwise had a good rapport with, the irrelevance and disrespect for the sitting President immediately scrubbing any serious weighing of merits or accomplishments.  The talk - “neighbor to neighbor” - recommended by George Packer in his otherwise excellent essay on the Democrat’s disaster (The End of Democratic Delusions) never got beyond the name Biden and the "gut level" rejection of him. “I won’t even consider that man” the body language was saying very clearly.   “Public Square reasoning"- the best hope of Western intellectuals from Dewey to Habermas - had no public square and reason has long since been banished by the empty-headed squares of new electronic spaces.  And that is the glaring short- coming in his otherwise brilliant essay: Packer is underestimating the power of the new irrationality which Wendy Brown sees so clearly to undermine even face-to face decency in the struggle to keep a republic.

And there was only one candidate “who tells it like it is” - which is what one young man, fresh out of a prison term, and newly employed by a assembly line firm now gone under, told me back in 2016. It was on an outing with his girlfriend at Dan’s Rock, elevation 2975 feet, the most commanding view in Allegany County, Western Maryland, which overlooks several large prisons and private corporations at the ABL site in West Virginia, using US Navy leased land to test and manufacture explosives, rocket motors and other sensitive defense products.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegany_Ballistics_Laboratory)

Photo by Carl Engstrom, one of the first Autumn bird counters at Dan’s Rock. You’re looking East, over the waves of lower hills which are in West Virginia. My choice for “landscape of the year” image…

Dan’s Rock has been the place, for several years now, of a fall bird migration count sponsored by the Maryland Biodiversity Project, its observers there from September through the end of November. Usually dawn to 10:30 or so. The overlook site, which was privately donated land, has its own cultural story to tell. This striking picture by Carl Engstrom, worthy of the best of the Hudson River school of painters, does look out high and over the adjacent eroded hills; if one lowers the view to the rocks comprising the overlook itself, you will sees waves of overlapping graffiti: who was there, and when, and who loves whom, and what some are offering sexually; there are religious sentiments and sentiments of sheer existential despair, and lot’s of drug recommendations - a fair reflection of the turmoil in the civil world of rural red state America. And beyond if you watched the Soprano’s saga. And religious conversion attempts seemed part of the landscape: frequent 4 or 5 years ago - maybe they thought I was going to jump. Politely declined.

Today, nine of the latest, giant wind turbines are being built in the vicinity, to the immediate south and east, after a nearly 20 year legal struggle by local opponents, the project a “gift” of the late Senate President Mike Miller, Maryland’s benign legislative despot, who vetoed objecting testimony of the MD. Dept. of Natural Resources, actually blocked the testimony itself, and his collaboration with the then chair of the Democratic Party, who also happened to be an international class energy developer. There’s a lot of contemporary angst built into this site, if one cares to dig a bit. The long local opposition was a classic case of what the powerful want to reign in with “streamlined and expedited” regs - to overcome Nimbyism - but aside from that passionate opposition driven by having their local American Dream of quiet and scenic home ownership undermined in value, it is also true that those giant turbines and blades, now visible easily from Frostburg, 8 miles away, were placed with their necessary access roads and landing pads in some of the best remaining rural habitat in the state. Alongside the cultural history sprayed onto the rocks, the giant blades also tell the economic and political story of our era, and are perhaps a fitting political commentary on the Democratic Party we are considering here in this essay. A more detailed history of this story of environmental “progress” taught me that even within a state like Maryland, business interests within the Democratic Party strongly tilt the policy playing field in the directions which have resulted in so much popular anger. And much of it no longer “reasoned” anger.

Back to the campaign in the fall of 2024:

"Nominating" Ms. Harris? Seriously, it was all power politics with the donors and higher ranks of the party; hoping that a multi-racial woman could counter Trump's strong suit, his appeal  - the subliminal and overt pitch - to displaced and downwardly mobile white men and to "grocery shoppers" - immigration and the economy. With the abortion issue turning out the suburban women’s swing vote. In that hoped for framing, the Harris pitch never made sense, as likely to inflame certain voters as to persuade undecideds, but I held my tongue to try to  prevent the worst. Like so many on the left since 2015 - after Sanders was defeated, again in the early Spring of 2020, the motivation became avoiding the worst - since the Dems didn’t offer anything to be enthusiastic about, least of all for a aging male lefty who has followed the history of the Western left inherited since the second and third decades of the 19th century. (Jacobin magazine readers will of course push the date back into the French Revolution.) When the Trump pitch moved well beyond working class whites to black men and Hispanics more generally, it was game over. And as George Packer so skillfully outlines for us. Protesting the quick shift after Biden’s withdrawal to Ms. Harris was as futile as examining what happened to Bernie Sanders between the Nevada Primary and Majority Whip James Clyburn’s management of the South Carolina primary in 2020. Sanders’ passing muster with the church-going black women’s leadership in the party there was as likely as me passing the Montgomery County feminist’s upper-middle class Elizabeth Warren test: I’m short on net worth and advanced degrees, and not yet quite convinced that in the long run, women’s leadership will prove “innately” morally superior to men’s. Admittedly, a pretty low bar. Which is kind of implied but usually unspoken in the contemporary exchanges between the sexes.

