Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
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.
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At some stage governing is about coming up with a policy that works and selling it.
Yes, that is hard. And there are many ways to do it, including working from the grass roots to develop the policy.
But the alternative of snowing the public on what you can do whether it works or not is a truly lousy approach, even if it is the political low hanging fruit.
So there needs to be a debate first about what works, what can get us those jobs. That debate needs to be about more than white male working class men, it needs to be about all people, and acknowledge that the unemployment rate and average income for minorities and women lags very significantly behind that for white men.
The Republicans right now are making policy behind closed doors, without committee hearings or public discussions or input. We should do the opposite, but when we do, our focus needs to be on delivering jobs not on winning votes.
