Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Michael Tomasky, the main New York Review of Books (NYRB) political commentator, writes in “Who Can Unite the Democrats?” (December 5, 2019 print edition) that the unfulfilled party task so far is for a candidate to re-assemble the “Obama” coalition, defined this way by Ruy Teixeira, a well known Democratic analyst-pollster:
The Obama coalition “’...is broadly understood to include not just nonwhites, young voters, unmarried and highly educated women, professionals, urbanites...but also 40 percent or so of non-college whites in critical states’”… Here’s the full article: www.nybooks.com/...
Yes, the Democrats are a party haunted by the desertion of large numbers of white working class voters, men especially but not exclusively, deserters who have helped build the counter revolutionary conservative Republican Party since Goldwater. That’s a party built around: anti-statist Austrian economics; anti Keynesian — anti-New Dealism-Great Society programs; anti-1960’s morality; and anti-secularism.
This is a Democratic party haunted by desertion from its own former New Deal ideals, succumbing to the idea that the private sector is now so all consuming, all “achieving” that the era of big government is finally over (since “Bill’s” 1996 eulogy).
Yet it is the failures of that private sector that has driven the left revolt inside the Democratic Party and that lie behind the book reviewed in this “inflamed” edition of the NY Review of Books: the one with the image of a burning house on the cover. (See my post from Thursday, Dec. 5th, here: www.dailykos.com/...)
There is a world view among dissenting economists about the private sector, that one rarely hears at places like CNN: the lower growth rates since the golden decades of 1945-1975; the drop in labor share’s of earnings and wealth; the low rate of investment in plant and equipment, and basic scientific R&D; the heavy investment in re-arranging corporate assets via Mergers and Acquisitions, discarding millions of middle managers along the way to greater “efficiency”; the obsession with buying back already issued stock shares -”shareholder value ‘uber alles’”; the indifference as to where investment occurs, when it does, and who benefits; the willingness to see rural America fall behind as growth concentrates in selected cities, growth suburbs/counties in a dramatically stark manner; and the inability to grasp the scope of the damage capitalism inflicts on Nature and the Climate…(unfortunately Robert Skidelsky’s book, “Money and Government,” which triggered the cover image of the house on fire, is weakest on that aspect of our troubles, and surprisingly so for someone from Great Britain, whose ecological and economic left was out of the gate early with its version of a Green New Deal, right up alongside the Great Recession in 2008.)
If Skidelsky’s book doesn’t convince you of deep troubles in our economic understandings — his opening sentence reads “ ‘We are at a junction where the whole of macroeconomic policy is up for grabs’” — then two books by the British-American economist Mariana Mazzucato should: The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths (2013) and The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (2018). Here is a recent piece about her in the NY Times, noting that she is lending advice to Senator Warren’s campaign and to AOC’s increasingly detailed roll-out of the specifics for the Green New Deal Resolution: www.nytimes.com/…
Remember, please, at this point, if you think I am over-stressing economics at the expense of cultural matters (race, gender, immigration) Naomi Klein’s brutally sharp take on what happened on the day the political earth shook after Trumps election, here in her column of November 9, 2016, in the Guardian: www.theguardian.com/… : “Trump’s message was: ‘All is hell.’ Clinton answered: ‘All is well.’ But it’s not well – far from it.” And the title of her column? “It was the Democrats’ embrace of Neoliberalism which won it for Trump.”
Have things changed so much in the way Michael Tomasky looks at it now, three full years later, in “Who Can Unite the Democrats/A Dem for All Seasons?” (The NYRB likes to put one title on the cover and a different one inside for the same article.) Not really. His constant emphasis is on how conservative and cautious the general electorate is — outside of the Sanders and Warren supporters in the Party (which ignores some of the findings in Ross Douthat’s column, which we linked to in our first article about Obama intervening. If you missed it, here it is again: www.nytimes.com/... ). The only concession to that left that Tomasky makes, after emphasizing that this probably won’t resonate with the electorate at large , is this:
“For thirty -plus years, Democrats have been careful not to be too this or too that: too liberal, too aggressive, too angry at the ‘malefactors of great wealth’...Warren is utterly incautious about such matters...Bernie Sanders does that too, of course, but while Sanders usually seems to be lecturing — basically his only emotional gear — Warren comes off more as someone who is jousting and enjoying it.”
