Quote:
Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
That has nothing to do with my question: what jobs are you going to create?
If you're going to complain about lack of policy solutions, please try to stay on a policy discussion for a few minutes without worrying about the politics.
|
I see a massive political problem, and a massive policy problem, and the two are tied together. The massive policy problem is that moderate Democrats' (and their counterparts in Europe) policy prescriptions have not created economic benefits for most people for well over a decade. The idea that you should adopt technocratic growth-oriented polices to lift all boats hasn't worked, both because the Great Recession showed that technocracy isn't all that and because the growth we've seen since then hasn't lifted all boats -- it's lifting only the luxury yachts.
The massive political problem is that voters resent this, don't see the Left as solving their problems, and have turned to a nativist Right that is more interested in restoring traditional social hierarchies and dumping on out-groups (especially but certainly not only immigrants). The Right is much more interested in zero-sum transfers of wealth and social status than in creating opportunity. A positive message about what government can do can resonate and can defeat this, but the Democrats don't have it right now. One can criticize Hillary for being a bad messenger, but it's not like Bernie, Joe, Martin or anyone else had a great platform that she ignored in the general election.
Now, you can say (and you did!) that Obama had a great platform, but didn't have the votes on the Hill to get it passed after 2010. I agree! But that's a big part of the problem. During Obama's time, I thought he was being wise by taking the long view, that voters would reward Democrats for governing well and responsibly. I was wrong! We got Trump and Republican control of government instead. So, saying that the Democrats have great policies isn't appealing if those policies get you two years of positive change, six years of stagnation, and then two/four/??? years of retrograde devolution. I love Obama, but in hindsight it's pretty tempting to say that he got the policies right but the politics wrong. (Could he have built a durable Democratic majority if he'd done things differently? I really don't know.). And if that's the case, maybe the policies weren't quite right -- maybe the policies please you and me but didn't do enough to address the real problems that many voters experience. Obama faced opposition from Republicans, true, but he never found a way to make Republicans pay a political price for that opposition, which is one reason we have Justice Gorsuch instead of Justice Garland.
Which is to say, I don't have good answers, but I do think that discussing policy as if it's untethered to politics is, at a high level, possibly part of the problem.
