Crafting an Agenda
The GOP is Trump, and Trump is the GOP. Democrats need to do more than flip voters who love what the president is giving them.
I’m not much for moral victories, not when we need real victories, and plenty of them. Today’s Georgia 6th election was a nothing short of a disaster for the Democratic party. It wasn’t even close. Yes, it rained, and yes, the tragic Scalise shooting played a role, and yes, it’s Georgia and reliably Republican and, yes Ossoff is twelve years old, and yes, yes, yes. But that simply isn’t good enough. This was a winnable race, and a race that needed to be won. So it is worth trying to understand why this keeps happening, and chart a path forward.
Lost in the sturm und drang of a $50 million race is that voter suppression is the giant 800-pound gorilla of a white elephant in the room. The GOP is very, very smart: they don’t prohibit people from voting, they just make it more difficult and let people make the decision not to show up on their own. And this phenomenon simply does not show up in media accounts of the outcome. Frankly, mentioning it sounds like defensive sour grapes: they cheated! Mom, they cheated!!! Except that it’s real and it’s bad. I am not quite sure how to fix it, but one way is to make sure that it is constantly mentioned, over and over again, in every conversation about this stuff. It has been normalized, so we have to un-normalize it. That’s a long-term goal, and we need to start now.
Ossoff’s strategy in this race was to be a bland, harmless centrist in the Macron style and use dissatisfaction with Trump to do the work for him. But that overlooks a crucial point, one that Democrats need to learn, and fast. The marginal Republican voter does not like Donald Trump. BUT the thing they don’t like is his impulsiveness and his Twitter habit and the fact that those two things prevent him from passing his agenda. They love his policies, and they continually vote for them. The biggest myth in politics and American life right now is the pervasive one that it is racist white working class males who are the main Trump supporters, and all other Republicans are either grudging partisans, or somehow misguided. That’s flat wrong. The Republican Party supports Trump’s policies because Republican voters support his policies. His combination of racism, faux-populism, and dick-swinging grievance-mongering IS the Republican Party. He is not an anomaly; he is the distillation of all that the GOP has stood for since the 1990s. He says the quiet parts out loud, and they love him for it. Case-in-point: Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, where exactly 48% of voters voted for John Ossoff twice, and 52% voted for Republicans twice, with $50 million wedged in between.
So what is the lesson for Democrats? It’s time for an agenda. Right now. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Manifesto is a good example of how a strong message of liberal policies that are achievable can make the difference in close races. And, frankly, that’s all Democrats need: don’t forget that 78,000 votes swung the presidential election, and 50 million eligible voters didn’t bother to vote. The task at hand is not to flip GOP voters: they know what they are voting for, and they continue to vote for it, Trump’s antics and the savage consequences of TrumpCare and tax reform be damned. The task at hand is to give millions of people a reason to vote for Democrats, a reason to have hope that life with Democrats in charge will be better than life with Republicans in charge. We take it for granted that Democrats are better than Republicans. We shouldn’t. We need to come up with a plan that speaks to all people — after all, working class whites have the same needs and wants as working class blacks or Latinos or Asians or anyone else. Those are the people who wonder what a Democratic party that loves Wall Street and never punished the bankers and let their homes get foreclosed on is supposed to do for them. So let’s tell them.
First: single-payer healthcare. Medicare for All. Democrats are losing the healthcare debate because, while the ACA has some really good parts to it, the main mechanism behind it is to pay private insurance companies public money to provide a service the government can also provide at a lower cost. That’s tough to defend. It lacks coherence. It is a Rube Goldberg approach, and people know it. There are many versions of a single-payer vision, some ending private insurance altogether, some leaving a layer of private insurance for the wealthy, etc. Frankly, it doesn’t matter: we can work out the details when we get the chance. For now, go out and fight for a just, fair healthcare system that covers everyone.
Second: small dollars work. One thing that Ossoff’s campaign, and Bernie’s before him, showed is that the Democrats are going to have no trouble raising money for 2018 and beyond from small donors. After the AHCA passed the House, liberal groups brilliantly set up escrow accounts for future candidates, to be distributed to whomever wins Democratic primaries to take on the GOP House members who voted for the bill in marginal seats. (Even better would be to invest that money in local infrastructure — year-round GOTV efforts for instance, but one step at a time). The energy is with the grassroots on the Left right now, and they are willing to fund in large amounts. Shifting to a small-dollar strategy leads to…
Third: fight corporate power. Democrats convince ourselves that we are on the side of the little guy, of the worker, except that we pursue policies that don’t help those workers. Democrats in the 1990s went whole hog for neoliberal policies like free trade and global governance, and contented ourselves that the crumbs of trade adjustment assistance would be enough to cushion the blow for the working class. It didn’t work. Democrats also bought into the lax anti-trust policies that have left us with 4 airlines, 1 search engine controlling all the data in the country, 4 cellphone companies, and fewer and fewer small businesses in nearly every industry. Bankers were bailed out after 2008, but homeowners weren’t. Student loans carry a massive federal interest rate, crushing the hopes of millions. The list goes on. The thread that connects these issues is money: Democrats went to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, got lots of money, and did what they were paid to do. I don’t blame them; it’s how the game is played, especially after Citizens United, there’s no other way to do it. Or there wasn’t. Now there is, and that sort of corporate money is no longer needed, which means it’s time for policies to reflect that. Break up the big banks. Stop allowing mergers in all industries that screw workers and consumers while making private equity rich. The original Progressive Era started with the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and led to income taxes and eventually the New Deal. Let’s replay that in the 21st Century. Trump stole left-populist economic policies from the Democrats. Let’s take them back.
Fourth: attack high drug prices, and go after the drug company executives who pushed opioids onto patients by the millions. Democrats missed an opportunity to punish financial criminals; let’s not miss the opportunity to punish addiction criminals. Ohio has already started this process, charging several executives at drug companies with crimes for falsifying data and misleading doctors and patients. A Democratic party that takes this issue seriously, that works to lower drug prices for everyone to cushion the pain of healthcare, and who go aggressively against pharmaceutical firms is a Democratic party that shows it has fight in it and is willing to make enemies to do good. That can’t happen unless the party is less beholden to lobbyists and money from industry, so that’s a prerequisite.
Fifth: Fight on the issues. An Italian reporter, citing a decade of experience with Silvio Berlusconi, the closest the West has seen to Trump since Mussolini, noted that the only politician to ever beat Berlusconi in an election was former prime minister Matteo Renzi, who did so by focusing solely on policy and ignoring the circus act that defined Berlusconi. That’s what we need to do in this country. Pointing out that Trump is an awful human is not going to win votes: everyone has taken a side on that issue, and it’s not remotely rational anymore. It’s tribal. So let’s go after his policies. Let’s show them for what they are. Let’s treat him as the president — not giving up on Russia but realizing it’s not the only issue in town — and let’s fight on the issues. Let’s not back down from calling TrumpCare savage and cruel; let’s not ignore the horror that is the tax reform coming soon. Let’s fight for racial justice and against criminal policing. Let’s argue that immigration is a positive good and that refugees are people. And most of all, let’s stop taking the high road: to invert Clausewitz, politics is war by other means, and until Democrats realize that, we won’t ever win again.
For many institutional reasons, Democrats have resisted creating the kind of manifesto that Labour created in Britain. But it’s time. It has to happen, or we are all going to wake up on Wednesday, November 7, 2018 with the same feeling we have tonight. Real change starts now.