When I couldn’t please the whims of a wealthy young donor in the Democratic Primary operations of 2006, where I was the co-manager of a GOTV operation in Rep. Jamie Raskin’s old head quarter’s office in Takoma Park, and having been “briefed” that I had to absolutely implement whatever campaign role that person/donor (or the family of…) demanded, I got a lesson in new gender roles. In the way of a memorable chewing out by a young, ambitious woman already higher up in the campaign, the equal to some of the down-the-chain-of-social-standing diatribes I’d been blessed with during my environmental career, especially one from a key ally of Gov. Tom Kean when he was chasing the politically futile project of a NJ Coastal Commission. And from my obsolete vantage point of “class” relations, it was hard, in retrospect, to judge which was harsher. Both the chewer-outers had been graduates of Ivy league or near Ivy league schools, closer to Ivy than my Lafayette College experience. And in the 2006 case, was it not about more than changing gender roles, but also the nature of the Democratic Party now so being critiqued vigorously post Nov. 5, 2024? Money and donors get what they want, and hell to pay if you’re the one to object. In this case, I really tried to please the young demander, and gave up when I had exhausted what I felt were all the reasonable options of campaign roles. I was supposed to create one even if it made no sense. It didn’t matter: campaigns were run in a military type manner: orders were orders. Not gender specific. Chain of command and hop to it. My “promising” career in Dem campaigning methods, at the age of 56, was over after that, even though 2006, a year awash in the Iraqi war backlash, was a very successful year for Dems on the ground in Maryland. And that year, 2006, was the last time I’d go door to door until Sander’s primary campaign in 2016.

Now back to the prospects for “left populism.”

And I have to admit, I too got tired of hearing the same perfunctory Sander’s pitch, on target as it was, and passing too easily over “the complexity,” the “is it culture or is it class” the boundary casual discussion which hovers over voter motivation. “Into the Dustbin of History” for an aging, white, downwardly mobile “patriarch.” There are no serfs, landless peasants or mere assembly line workers in the broad, all inclusive feminist charge of “white male Patriarchy.” When I left Montgomery County, impoverished, in 2014, immigrant author Reyna Grande (“Across a Hundred Mountains” (2006) and “The Distance Between US,” (2012) was all the rage with, especially, women liberals. Grande, being a good writer, was playing the role of a Mexican Harriet Tubman of sorts - for her family at least, and reinforcing the Dreamers version of a Hispanic American Dream. It was courageous and heroinic, no doubt, but the whole immigrant flood was going to inflame “the cause” of the troubled white working class who lost industrial jobs to the elite’s global trade Utopian vision with China. It was wise, though, that the Dems dropped the economist’s explicit chant from the 1990’s: “we’re proud of our policies on trade that raised a billion Chinese peasants out of rural poverty and made them industrial workers.” Blue collar men lost standing in the family - financially and emotionally - to working women, and were reminded of the strong chant inside the American Dream - or was it the Greek Chorus just offstage, which cried loudly: “Be smart: go to college” as one appliance store in Hamilton Township New Jersey urged its mostly blue collar shoppers.

It’s as if John Higham never wrote “‘Strangers in the Land’: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925” where Nativism, Anglo-Saxonism, racism, and later hyper nationalism bordering on Jingoism (late 1890’s) were levers only too happy to be pulled by the American upper crust (see Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts) to divert attention from the titanic industry-labor struggles of the day: from “Haymarket” to “Homestead” - to the radicals coming into the country from Southeastern Europe - Hungarians, Slovaks, Poles, Italians, Sicilians… Russian Jews…many infested, so it was said, with socialism and anarchism, and others with the bane of nativist Protestants, those Roman Catholic servants of the monarchical Pope…plotting to take over. Do I have to sketch out the ‘uses” of the flood of Hispanic immigrants over the past ten years when the American working class has been taking it on the chin since the days of Jimmy Carter? The tropes employed by Trump and company were the exact echoes of the criminal charges hurled by the anti-immigrant forces after World War I - the criminal inclinations of those South-Eastern Europeans…

