Toward a Politics of Efficacy, or, “It’s The Economy, Stupid”
One talks of politics these days. More than that, one reads of politics. Content from across the world, content pouring from the sky, gushing from the dams of The Atlantic, Vox, CNN, Breitbart. It is easy to read things one agrees with and think to oneself, “Yes, the point this content generator makes is good and true, and I agree with it, and thank god there is still some sense in this world,” and consider oneself thoughtful, politically engaged. But the points themselves are discrete; what relation they bear to one another is obscure. It is a way to pass the time, to comfort oneself. And so when one talks of politics it can be difficult to make one’s point if conversation is steered away from topics on which one has read “relevant” “articles.” One may not even have a point — a legitimate personal politics is not spontaneously established by reading enough Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman in the New York Times. This is an attempt to establish a unified theory of my politics.
A well-enumerated personal politics is not simply a list of opinions on the issues of the day. Rather, it is a thought process, a formula to be applied to any and all situations/problems/arguments. It would allow one to construct that list of opinions, but the list itself is immaterial. Much of what follows may be well-established and/or self-evident, but I believe the exercise itself is healthy. Understanding one’s own politics allows one to apply to oneself in a productive manner, rather than thrash about blind in the hopes of doing something that will do something good. One must show one’s work.
The central question one must ask — the phrase from which all else unfolds easily, inevitably, like an elaborate set of dominoes — is this: How does one affect material change in the day to day lives of the citizenry? Quite simply: how does one make things better? (Here we will acknowledge and set aside the problem of defining “better” — while it means different things to different people, we can assume each of us has a general idea of what “better” looks like) The answer is power. It is the only answer, it always has been, it always will be. Power is the exclusive concern.
And so the question then becomes, how does one gain power? In the past it was might. Today it is money, but the relationship is indirect; the billionaires do not write the laws themselves. Politicians control the formal levers of power, and in the American republic, votes cast by the American people determine who holds office. On its face this would appear to be an ingenious system: the people themselves decide who to entrust with the power to affect change in their lives, to make things “better.” Given that elections are held regularly, and given that a non-monopolized free market excels at presenting a diversity of options, one would expect politicians — people who are presumably interested in remaining in control of the levers of power — to represent the interests of their constituents; the people giveth, and the people taketh away. Of course, things don’t function so neatly in reality, but the general concept holds true: you get the most votes, you win. And so the ultimate concern is votes. Votes yield power, which yields the opportunity to make the world as one sees fit.
Here are some facts. Donald Trump, a Republican, is the President of the United States. He was elected President of the United States because he received more votes than his opponent Hillary Clinton, a Democrat — not the votes of citizens (he lost the popular vote by well over three million), but the votes of states in the Electoral College. The Republican Party also controls both the Senate and the House of Representatives, as well as 33 of 50 governorships and 32 of 50 state legislatures, with total control of 25 state governments. As of January 2017, 28% of Americans identify as Republicans. By any measure there is a mismatch here — the amount of control exerted by the Republican Party at both state and federal levels in no way corresponds to the number of Americans who want that to be the case. And yet here we are.
Here are some more facts. The Republican Party wants to further deregulate the financial industry. The Republican Party wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, stripping millions of Americans of their health insurance while at the same time delivering a massive tax cut to the high-income bracket. The Republican Party wants to restrict immigration along national and religious lines. The Republican Party wants to spend far less on education and far more on the military. The Republican Party wants to eliminate environmental protections to allow corporations to further exploit the earth. These are not very popular policies. They serve the interests of very few, and actively work against the interests of many many millions. And yet here we are.
So those who govern do not accurately represent the governed. Why? There must be a reason, and there is. It is because the Republican Party does not care. They are interested exclusively in the power to make the world ever better for the billionaire class and no one else. They hold the majority of their own voters, the majority of the American people, in contempt; these are not human beings to represent, these are problems to be solved, obstacles to power to be negotiated. They have no high-minded ideals to guide them, no illusory interest in consensus, in centrism. It is a brutal, nihilistic game they play, and they play it well. Districts are gerrymandered. Polling places are shuttered. Early voting is curbed, voter ID laws are enacted. The explanation behind these moves is always couched in skim milk politco speak, but the motive is clear: get more votes than the other guys. If you cannot convince people to vote for you, at least keep them from voting for the opponent.
And what of the opponent? What of the grand champion of the people, the Democratic Party? The ones who proudly proclaim on Twitter and Facebook, “When they go low, we go high;” what of them? They have gotten what they asked for. They have satisfied their sense of high-school morality and “gone high,” and in so doing have allowed waking nightmares to install themselves at the heads of governments across the country. They may not have won, but they can sleep soundly at night, with a clear conscious; it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. Meanwhile the immigration raids have begun, funds are allocated for an eleven-figure boondoggle along the southern border, Dodd-Frank and the ACA are on the chopping block, and Stephen Miller, the fascist Martin Prince, has the ear of the geriatric sexual predator bumbling around a darkened White House in a bathrobe. “When they go low, we go high” is a joke and a lie. To allow any of this to come to pass is the height of immorality. There is blood on the hands of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama.