Unfortunately, this higher emotional gear and Tomasky’s brief and only reference to the impacts of the political economy generating those feelings — “… describing and denouncing this malignant form of capitalism we’ve been living with for forty years” - belongs to just one of the very diverse camps in the Democratic Party. By implication, it’s not an accurate description of the reality that the diverse broader party sees — and which the deserted white working class sees, outside the party. Despite the pain that economy inflicts on them, they have cast their lot with the most intensely capitalist party in the world, and when they look back over the shoulder at the Democrats they have left, they hear no challenge to that economy’s main tenets — until Sanders and Warren came along. And of course, that migrant white working class is fed mostly on the culture war themes that keep the nation and the Democrats off any serious critical economic analysis of the type Modern Monetary Theory offers, or which Skidelsky broad historical portrait gives us: capitalism over the centuries.
If one combines the Sanders and Warren supporters, the “Intersectionality” of the picture widens, but Tomasky says it’s inevitable that one camp will have to make a break with the other. So far, that hasn’t happened; they’ve been tactical allies, and it might make sense for each to keep it that way right up to the convention’s possible gridlock.
In Tomasky’s view, uniting the Democrats and by implication, winning the election, comes down to a magic act, one based on rare political skills and charisma, which both Bill Clinton and Obama possessed and could pull off — but which the two lefties and the rest of the huge field cannot duplicate. An act which Biden and Warren come closest too, but who aren’t there yet, unable “to reassure the other part.”
Well then, it’s not about the reality of Class and Climate “Inequality,” it’s about a magic act from the best actors to convince the left and center-right of the party that their outlook is shared by the candidate of the hour. Speaking as someone who recorded four affirmative votes for these previous masters, I can write this from the head — and heart: after realizing that Bill Clinton faked left in 1992, to govern instead as a moderate Republican would have many years earlier, I listened very closely to Barack Obama in 2008. And I voted for him with no great expectations but happy to vote for the first Black President in history, which is no small milestone given our nation’s leg-iron legacy on race. However I never heard what I wanted to hear about the political economy, which I was increasingly focused on as a writer in the Beltway area — and with my eyes on the near cataclysmic financial events in the fall of 2008. I turned down tickets to his Inauguration so someone much younger and more “enthralled” than I was had the chance, slim as it was, to gain access to some of the main events. (I supported Obama over Hillary Clinton in the primary in 2008.) And although I too felt elevated by the sweep of Obama’s restrained eloquence — I never allowed myself to believe that he was a Social Democrat in the FDR mold, ready to make a break with the Neoliberal prescriptions: the Rational Expectations Hypothesis, Real Business Cycle and Public Choice theories which underlie our troubles here and in Western Europe — and beyond.
Let me be clear. Bill Clinton was very skilled and very smart, the most passionate moderate I’ve ever seen. He spent some of that passion fiercely mocking the left, and yet he did not have the economic depth himself to resist his Wall Street leaning advisers, much less unleash his passion against them, or the fabled Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, at the full flood tide of Market Utopianism. He would later have regrets, though, about having opened the floodgates for speculation with his de-regulatory financial measures. Who is that waving to us from just offstage there? Why it’s Phil and Wendy Gramm.
President Obama, the constitutional law professor, was a first hand witness to the collapse of Market Utopianism in 2008-2009. Yet he, like Bill Clinton, did not have the economic confidence to challenge the assumptions which led to near calamity, and the private sector leaders of the system which had just failed. Which reminds me that at this time in our history of the political economy, that’s what we need, and I think Sanders and Warren each have a good part of this: the ability to take on the failing economic assumptions, the causes of the House of Economics being on fire.
