The
Beltway crowd has discovered populism. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s
surging popularity from her aggressive defense of Social Security and
demand for Wall Street accountability has triggered talk of a populist
challenge to Hillary Clinton in 2016. Bill De Blasio indicted New York’s
gilded age inequality in his stunning victory in the New York Mayoral
race. This month, President Obama returned to his campaign themes,
delivering a speech
calling inequality “the defining challenge of our time.”
Republicans,
preoccupied with their Tea Party zealots, mostly have avoided joining
the debate, but the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party raised the
alarm. In an incoherent
article appropriately placed in the
Wall Street Journal,
the New Democrats at the Third Way scorned Warren for defending Social
Security and Medicare and peddling a “dead end” “we can have it all
fantasy.” They beat a hasty retreat when they were
slapped down
by Neera Tanden, head of the Obama New Dem Center for American
Progress, who then labored to paint Bill Clinton – Bill Clinton – as a
populist. Gaseous Bill Keller of the
New York Times weighed in for what he called the “center-left” against the “left-left” of Warren
et al with arguments immediately
dismembered by economist Dean Baker.
These are but the
opening skirmishes of what is likely to be a fierce battle inside and
outside the Democratic Party. Populism, by definition, doesn’t trickle
down from the top. It spreads as a bottom up movement that chooses and
elevates its own leaders. It doesn’t spread because Elizabeth Warren is
espousing politically toxic and unpopular ideas, as the Third Wayers
charged. Rather Warren is threatening because she champions attitudes
and ideas that enjoy widespread popularity outside the beltway, but are
slighted inside of it.
Populist movements
grow out of popular discontent. For over thirty years, inequality has
been growing. Profits and productivity and CEO salaries have risen, but
workers haven’t shared in the growth. But hard times, as Lawrence
Goodwyn, the great historian of the Populist Movement
notes,
do not generate democratic movements. Times have been “hard” for most
people for a long time. When families lose ground, people tend to
believe that they are at fault, that their luck has been bad, that they
made the wrong choices. They work harder; they take on debt; they get
by. Resignation and deference are normal.
Movements start only when
reality – and organizers – begin to open people’s eyes.
The economy hasn’t
worked for working people for a long time. Wall Street’s excesses then
led to the Great Recession. Yet the banks were bailed out; banker
bonuses were paid, while homeowners were abandoned. The wealthy
recovered, while most Americans struggle to stay afloat. Occupy Wall
Street helped crystallize people’s sense about the 1%. They rig the
rules, as Elizabeth Warren put it, to benefit themselves. Running for
re-election in a lousy economy, the president was wise enough to embrace
populist themes. And Mitt Romney, with his money summering in Cayman
Island tax havens, proved the perfect foil.
This emerging awareness seems spreading among millennials, who, as Peter Beinert
detailed,
are entering the worst jobs market since the Great Depression. It also
finds fertile grounds among people of color and single women, hardest
hit in the recession and having a hard time recovering from it. That is
the threat: Obama’s ascendant “rising American majority” is looking for
change and open to populist arguments.
Sen. Elizabeth
Warren, actively involved with the on-line activists who helped propel
her candidacy (and raise her tons of dough in small contributions) gets
this. So does Sen. Sherrod Brown who won election in Ohio with a
populist indictment of our trade policies, and Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse,
Tammy Baldwin, Jeff Merkley and, of course, Bernie Sanders. They are in
the lead because they understand not only the morality of the populist
argument, but its political appeal as well.
Keller suggests
that the populists are for redistribution while the “center-left” New
Dems focus on growth, but this is a burlesque. The populists are looking
for economic growth that works for working people. They opposed
austerity policies that gave reducing budget deficits priority over
putting people to work. They champion investments vital to our future –
in everything from rebuilding our decrepit infrastructure to capturing
the lead in the green industrial revolution to investing in education.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus budget showed how we could afford
those investments and put people to work, paying for it with progressive
tax reforms. And they offer answers at the scale of the challenges we
face, not the symbolic gestures favored by New Dems as political
message.
Similarly, the
populists are for predistribution, not just redistribution. With the top
1% pocketing fully 95% of the income growth of the society, populists
want workers to be able to capture a fair share of the profits and
productivity they help to produce. So they champion not just increasing
the minimum wage, but empowering workers at the workplace to organize
and bargain collectively. And they will push to curb perverse CEO
compensation schemes that give executives multi-million dollar personal
incentives to loot their own companies.
The new populists
understand that entrenched interests fix the game and feed off the
public trough. They want to get health care costs under control not by
cutting Medicare, but by taking on the drug and insurance companies and
hospital complexes that make our health care costs twice those of other
industrial countries. They want an end to subsidies for Big Oil. They
would end the tax breaks enjoyed by multinationals that ship jobs or
report profits abroad. They would insure that billionaires pay higher
taxes than their secretaries. And then use that money to pay for good
public education for all children, to make college affordable, to be
serious about advanced training for workers.
This debate isn’t
simply, as Neera Tanden implies, about championing a small tax hike on
the rich to pay for universal preschool and other good programs. We’re
about to have a brutal debate about trade policies when the president
seeks “fast track” trade authority to push through treaties being
negotiated in secret with multinationals at the table and workers locked
out. Populists want an end to the corporate defined trade policies that
have racked up record deficits and devastated American manufacturing.
They will challenge Wall Street’s “strong dollar” policy that benefits
investment abroad but makes things made in America less competitive.
And we’ve only
begun, as Elizabeth Warren illustrates, the debate about Wall Street.
Populists will demand the breakup of the big banks, and curbs on the
casino economy.
Will the populist
movement spread? That, of course, remains to be seen. Historically, this
requires not simply bad times, discontented people and articulate
leaders, but grassroots educators and organizing, teachers that
challenge the conventional wisdom and give people a chance to see the
world anew. In the original populist movement at the turn of the 19th
century, this involved literally tens of thousands of itinerant
lecturers, speaking in barnyards and town squares, educating gatherings
of farmers and workers, enlisting them in an independent organization
that provided real service. Today, it involves everything from Occupy’s
teach-ins to the space provided by the new media to the organizing
initiatives driven by unions and increasingly ideological grassroots
organizations.
If the populist
movement spreads, it won’t be a Beltway phenomenon. As Occupy
demonstrated, it will disrupt business as usual. It will feature fierce
battles over basic issues and corruption. Democrats will have to decide
how to respond. However disruptive, this is democracy’s promise: That
there is space for fiercely independent citizen movements to take on
very powerful interests, to challenge Gilded Age inequalities and
deep-pocket money politics, and make the economy work for working people
once more.