How did this all come to pass? There are innumerable arenas in which the Democratic Party has failed, but for the sake of brevity let us focus on the 2016 presidential election. We have already established the basics: while he lost the popular vote by several million, Donald Trump received more votes than Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College. And here is an important point already. Liberals protest about the illegitimacy of the Trump presidency, given that he received so many fewer votes. It simply is not fair, the thinking goes. But Donald Trump and the Republican Party do not care about what is fair. They care about winning, and in the United States of America in 2016, the winner was decided by the Electoral College. The popular vote was utterly inconsequential. Had that been unknown prior to the election, had the existence of the Electoral College been a surprise sprung on the nation the morning of November 8, then it would have been unfair. The College itself, of course, is supremely unfair, awarding low-population states far more influence than they deserve. It should be abolished immediately, without question. But that is not our reality. The nature of the Electoral College is and has been well-established. As we all of us knew what was at stake, we knew the rules by which the game was to be played. The Republican Party operated in such a way as to maximize their chances according to this particular set of rules. The Democratic Party did not.
And this blunder may not have even mattered: had the Democratic candidate delivered a sufficiently compelling message, the popular vote discrepancy would have trickled down to the Electoral College. A margin of ten million (the amount by which Barack Obama defeated John McCain in 2008) would have more than accounted for the apocryphal 80,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. But she did not deliver a compelling message. In Donald J. Trump she was served the softest, slowest pitch possible — this was a man who calls Mexicans rapists, who alluded to Jeb Bush’s low libido in a debate, who defrauded thousands with a snake oil “university,” who openly boasted of past sexual assaults, who ran a historically disorganized, underfunded campaign, who looks like this — and she struck out looking. And let us set aside the matter of “charisma” or “likability.” The electorate has a short memory; most Presidents (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C) are not gifted with Barack Obama’s once-in-a-generation magnetism, and Trump was not exactly a likable man himself. Who Hillary Clinton is as a person is not the reason she lost the election (nor was Russia, nor was Wikileaks, nor was James Comey). What reason did she give one to vote for her? That she was not Donald Trump, yes — that was an historically compelling argument. But what else? She failed to advance a single compelling policy proposal herself. She would not build the wall, she would not ban immigrants on religious grounds, she would not repeal the Affordable Care Act, but what would she do? What case did she make to a normal, to one who is neither racist nor to whom identity politics are a factor? To the mythical white working class voter, for whom the recession that supposedly ended half a decade ago is still ongoing — what did she say? “Your jobs aren’t coming back.” “The world has changed.” “Go to school.” Is it any wonder she lost? And yes, it’s true, their jobs aren’t coming back. But Donald Trump said otherwise, and he is the president now. What happens next is inconsequential.
Now, with regard to gender, briefly. Female candidates have the deck stacked against them from the start, without a doubt; sexism still thrives in this country, more than any of us is willing to admit. But as with the biases inherent in the Electoral College, this is was a known issue. To overcome the gender handicap, the first female president will have to be a better candidate than her male counterpart several times over. Hillary Clinton did not prove herself several times better a candidate to the electorate. And yes, doubtless, this is unfair. But the effective political party must disregard that fact and simply acknowledge that it exists. Given the existential threat posed by a Trump presidency, it was incumbent upon the Democratic Party to win the 2016 presidential election by any means necessary. If they could have done so by running Bernard Sanders, or even limp dick Martin O’Malley, they should have.
The Republican Party is able to advance the interests of the billionaire class by emphasizing cultural politics. They were the ones who reintroduced abortion as an issue, they were the ones who that began regulating marriage on the basis of sexual orientation, they were the ones who began a doomed, extraordinarily destructive “War on Drugs.” These should not even be questions in 2017; these are matters so simple, so cut and dry black and white, they should not even be engaged upon. And yet the Democrats have played right into the Republicans’ hands. As Hillary Clinton allowed Donald Trump to define the parameters of the 2016 election (“America is already great”), Democrats have allowed Republicans to dictate the shape of our political discourse. Certain matters — income inequality, welfare, drone warfare, mass state surveillance — are considered settled. On these issues and many others, the electorate has no choice; finally, a bit of that elusive “consensus.” The only point of distinction, the only choice available, is cultural. And once again, we have a simple fact that must be acknowledged: cultural issues that animate urban millennials do little for those who are a little older, a little further out from the city center. That is not to say that is how things should be, or that cultural issues are somehow unimportant. What it is to say is this is how things are. This is the reality we are faced with; it may not be the one we prefer, but it is the one we have.
Here is one last fact: there is much more that unites us as Americans than divides us. We are most of us dispossessed of ourselves, alienated from the products of our labor, working too hard for too little money. I hesitate to say our lives are bad because despite it all I still find mine enjoyable (the system works well enough for me, a white man with a college degree). But what I can say is this: most of our lives are not as good as they could be. How can they be bettered? Cultural changes are in some of our interests, but economic changes — 99% of the country is interested in economic changes. Where cultural concerns divide, economic concerns unite. In other words, speaking to economic reality yields votes. Votes bring power. And power allows one to make the world better — both economically and culturally.
The key to the future is a strategic approach focused on attaining and sustaining power. The reality of contemporary American politics demands an end to idealism; Rome was not built in a day, but it burnt down damn fast. We are in desperate need of a new politics, a politics of efficacy. Votes and votes alone confer the power to affect change. And what do voters care about? The economy, stupid.