Essentially, then, political commentator Tomasky is asking us to back a leader yet unknown who can perform another skillful high-wire act of “Unification” without either specifying just “What Age we are in” or what our major problems are — which clearly Sanders and Warren do much more explicitly — and well. So what will the Unity be based on? “Unusual political skill and charisma?” Perhaps that can succeed again. But what happens when the next Democratic leader faces even more dramatic Climate events, worse than Paradise Lost, and simultaneously, the end of the rather anemic but longest economic expansion in Western history, ten years and counting? What then? Most likely, a replay of what President Obama, with all his eloquence, dignity and moderation confronted in the form of the red- hot ideologically driven party of the Republican Right: stalemate, shutdowns and ideological confrontations. With higher stakes. A bleak encore of the stalemates which economic historian Robert Skidelsky covers from Europe in the 1930’s...the core issues of state and market and “paying for it” still there. He pays long overdue respect to Karl Polanyi: I’m waiting to fall out of my chair if I ever hear that name from a contender in the Democratic party.
The deeper answer to Tomasky’s shallow and very ephemeral basis for unity is to seek those genuine universal values, and policies, that can transcend the different understandings that make up the very diverse movements inside the Democrat Party. To me, that means the Green New Deal, built upon the values, the rights, in FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. These eight rights all move towards greater equality, without promising “perfect” equality, which is impossible. FDR’s framing is not to aim for perfect equality, just a fairer start from some basics many still don’t have, and then, let the famous — or infamous- American competition begin anew. And the closing argument for these universals should include “Equal Standing Before the Law,” which speaks to race, gender, sexuality and immigration status, and a Standing for Nature equal to or greater than for economic “actors.” For our entire history, when protecting Nature clashed with protecting the American (economic) Dream, Nature lost. That’s how we got to where we are, and after just reading an account of a local Maryland County to better protect forests, Anne Arundel County, that’s where we still are, economics winning, hands down. Climate chaos or not.
(And I urge Elizabeth Warren to take a second, or would it be 1st look at FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. The Fourth right reads this way: “The Right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad...” That’s the gateway to a vigorous anti-trust policy, is it not, a bedrock of Warren’s world view.)
Rallying behind the Green New Deal and the Second Bill of Rights is the better bridge between the social and economic equality causes within the Democratic Party. I’m for Social Democratic economic rights and equal legal rights to go with American political rights. Hard to achieve, granted, but a sounder and more equitable basis for Unity than “political skills and charisma.” And isn’t there a rising star who embodies my preferences and Tomasky’s as well: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? And you know who she had endorsed for President at the memorable New York rally this fall.
That’s what we are fighting for, we on the party’s left, and I’m glad I came across one final article for you, which just arrived just a few days ago.
It’s well written, by someone quite different than Michael Tomasky, one Joseph O’Neill, who teaches literature at Bard College, not political science or political economy. And a new name for me, so that I am not beating anyone’s drum here. Ironically, Bard College is connected to the Levy Institute, home to one of the leading Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) advocates, L. Randall Wray, who has written, along with Yeva Nersisyan, in May of this year, the most detailed case yet for how we can pay for a Green New Deal, here at www.levyinstitute.org/… This analysis includes the full spectrum: clean energy, job guarantee, Medicare for All, Free Tuition, the package the Right claims will cost $93 trillion over ten years. That’s not the approach Wray takes. Maybe some changes are needed at the CBO.
O’Neill got the very top line, above the Masthead, in the December 19, 2019 issue of the New York Review of Books, and it carried the title of “Better, Angrier Dems.” That would be a notch below the weight the editors had given Graeber’s article in the previous issue. Inside, the title got shifted to “No More Nice Dems,” which is close enough. And to further whet my appetite, there is a color portrait of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, not a very good one, mind you, but not insultingly bad either.
And so I read on to the background and review of the two books, “All Politics is Local: Why Progressives Must Fight for the States (by Meaghan Winter) and “American Resistance: From the Women’s March to the Blue Wave” (by Dana R. Fisher).
