In his first big speech since leaving the white House, former President “Joe Biden accuses Trump and Musk of taking ‘hatchet’ to social security.” So reports Lauren Gambino at The Guardian, and continues: “Joe Biden on Tuesday accused Donald Trump and his billionaire lieutenant, Elon Musk, of “taking a hatchet” to the social security administration as they moved at warp-speed to dismantle large swaths of the federal government…In his first public remarks since leaving office, the former president avoided any explicit mention of Trump – his predecessor and successor – but he was sharply critical of the new administration for threatening social security, which Biden called a “sacred promise” that more than 70 million Americans rely on each month…“In fewer than 100 days, this new administration has done so much damage and so much destruction,” Biden said, addressing the national conference of Advocates, Counselors and Representatives for the Disabled in Chicago. “It’s kind of breathtaking that it could happen that soon.”…On Tuesday, Democrats across the country held a day of action to “sound the alarm” over the Trump administration’s plans to downsize the social security administration, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said earlier on Tuesday. Biden referenced the sweeping cuts to the agency’s workforce and its services in his remarks…“In the 90 years since Franklin Roosevelt created the social security system, people have always gotten their social security checks,” Biden said. “They’ve gotten them during wartime, during recessions, during a pandemic. No matter what, they got them. But now for the first time ever, that might change. It’d be a calamity for millions of families.” Read on here.
Aging and somnolent Democratic members of congress alert: The younguns are coming for your seat. That’s the gist of “In unprecedented move, DNC official to spend big to take down fellow Democrats” by Elena Schneider at Politico, who writes: “David Hogg, a controversial Democratic National Committee vice chair, is pledging to upend Democratic primaries by funding candidates who will challenge “ineffective, asleep-at-the-wheel” Democrats…The move puts Hogg, the now 25-year-old who first gained national stature as an outspoken survivor of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, on a collision course with his own party and some Democratic House members…Leaders We Deserve, which Hogg co-founded in 2023, announced plans on Tuesday to spend $20 million in safe-blue Democratic primaries against sitting House members by supporting younger opponents. In an interview with POLITICO, Hogg said the group will not back primary challenges in battleground districts because “I want us to win the majority,” nor will it target members solely based on their age…“We have a culture of seniority politics that has created a litmus test of who deserves to be here,” Hogg said. “We need people, regardless of their age, that are here to fight.” Some may grumble about ‘ageism.’ But isn’t that what is going on right now, effectively locking out capable young people who want to become Democratic office-holders? In any case, few sentient Dems would doubt that their party could benefit by a makeover featuring a more youthful look, or at least a less ossified one. Hogg is doing something about it, and it looks like he has the smarts do it intelligently. We sure as hell could use more young voters.
“Working-class voters respond to arguments about protecting America from foreign “invaders” because being American is blue-collar people’s strongest boast; it’s the source of their status, so they like politicians who emphasize it,” Joan C. Williams, author of “White Working Class” and the forthcoming “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back,” writes in “Democrats need to speak to cultural concerns as well as economics” at The Los Angeles Times. She notes further, “A 2020 poll found that being American was an important part of the identity of 79% of Americans with (at most) high school degrees, but only 43% of predominantly college-educated progressive activists. The college-educated, in contrast, prefer to stress their top-of-the-heap membership in a globalized elite. Working-class voters also define their communities geographically, where they have networks based on neighborhood and kinship. By contrast, the “Brahmin Left” (to use Thomas Piketty’s term) see themselves as part of an international community characterized by “feeling rules” that mandate empathy for immigrants and racial minorities but less often for class-disadvantaged citizens of their own countries…People’s values reflect their lives, and their lives reflect their privilege — or lack of it. This is a message progressives, with their acuity about racial and gender privilege, should be able to hear. It could help them come to terms with an uncomfortable fact: Non-college voters of every racial group are less liberal than college grads of the same group…But moderates need to expand their cultural awareness too. When moderates like commentator Ruy Teixeira and the advocacy group Third Way argue that Democrats should throw identity politics under the bus and abandon their strong views on trans rights and climate change, they too are overlooking the cultural dimension of contemporary politics. Just as members of the Brahmin Left need to acknowledge that the logic of their lives differs from the logic of working-class lives, moderates need to acknowledge that progressives won’t just give in on issues like climate change. Those issues are deeply etched into progressives’ identities: The Brahmin Left is truly worried about the end of the world, even as non-elites are more concerned about the end of the month.”
Maeve Reston writes at msn.com that “Matt Bennett, executive vice president for public affairs at the centrist group Third Way, said the size of Sanders’s crowds has been impressive. But he argued they are driven largely by anger about the Trump administration’s policies rather than any sudden embrace of Sanders’s agenda of controversial policies like Medicare-for-all…“The problem with the far left is that they have scored their victories only against other Democrats. They have yet to flip a single House seat, not to mention the Senate,” Bennett said…Bennett said the only way to stop “the absolute catastrophe of Trumpism” is “to win majorities, and the only way to win majorities is with moderates in purple and red districts and states…But Faiz Shakir, a longtime Sanders adviser who ran for Democratic National Committee chair earlier this year, said Sanders is ascendant in this moment because he is channeling the wrath of regular people toward the billionaire class and “the hubris and lack of humanity” in people like Musk. Sanders remains popular at a time when the Democratic brand has hit historic lows because he’s known as “a class-based populist warrior against concentrations of wealth and power,” Shakir said…The Democratic brand, by contrast, Shakir said, is still “unsure of the class prism, far more focused on left versus right, social racial justice issues that are not on the main highway of the thing that millions and millions and millions of people are upset about.”