Reviving the American Dream
Democrats must keep denouncing President Trump’s vile bigotry, white identity politics, and “disgraceful…failure of both presidential and moral leadership”. However, resisting Trump is not a winning strategy for 2018. Instead, they would be wise to study Steve Bannon’s candid comment in the wake of the Charlottesville, VA violence that “if the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
Many voters’ lives stagnated or even deteriorated for years under President Obama, and they decided they “had nothing to lose” voting for Republicans and change. Thomas Edsall included a map in his February 2, 2017 NY Times column documenting their bleak economic reality. It shows over half the economic activity of the United States occurring in only 30 metropolitan areas. The rest of the country, which saw little economic activity, tilted overwhelmingly Republican.
As Bannon implies, the economic reality for voters in 2018 may be that nothing much has changed since 2016. Progressives in the streets and Democrats in Congress have defeated the Administration’s radical efforts on health care. Cruel budget reductions for programs helping rural America have not yet been adopted. The Administration’s more successful efforts to kill regulations are little noticed and unlikely to impact voters’ until long after November 2018.
Thus, voters whom Democrats must turn out in greater numbers or convert in order to win in 2018 should not be counted on to abandon their support for a President and his Congressional minions who repeatedly appeal to their fears. Worse, they may attribute Trump’s lack of success to Democratic resistance or “fake news”, and he will not be on the ballot.
To win in 2018, Democrats should respond to Bannon’s inadvertent warning. While defending America’s core values and denouncing Trump, they should pivot to speaking forcefully to voters’ economic reality and fears with a strong, clear, positive agenda that revives The American Dream.
Many voters do not even know about the Dream, are too young to have bought into it, or have lost their faith. Professor Robert Shiller recently traced its metamorphosis from practicing morality and championing equality of opportunity into displaying material success. Progressives should revive James Truslow Adams’s words from 1931: a “dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.”
It will not be easy to revive The American Dream, as David Leonhardt’s August 7, 2017 NY Times column, “Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart,” shows. Since 1980 the super-rich have captured a greater and greater share of income growth, with those at the top pulling away ever faster from those at the bottom. Millions of Americans knew that they had been left out and were not being heard by the Democrats, and voted their resentments in 2016.
Democrats can make a good start reviving The American Dream by focusing voters on the solidly progressive agenda Senate Democrats fleshed out for their recently announced “Better Deal.” That agenda — raising wages and incomes with good-paying jobs; lowering the costs of living; and building an economy in which Americans have the tools to succeed — should appeal to a broad range of voters.
Edsall explained that voters in fear for their jobs or their safety reject progressive values, government-run programs, and policies inclusive of “others” — foreigners or minorities — -who serve as scapegoats for their anxieties. Progressives find it incomprehensible, but many voters relish Trump’s reckless threats. To win enough of them over Democrats must resist the instinct simply to bash Trump’s national security ineffectiveness and frightening words of fire and fury. The Better Deal needs a strong progressive agenda on terrorism and national security which not only makes us be safer, but as importantly, feel safer.
Internal Democratic Party debates over which voters to attract and other debates between the Party’s Centrist and Sanders/Warren Wings are costly diversions from the needed focus on these fears. The Senate Democrats’ themes — with the addition of terrorism and national security — are “big tents”. Candidates can identify more detailed proposals responsive to the diverse communities in which they are running, especially for House seats. Democrats do not have the luxury of intramural fights or of excommunicating anyone who is insufficiently progressive; they need to appeal to all Americans.
The key for Democrats in 2018 is to understand, accept and speak to the reality of the voters they must recapture or turn out. The Senate Democrats’ strong progressive agenda, if pounded clearly, repeatedly, persuasively, can respond to voter fears and revive their confidence in The American Dream for themselves and their families.