What O’Neill does is to remind us of the organizational zeal that the Republican Right has got, it’s long term machine consisting of Conservative/Libertarian billionaire donors and accompanying local infrastructure that has led it to the control of 68 state Legislatures to the Dems 37 - even in the wake of 2018. It’s something the Dems haven’t been able to match for a long time. I’m going to quote from him at some length because I think a good part of his message in this article is right on target for Democratic moderates, whom he zeroes in on: know your enemy, with no apologies for calling them the enemy, political enemies not just to the Democrats, but deeper ones, to the Republic itself, to democracy itself. Here we go, first to the “machine”:
...it has produced a kind of Bolshevik dreamland in which a few billionaire hypercapitalists and libertarian extremists oversee a sizable cadre of professional ideologues and organizers who do the boring, technical, and persistent work of radicalizing, training, rewarding, and controlling conservative legislators, policy theorists, media figures, propagandists, administrators, evangelists, and judges. This reproduces a self-sustaining vanguard with real power, real expertise, and a ferocious dedication to victory that increasingly surpasses any allegiance to the ethical and civic norms associated with modern democracy. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, intellectually dishonest judicial rulings, and systematic disinformation are now essential Republican tactics. There’s a reason why the GOP, for all its substantive uselessness, is such a formidable political foe. It plays to win.
Editor’s Note: the emphasis is mine.
It looks like the Republican Party is a long, long way from the 1960’s and the “End of Ideology” in the West. But O’Neill, like Tomasky before him, doesn’t go into the origins of the ideological fires on the Right. What exactly generated the red hot coals which keep the machine heated, and running?
Those fires were stoked originally by hatred of the social democratic egalitarian state which the New Deal and Labor built in the US, Britain and most of Western Europe (where explicit Socialist and Social Democratic & Labor Parties played the leading roles) and which started coming apart in the 1970’s. On the left, those fires were stoked by a passion for egalitarian economics, and a state which would intervene into private markets on behalf of the middle and workings classes. Because the new Democratic Party built by Bill Clinton and his Democratic Leadership Council backed away from the interventionist New Deal state, and embraced Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and their donations, and Market Utopianism’s deluded economic ideas, it could find some, not easily, but some common ground with a Right-Bolshevik like Newt Gingrich: compromises which kept drifting to the right, though. The best part of O’Neill’s piece is to throw cold water on the Democratic moderates’ illusions about what this means: the Democrats became a “’movement’ of losers” ( a poor choice of words in an otherwise spot-on diagnosis) :...and I’m not sure why he chose to leave Bill Clinton out of this picture — I sure haven’t:
The likes of Joe Biden and Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer seem actually averse to defeating Republicans. Unlike their opponents, they don’t appear to think that the job of Team Blue is to take on the other side as forcefully as possible. On the contrary: to this day, they apparently believe that the very idea of a Team Blue is distasteful and that Democrats should, whenever possible, bolster the GOP’s standing as a good-faith party with goals and principles as valid as their own. Their core mission is to practice a ceremonial innocence about the unshakable virtue of American conservatism — and to do so even as the worst, full of passionate intensity, are cleaning their clocks...Republican politicians, some Democratic officials seem not to grasp, are not guys in a bar with opinions different from your own. They are people who have chosen to devote their lives to undermining the core interests of your supporters and their families and communities...
Editor’s Note: my emphasis.
Let’s not shy away from the implications of O’Neill’s call here for a different type of Democrat and Party. It’s emotionally quite a challenge to work within our system under what I what call 1850’s conditions...watching CNN last night (Thursday, Dec. 5th, the Don Lemon show, it featured three videos of angry players, in the impeachment hearing, on the campaign trail (Biden) and in a press conference (Speaker Pelosi.) In reality we are there: in the 1850’s 21st century equivalent and even a moderate like the former Democratic Mayor of New Orleans says it will only grow more intense. I live in a very Red State rural part of Maryland; I know this dilemma in many different forms. The standard civic pressure is towards throttling back open ideology and towards pragmatism, finding the lowest common denominator of agreement, which usually leaves the key major issues unresolved. Civility at all costs? At the cost of principles?