And the American business community and its major formal institutions, did they ever address the nation as to what their worker-workforce needs were, and rise above the ugly dynamic developing on the Republic Right, reinforced by the overly cocky premise inside the Democratic Party that the immigrants were all going to move into the Democratic Party, create a “color wave” quiet revolution to give it a permanent majority? Ah, the cruel irony for everyone. Business had the power to turn this issue into a responsible discussion of policy options, but if it ever did, I missed it in those muted, fading rational voices in the decaying “public square.” No one ever blames business, but they avoided their long term civic duty. Of course, recent theoreticians of business responsibility have been telling us for decades that firm’s only responsibility is to make profits for its shareholders. We know though, that along with this claim came the enormous influence of business lobbyists, not quite in the “public square,” but “inside the Beltway,” and in the channels of campaign contributions. Bill Greider’s clear warning “Who Will Tell the People? The Betrayal of American Democracy” (1992) gave a very clear warning about who was stepping in to the vacuum between the disorganized citizens and their representatives. No one paid much attention. It’s business with great power without taking responsibility, just as with climate disruption. And yes the Dems did earlier try to put the reins on illegal immigration through sanctions upon cost cutting employers rather than “a wall,” but that was never successful and risked too great an open rupture with business allies if fully broached in the public square. Another, then, in a long line of “restraints” by a party transformed by its relationship with the highly educated and a good portion of the national business community. I’m being too polite here: rather, it’s a chokehold preventing a genuine “left populism” from taking over the party, Sanders and AOC being the closest - really not that close, and they didn’t win any new plaudits with me by backing Biden in the great “step-down now” Joe contest after the grand debate failure in the summer of 2024. Editors note: they are doing themselves proud in their barnburner of an anti-Oligopoly speaking tour in the spring of 2025…along with Cory Booker’s record 25 hour Senate protest speech, and Senator Van Hollen’s trip to try to rescue the imprisoned Kilmar Armando Garcie from a concentration camp barely disguised as a jail.

From Reuters, Nov. 6, 2024: Reuters/Daniel Cole

As the late John Kenneth Galbraith said on his deathbed, 2006, as relayed by his son at an "America's Future" conference in DC: "America doesn't need two business parties."  I think I heard that warning on the same day as I sat at one of the luncheon tables with Michael Kazin, a well known academic - with his books and an Editor’s role at Dissent Magazine. My speaking temperature that day was apparently too hot for him, being a cautious - and respected - academic.  Ten years later, Bernie Sander's temperature ran too hot for the party as well. In matters of “populist” and “centrist” traits in the Democratic Party, muted and balanced has the upper hand, even as the overall national temperature of the bottom, non-college degreed 60% rises. It’s an incredibly difficult personal and public political balancing act to pull off - being a non-demagogic populist: history is littered with the failures; Lafayette never cut it in the French Revolution in the late 18th Century, nor Kerensky in the Russian in the early 20th, Debs on the American left, or Huey Long during the New Deal, defiantly corrupt and populist at the same time. George Wallace, if one can forget or forgive the racism, which is impossible to do, had all the tools of passion and pugnacious public speaking abilities, even on the firing line as the guest at Ivy League appearances. Wallace was a “right populist” if ever there was one, and those who make the claim about his economic egalitarianism are using different scales than I am; I’m siding with Dan Carter’s great books about him: in 1995 “The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics” (which fits nicely, with an earlier start, to George Packer’s essay I linked too above), and in 1996, “From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994) - and again, note the author’s acuity in seeing the scope of what was underway. Will it end with Trump, or continue down even more radical right paths?

Here we are, then, in an America which has been “all in,” no reservations anymore about capitalism, with no counter-veiling powers left, after the defeat of Sander's Left Populism, and hoping via Right Trumpian populism that turning inward from the world’s troubles and pinning all hope on drastic alterations of trade policy cures the economic pain of Trump’s poorer base. In his Right Populism, it’s “All Power to the Private Sector,” my reference to the cries of the far left in Revolutionary Russia, 1917-1921 - “All Power to the Soviets” which came to mean all power to the party hierarchy, which became Lenin, then Stalin. Even suspect generals and high ranking officers were shot by the thousands or banished to the early Gulag in the late 1930’s…hmmm…Trump’s reaction to “disloyal” generals?

