Thomas Frank & the heart of the Democratic Party.
Thomas Frank in his new book “Listen Liberal!” REALLY gets it, and in my opinion speaks the truth about how the 10% (of the distribution of income in America) professional establishment crowd has now captured the Democratic Party. I was active a bit in the CA Dem Party and saw this firsthand.
The same people every year run things, and though they do a very good job at winning elections here, there’s very little efforts spent on grassroots outreach. In fact, in my experience they barely tolerate the grassroots, because their main focus is fundraising and the bulk of the money comes from big business not massive small donations even though Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has now demonstrated a real grassroots campaign is financially viable!
There are Democratic Party “Clubs” in California but these clubs are small in number, mostly comprised of elderly retirees who remember how vitally important civic engagement is, and are used to endorse the Party picks giving them the “grass roots” stamp of approval.
So as a result we get big business friendly candidates who took, and continue to take, massive amounts of money from the DWP Department of Power & big oil, big banks, health insurance lobbies etc, and who approve expanded fracking and oil extraction on our beautiful CA coastline! They do this because they say they have to because “that’s how the game is played”. It may be how the game is played, but it’s a game we the people are all losing! Yes indeed! It’s how “the game” is played but it’s also how we lose our democracy, and why all of our lives are much harder and more stressful than they should be or need to be!
The Democratic Party used to be a party of the blue collar worker, the factory line worker, the bread/milk truck driver (like my dad), the secretaries, school teachers, construction workers and students. It was overwhelmingly financially supported by labor organizations because pre NAFTA and Chinese Trade normalization the policies of Democratic electeds protected collective bargaining and organizing rights and wages steadily rose every year!
I’m a child of the 70’s, (Yes Disco, The Six Million Dollar Man & Transistor Radios), and my father was a blue collar worker. I mentioned he drove a bread & milk truck for a company called Helms in Culver City for a while. He was a Korean War veteran, educated on the GI Bill (another “Socialist” program), and through his hard work started his own business and bought a house all on his blue collar income. My mother worked very hard full time raising us four kids taking us to schools, hospitals, YMCA camps, Sunday School, and running a busy house of wild redheaded freckled faced kids! Then in the 70’s sometime she and millions of other women entered the workforce.
I could see the stress increasing in our household even as a young boy I could feel it. I saw my father and mother sitting at the kitchen table doing their bookkeeping literally counting the pennies and trying to pay the bills as things got harder. They worked very very hard and put all four of us through college. Back then going to a California state college was all but free due to the California Educational Plan and my two eldest siblings went to CSUN and Sonoma State another went to San Diego State. All become professionals contributing many more times back to the state than they cost by way of a mostly free college education! Our state grew because of this approach and the middle class grew! That was right up until Ronald Reagan came in ended our state education plan and funding of state colleges.
Well after that and something called Proposition 13 that cut off state revenues dramatically negatively impacting public education, our schools and our standards of living started to decline. People started having to go into debt to get into college and parents had to pay that bill along with growing credit card bills. Credit cards used to be things used with department stores and rarely and of course there were no debit cards with the various “fees” for using our own money. People seemed to survive as I recall just fine using cash. But with the decline of participation in labor unions again thanks to Ronald Reagan breaking PATCO the air traffic controllers union and various other legal attacks on them, wages continue to stagnate and personal debt continued to increase.
Not long after all that around the end of the 70’s my folks got divorced. The stress of money and making ends meet was always a big factor in their arguments. As I recall a lot of couples experienced the same thing right about that time.
So I started out talking about the Democratic Party. After the decline of labor union money as a major source of funding it had to look somewhere else for money to run the ever more expensive campaigns and it turned to the banking sector. Banking at the time was more or less boring. People had passbooks and bankers knew the people they lent money to by name. So banks seemed in alignment with the core principals of the Democratic Party and a new partnership was struck.
After the deregulation of the banks, something that a handful of Congress members like Bernie Sanders warned against, the cracks in the wall of Wall Street & Main Street started to form and the pressure of runaway greed eventually as predicted broke through leaving millions of homeowners “under water”. People’s lives were ruined. People who thought they could retire suddenly found even though they were now old, maybe sick or in poor health could not retire because their 401ks were wiped out.
So we are supposed to have had a recovery we are told and we are shown statistics of months of positive job numbers which are far better than the disastrous post GW Bush months of negative job numbers! But the majority of the blue collar base of the Democratic Party and the masses of people in the nation overall have not felt this recovery. If you’re not making 70k to 300k a year you are very likely still working harder, longer and getting deeper in debt which means you’re experiencing more stress and illness.
But the people who run our political party on the Democratic side and I would assume the same on the Republican side are not the the blue collar workers who make up the base of our party. They are overwhelmingly the professional class some call the “elites”. Elite isn’t a bad thing. We need people with good educations and expertise to help run things after all! But if you look around yourself and all your friends are seeing their investment funds grow and driving a new Prius or Tesla it’s likely you’re not getting the true picture of what’s going on with most of the party rank and file.
I think a government is like the brain of the body politic. It requires a constant flow of oxygen carried by fresh blood for it to function well. That “fresh blood” is new people, citizens like you and I who enter public service with our own experiences of the day to day challenges of existing in a changing “global” economy. We need citizen politicians and political party leaders to constantly move into and just as importantly out of our government structures so we can stay in touch with the everyday struggles of blue collar middle class America. For regular people like us to run for office we will need to change our campaign finance laws to enact something referred to as public financing of elections and we will need to overturn Citizens United.
If we don’t do these things there will always be a disconnect between the brain of body politic and the body ie we the people. That lack of blood flow to the brain is essentially a metaphor for a stroke, and it’s one that is crippling our form of democratic Republic where the majority of people decide how to deal with our most pressing issues and what our priorities should be.
WE NEED A CIVIC REVIVAL IN AMERICA!
We need to stop looking up to political parties to pick our candidates for us and tell us who we should vote for or to a President to solve all our problems for us, “fight for us” or “make America great” again.
Create or join a local “meetup” group about your community and the important issues it faces from education to jobs to whatever impacts your families on a daily basis and organize to make things better. It could actually be fun! You could meet really nice people! You could help others and yourself!
Write a letter to the editor with your group each month or write one on your own each month. Oh and buy and read a newspaper or two! Relying on Cable TV “news” for a clear picture of what is important to most of us is not that productive a strategy.
Talk with your kids and family members about “politics”, which is to say how we use our voices together in society to stand up for ourselves and our neighbors, even to stand up for our Planet Earth. Some or most of us feel a strong sense of obligation to leave an inhabitable green Earth to our next generations. Call it “environmentalism” or “conservation” or just respecting life and nature, we have a great opportunity to make a difference!
Tell your elected Reps what you want from them and if possible do so with a group of local voters. This is our job, as citizens, to hold the people we hire as representatives to account for their promises and their responsibilities.
Today, only one candidate for the office of the Presidency is committed to push for not only overturning Citizens United but for enacting public campaign financing of elections. This is the only way we can keep moving new people into the political system, people who understand what it’s like to have to pay rent or see a child not have enough of what they need.
Only one presidential candidate is foregoing taking money from special interest secretive PACs and the big banks. As such this candidate doesn’t feel the pressure or influence of those super rich and powerful folks who strut around our state capitals and our Nation’s Capital. That candidate is Senator Bernie Sanders. That’s why I am doing everything I can to help elect him and anyone like him I find. I trust him to do what’s right not what the big donors want him to do.
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