And so what are the remedies which are recommended to alter this great imbalance of passion and organizational machinery which the Right has marshaled to achieve their capture of so many State Houses and Legislatures — and control of the Senate in DC?
Here O’Neill descends a notch or more in his thinking. He has been mining the two books under review, by Meaghan Winter (All Politics is Local...) and Dana R. Fisher, (American Resistance...) for on- the-ground, battle tested successful methods, and adds another source, “We Are Indivisible: A Blueprint for Democracy After Trump” by Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin — and says “we know enough about how power is won and lost in America to outline a dominant Democratic strategy. And that is:
“It would entail three overlapping to-dos. First, prioritize the grassroots. Second dismantle and counter the GOP’s structural voting advantages. Third, in order to achieve the first two goals, change party politics in Washington.”
If those sound less than convincing, lacking in specifics, let me add that he does supply some details, such as his authors’ recommendations: adding four more blue Senate votes by conferring statehood on the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and conferring citizenship status and voting rights for the 11 million undocumented immigrants.
Let’s look at one of the core proposals, “prioritizing the grassroots” to counter the Right’s reliance on winning rural activism built around anti-abortion activists, gun clubs and conservative/evangelical churches. Please notice that these conservative activists come from the social side of the strange Conservative-Libertarian coalition, not its economic side, and that’s a strong clue to the imbalance in O’Neill’s thinking, the economic side not receiving much attention. And here is the refinement that comes from the fieldwork of Ms Winters: Mobilizing, the old concept, has only meant “encouraging people to show up to perform a short-term function like voting or protesting.” The deeper, more lasting idea behind “Organizing” means “getting people together, empowering them, giving them the responsibility and freedom to bring in more people, expand the agenda, take on more work.” And who will be the people to carry out this work? It means “incentivizing and empowering movement workers who have most at stake, notably women, African-Americans, and the young.”
Are these cohorts the left Democratic equivalents of the Right’s missionaries just listed? Can women, African-Americans and the young be motivated and sustained by their shared hatred of Trump — through years for the long haul rehabilitation of the Democratic Party? Beyond hatred of Trump, what is the shared ideology for them in rebuilding a fighting Democratic Party: I could list the Intersectional causes here as reforming the Mass Incarceration state, passing ERA and Gender Equality measures, pay for caring work, and forgiving tuition indebtedness for the young... yet haven’t these groups thrown in their lot with different national candidates in the Democratic Primary? I hear a strong feminist commitment to Warren over Sanders, just like there was for Hillary Clinton over him in 2016. Is there enough common ground here to move beyond the old Democratic Party’s voter based “Mobilizing” to the suggested deeper community ties of Organizing? Perhaps the best way to frame the difference is to remember the hundreds of thousands who turned out for the big Obama rallies in 2008, the million or more for the Inauguration...and compare that to what emerged in AOC’s district from a tighter ideological movement…she’s gifted politically, has charisma, to put it mildly, but she is not fence straddler, and given her district’s socio-economic make-up, she shouldn’t be.
I have no problem with accepting that good things can start at the local level and then spread, but I think that dynamic has worked better when it starts, even at the local level, with received or newly built common ideals, which the broad progressive movement, the left has not had for a very long time, if ever in the US. Even it its heyday in the 1930’s it was fractured, despite the temporary truce of the Popular Front, between hard core Communists, Norman Thomas Socialists, CIO organizers (some overlap in categories here, of course) and liberal reformers from many sources, including some from the 1912 TR Bull-Moose Party Breakaways, Republican Progressives, who flooded in to staff the New Deal programs and head the agencies, thinking especially of Frances Perkins at Labor, called FDR’s conscience and Harry Hopkins at the WPA, Harold Ickes at Interior. Much of the work done in the New Deal was initiated by proposals from around the country for local projects, with largely but not exclusive federal funding, with federal direction and vetting out of corruption and the inevitable bottlenecks, solved satisfactorily in agencies like the Civilian Conservation Corps with compromises with organized labor and local private economic competitors, black Americans and women losing out in the effort. (Note the conscious course corrections of the New Deal in the language of the Green New Resolution).