Mainstream Democratic apologists keep pointing to Labor Leaning Joe Biden’s legislative accomplishments with his two signature bills; but look more closely and you will find that the finer print, while leaning towards labor, bestows business rights in picking up the subsidies or not, even selling them - the tax credits - if not used - to other non-energy related business tax needs. And is someone going to tell me that planning the new grid, if there is any planning in sight, is going to be a “populist” exercise? And my public retort to the Dem gestures toward the “common folk” is: no labor law reform, no national minimum wage, no Social Security increase in payments since Nixon, and certainly no dental or eye care provisions, much less national health insurance of any type guaranteed to all citizens as a human right - or if you would prefer to put it less sweepingly, one of the eight rights in FDR’s Second Bill of Rights speech from 1944.

  The cruel irony of one of the most famous books about American Democracy, Robert Dahl's "Pluralist Democracy in the United States: Conflict and Consent (1967) - a virtual political Bible to liberals when I read it as an undergraduate in a political science course, c.1969, - the cruel irony is that the book maintained that no one faction/cause/class/interest dominated U.S. politics and got everything it wanted.  Not even business. Well, since that book, Dahl himself moved to qualify if not fully correct his earlier take, sensing that business "ascendency," with no serious opposition, not even on old Lord Acton’s (1834-1902) premise that “absolute power corrupts absolutely” - was going to make sausage out of his beloved pluralist democracy in the US. A brief stroll down the titles of Dahl’s (1915-2014) later works tells you his growing reservations and self-criticisms of what he was seeing in the US, post Reagan, 1980: 1983: Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy; 1985: A Preface to Economic Democracy; 1989: Democracy and its Critics; 2002: How Democratic is the American Constitution; 2006: On Political Equality….

And so, decades later,  Biden's inability to challenge the reasons for the inflation - which would involve a challenge to business prerogatives - corporate CEOs'/ CFOs'  power to set prices, fair or not - it was a ideological and policy impossibility - and he could never succeed at that except around the edges, mostly irrelevant or very minor tweaks, more symbols of political impotence than delivering relief. 

It started with Reagan, and has devolved to Trump.   The Democratic Centrists have no answers, and they paid the price at the "check-out" counter, the open flood at the border touching the "chaos" and "helplessness" nerves already raw for so many millions and for very different and multiple reasons than “immigration.”    And it wasn't just the grocery bill; it was the rising costs of a decent middle class life that told so many in the bottom 60% - that even with two incomes, middle class “status” didn't mean a secure life, financially - not at all. Lose your job on a corporate whim - or even a "sound" business decision, and your life would soon be upside down.  And the personal day of financial reckoning would arrive a lot sooner than it would for the owners of all those urban empty office buildings whose loans keep getting turned over: extend and pretend.    Those who used credit cards to meet the income gap since the 1970’s, with no living federal minimum wage, to try to bridge the canyons growing ever wider since Reagan and the demise of that - in Republican eyes - all of them, far Right to Centrists - of that awful New Deal promise, paid the price with credit card rates from 25-36%. Yes, it was Trump who suggested 10%, but that didn't last more than a week as a plank.  The Dems said they'd fight late payment fees, as if that was the core problem or its cause.  As always, dodge the real issues for symbols. That’s the life of a centrist, until the flow of history and the actual lived lives of people catches up with all the evasions of who holds power, economic and political, and which turn the world upside down, with no guarantee that “decency” emerges standing on two feet.

For that strategy, time ran out in November, 2024 just as it did in November, 2016.

Best,

Bill Neil 

---

Postscript:

Nov. 6th, 2024

Some comments in the NY Times: to Carlos Lozada’s opinion piece: “Stop Pretending Trump is not Who We Are.” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/opinion/trump-wins-harris-loses.html

William Neil

Maryland2h ago

March 5, 1933, Weimar, Germany. The evidence of who "he" was there in the puddles of blood in Germany's streets since Nov. 1918. Not everyone wanted to look, and many who did, said good, that's the way to treat the left. So far from Trump, it's mainly words and threats, but I take them at stated face value, unlike so many center-left academics. I hope our cashiering democracy works out better for us than the Weimar Germans. I suspect however, that rounding up and deporting 13 million illegal immigrants will turn out to be the May 1, 1933 - May Day not just for the left, but for immigrants - and beyond for those who will have to prove "who they are." Don't say I didn't warn you: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/10/27/2060619/-Joe-Biden-is-destroying-the-Democratic-Party#comments

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Reuters, November 6, 2024: Reuters/Kevin Mohatt

And three days earlier: Nov. 3rd responding to an Ezra Klein column https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/03/opinion/trump-harris-election-day.html “There’s something Very Different about Harris vs Trump.” I was responding, barely able to contain my scorn and sarcasm, to this paragraph in the Klein posting:

“The very richest Democrats have become just as left-wing on economics as their less affluent party members, and far more economically progressive than low- and middle-income Republicans,” Rogé Karma writes in The Atlantic. “U.S. politics seems to have decisively entered what you might call a post-Marxist or post-materialist phase.”