Editor’s Note:
May I add a word of caution here, a footnote, at least, to my own idealism of building around new shared “universals,” from the Green New Deal and FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, which inspired it? And that would be that in this “Age of Fracture,” which surely it is in the words of Bancroft Prize Winner Daniel T. Rogers. In his estimation of our age, as well of the one I’ve used - of Inequality for Citizens and Nature — it may be impossible to build an explicit alliance which accepts the ambitions of the Green New Deal as their ideological core.
I look at Black Lives Matter, MeToo, the Feminist Movement, Old Labor/AFL-CIO, the Dreamers, 11 million undocumented immigrants, the Greens, LGBTQ, the generational divides, and I look at the Democratic Primary field and I wonder: is it possible to build what FDR and the New Deal did informally, over a decade, by experiment and trial and error, to build it with the focus and ideals now held clearly before us, and gain a powerful Intersectionality, a Consensus across today’s great divides, divides even within the Democratic Progressive Movements — and Movements they surely are?
And I haven’t even named perhaps the most powerful of the Democratic “movements”: Corporate American, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Big Pharma...the Dems own “big donors” — they are there with access, inside access to all the key party nodes of power and decision. Are we going to be forced to settle for competing, multiple Demos’...and the Corporate “checkmate” one , under this strange umbrella called the Democratic Party? But then again: who has a stranger coalition than the Republican Right: made up of a good portion of Corporate America and the individuals in the 1%, small businesses, most farmers who are businessmen first, and then working class high school grads who have been on the defensive economically and culturally for decades now...joining in the strange “cross-class” alliance with the likes of Mitt Romney and George Bush and Donald Trump — and as allies of the fundamentalists, evangelicals, Catholic conservatives...all those sects and churches on the Right. We see the groundwork for a conservative culture being laid by the churches on the Right, especially in rural America. Wouldn’t a new CCC help build a solidarity to challenge them and their twisting of the New Testament so far — that it’s comfortable with the likes of Trump?
Succeed or not, the attempt must be made to build the Democratic Party on more than individual political gifts and charisma...that human element that never goes away but never can be predicted...the ideals and policies built from the new “founding documents” are what genuine democracy is all about...shaping our country, not waiting for the private sector to wave goodbye to us...and bury Nature alongside the human graves from Deaths of Despair. We must be better than that. We have been. We can be again. The rough outlines of our hopes have been placed on the table, in what I have called the most ambitious policy plans ever placed before the American people. And its Congress. That Resolution, those 14 pages, flawed to be sure, with many working now to flesh them out, still, is a rare event in the history of democracies. It flows from some of the oldest and best egalitarian springs in our history, and some of the new ones nurtured by FDR’s CCC, in our National Parks and Forests, a woman’s determination that we should never witness a “Silent Spring” — and a NOAA climate scientist’s courageous defiance of a President and a party in 1988 to tell the truth: the signal had arrived amidst the noise, announcing climate chaos was here.
O’Neill has some very interesting takes from his “in the field” authors concerning the failures of Progressive/Liberal Foundation donors, with them leaning towards national issues and causes, and unwilling to fund the long term institution building from the grassroots up that would sustain a national progressive movement, the work that the notorious Right leaning donors have successfully undertaken. The liberal funders’ reticence has been outflanked by the emergence of ActBlue, which has become a “grassroots fundraising monster,” feared and publicly noted by none other than Mitch McConnell himself. The numbers from 2018 are impressive: “...ActBlue took in over $1.6 billion from almost five million unique donors at an average of $39.50 per donation. This money — $400 million more, for midterms, than Hillary Clinton raised in a presidential election — went all over the country to 9,300 recipients running for office at every level of government. “
My deeper question is, however: what are the burning ideals which lead to ideas and then policies which build the more Universal out of this contemporary potential Intersectionality? Who has been the candidate in the party, among the so many running, who has done that, cultivated and advanced the ideals?