And here is the link to Roge Karma’s full article in the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/democratic-voters-educated-populist/680462/

William Neil

MarylandNov. 3

Gee, I hadn't realized how upper middle class and "better" Dems were in a post Marxist, non-material phase. Too bad that they haven't taken the bottom 60% of the economic base with them. Why do I say that? Being on the left all my life, a social democrat who pays close attention to the words Western society, not just the US attaches to points on the political spectrum, a backer of Michael Harrington in the 1970's but who gave up the formal "socialist" label yet supported Sanders who kept it but foreswore one of the key socialist markers: he would not seize ownership of the heights of the private sector - but left room for the concept of publicly owned utilities - ideas from the Progressive Era, not Marxist doctrine. And therefore Ezra, where are these left markers in the Dem elites: they have failed since Harry Truman through Joe Biden, despite Joe's pro labor rhetoric, to pass labor law reform, failed to raise the national minimum wage, failed to increase the medium and below payments for Social Security, not changed since Nixon, have provided no dental and eye care provisions for Medicare, much less any comprehensive right to Health Insurance, an issue since Truman again. They have failed to control the interest rates banks are allowed to charge on credit cards, no limits to usury, speaking of ethics, and failed to come up with any public mechanism to deal with inflation. On the environment, all the rhetoric adds up to losing directions on species survival and climate chaos. (and Losing the race against the clock)

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John Zeigler commented November 3

J

John Zeigler

Georgetown, TXNov. 3

@William Neil Thank you. The core of the progressive movement in this country has not shifted to the left, but has remained firm in its goals, despite the hugely well-funded attempts by the 2% to convince the 98% of the rest of us that war is peace, right is wrong, and the sky is purple and not blue. The sanctification of greed and the denigration of integrity by both major parties is appalling.

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William Neil commented November 3

W

William Neil

MarylandNov. 3

@John Zeigler thanks John. A lot more not done, especially on creating genuine Pluralism in the economy...a robust CCC for example, to tackle not just enviro issues but now natural disaster fighting responses for fires, floods and hurricanes. Also to work on rehab of the hundreds of thousands of abandoned homes I see in small town rural America. The WSJ rallied at even Biden's meek gesture of dribbling out 1-5 CCC workers to little projects sprinkled throughout the country. They were worried about creating a left elan or institution...which I translate as no pluralism of institutions possible here, just for profit business ones. A reminder to all parts of the spectrum: the Deep State is thoroughly capitalist and corporate - just look at the terms of the major climate programs Biden got passed...no new planning entity not even for the grid which logic cries out for if we're going "All electric" - which we are not. Behind the scenes at places like grid operator PJM it's economic warfare between competing energy forms, who controls the grid and the wholesale and retail implications. The little beleaguered public interest sections at the state level are out financed, out lawyered...no equal justice in the courts of economic power.

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This image of a wheat field in Ukraine is from Dreamstime. It reminds me of the wild field just to the West of the northern part of Glendening Park, Frostburg, MD, about 10 acres or so, next to the football field for the kids, where once (upon a time…) at least five families of Bobolinks nested before flying south to the Pampas of Argentina in August. I, “We” failed to save them though: the field was cut up by the owner’s kin, a dirt bike track racer - and the Bobolinks never came back. That was June of 2022. Some day I’ll tell you about all the patches of woods near me that have been cut down since I downsized in the Spring of 2021 and moved one mile SE of Frostburg the town. All losses for economic development reasons, the best rationale there is in rural areas, Red state Trump territory, to bury Nature as if there is some other rural nirvanna where Nature is going to survive…(“somewhere over the rainbow…”) so if it isn’t the Latino immigrants wrecking the American Dream for those here before them, it’s the Greens, the Nature lovers, who would starve the citizens and leave them without gasoline or heat, just to save a creature like the Bobolink.

Image from Cornell Labs. I was so startled to find one male in the tree line along that field in early May of 2022 I did a double take. Like so many good causes in my lifetime, the losses add up.