I could very well argue, and will, that the coalition behind AOC in her Queens-Bronx district in New York City, did exactly this, but that coalition was driven and focused by forces which O’Neill, conspicuously leaves out. Not the women, African-Americans and young, which were clearly there as well as Hispanics in AOC’s district, but the deeper values, ideal guidance offered by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Bernie Sander’s Our Revolution graduates, the Sunrise Movement, Justice Democrats, and the two thinks tanks advising these forces on the left: Data for Progress and New Consensus.
And there is no mention of the Green New Deal Resolution in O’Neill’s review essay, and perhaps the most powerful force behind it, the many-arrayed corps of the environmental moment, local, state and national, well ahead in numbers and urgency over the organizations on the economic side of the equation. That’s with the AFL-CIO leadership seemingly ready to duplicate its meanest, narrowest George Meany days from 1972, and despite the Green New Deal endorsements from the national SEIU, the Flight Attendants, CWA and the National Nurses United. These are the missing aspects of his otherwise very good analysis of the old Democratic Party moderates up against the Bolshevik level intensity of the Conservative-Libertarian Right.
O’Neill gives short shrift to the history of the Republican Right in the realm of their driving economic ideas: less government, lower taxes, free markets as summarized by George Lakoff. He instead mocks their falling behind the affluent blue states and regions, which are subsidizing the red regions in the flows of taxes in and benefits out, and O’Neill resurrects the old Centrist Democrat rallying cry — the Republicans have run up the national debt in all their administrations: Reagan, Bush II and now Trump (George H.W. Bush went for that infamous tax increase which became the rallying cry of the hard core Right, Grover Norquist’s pledge if you remember)….
From the left point of view, I agree that every Republican administration has been an economic disaster of one form or another, but that’s not the way a huge portion of the country and many professional economists see the same history: why is that? One thing O’Neill surely under-weights is the influence, the intellectual influence, especially in the economic realm, of Right leaning think tanks, which seem to me to far outnumber those on the left, even if one adds in those clearly in the Center, like the famous Brookings. I went here to a list of the top fifty think tanks in the nation, and as I looked at the list, I thought that O’Neill is really missing the impact of the institutions that help shape the intellectual agenda behind the parties: thebestschools.org/…
Of course, this helps O’Neill ignore the huge question before the nation: if we are going to fight economic inequality and stop climate chaos, it will cost money, a lot of it: how will we pay for the Green New Deal? That’s the same topic and question evaded by Graeber in part I of this essay, “Will Obama Intervene?” despite the fact he was reviewing a book that made money and its relation to government the centerpiece of more than 400 hundred years of our shared Western economic history.
I want to close with a quote from someone who has I think done perhaps the best job in grappling with the answer to “How Will We Pay for It, A Green New Deal?” And that’s L. Randall Wray, one of the leaders of the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) school, and who wrote the long essay spelling out how it might be done along with Yeva Nersisyan, an economics professor at Franklin and Marshall College. Here again is the link to their work: www.levyinstitute.org/… It’s Working Paper No. 931 of the Levy Institute at Bard College if you get lost along the way.
Here is Wray posing the challenge to all of us, comparing it to what we in the United States faced in the Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945.
The task ahead of us is bigger. The stakes are higher. The future of humanity lies in the balance. Half measures will not do. It might take all our available resources—and then some—to win this battle. The experts say we have most of the technology we need. We have unused resources to put to use. We can shift others from destructive uses to be engaged in constructive endeavors. We can mobilize the population for greater effort with the promise of greater equality and a shared and sustainable prosperity. We can make a good effort. We might win.
Best to you all in the coming, momentous year of 2020, which well may be the most tumultuous since 1968. I hope it has a happier Presidential ending than that one did.
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, MD