“America Ferrera: Thank You, Donald Trump!”, Lauren Moraski’s CBS News report on the actress’s perceptive open letter on Trump’s Mexican-bashing at HuffPo, should provide cause for concern among smarter GOP strategists. As Moraski quotes Ferrera:

“You’ve said some pretty offensive things about Latino immigrants recently, and I think they’re worth addressing. Because, you know, this is the United States of America, where I have a right to speak up even if I’m not a billionaire. Isn’t that awesome?” she wrote.
“Anyway, I heard what you said about the kind of people you think Latino immigrants are — people with problems, who bring drugs, crime and rape to America. While your comments are incredibly ignorant and racist, I don’t want to spend my time chastising you. I’ll leave that to your business partners like Univision and NBC, who have the power to scold you where it hurts. Instead, I’m writing to say thank you!”
“You see, what you just did with your straight talk was send more Latino voters to the polls than several registration rallies combined!” the former “Ugly Betty” star wrote in a blog post published Thursday, adding, “Remarks like yours will serve brilliantly to energize Latino voters and increase turnout on election day against you and any other candidate who runs on a platform of hateful rhetoric.”

Ferrera then provides an instructive lesson in political math for the clueless tycoon:

Do you know why that’s such a big deal, Donald? Because Latinos are the largest, youngest and fastest-growing constituency in the United States of America. That’s right! You are running for President in a country where the Latino population grew by over 49 percent from 2000-2012, while the rest of the country grew by 5.8 percent. What’s more, we are the future. The median age of the average Latino is 27 years old, compared to 42 years old for white Americans. In case you need a translation, that means there are a whole lot of Americans who are Latino and have the right to vote. And, we’re not going anywhere.

With his remarks stereotyping immigrants of Mexican origin as criminals, drug smugglers and rapists, the tone-deaf Trump crossed the line from silly gasbag to dangerous demagogue. Other Republican presidential candidates have hinted at similar stereotypes, albeit with less blustering stupidity. GOP leaders are apparently divided on how to respond, and the more they equivocate, the worse for them.
No matter. Ferrera is surely right that Trump’s comments could swell Latino voter registration, and that alone is very bad news for all Republicans. Once they enter the polls, the GOP’s 2016 prospects head further south.

From Amanda Marcotte’s “Ralph Nader’s Dishonest, Sexist Rant Against Hillary Clinton” at Talking Points Memo:

Nineties nostalgia is cute when it’s all about overalls and Nicki Minaj sampling “Baby Got Back,” but Ralph Nader is taking it too far, by trying to revive his all-too-successful late ’90s campaign to convince huge numbers of American liberals that there is no meaningful difference between Republicans and Democrats.
In a recent interview with Larry King for Ora.TV, Nader launched a rather scurrilous accusation of secret Republicanism at Hillary Clinton that recalled his similar efforts against Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the ’90s, only this time he added a sexist kicker to it. King asked Nader about recent accusations that Nader has lobbed at Clinton, namely that she evinces a “shocking militarism that is a result of trying to overcompensate for her gender by being more aggressive and macho,” and that she’s “reversing the tradition of women of peace.”

Since the Florida mess in 2000, Nader has pitched nonsense like a left-lbertarian alliance, which neither side wants, and he has gushed positively about Rep. Ron Paul’s isolationist credo, despite Paul’s racist newsletter and opposition to racial justice. Further, adds Marcotte:

Nader talks about politicians from both parties. He concedes that Jeb Bush is just like his brother and calls him a “corporatist and a militarist,” but he elides talking about specifics. For Democrats, however, his language gets aggressive and colorful. He outright accuses Obama of being worse than George W. Bush, Same story with Clinton: To watch this interview, you’d think that the country is much more likely to get into a war under Clinton than under Jeb Bush,
Nader is playing the same game on domestic policy, too. He tacitly admits that Clinton might be able to do things like raise the minimum wage or improve the social safety net, but immediately shifts gears back to trying to convince you that there’s no real difference between Republicans and Democrats on economic issues,
It’s clear that Nader is really gunning for a rerun of the 2000 election. He is still pushing the toxic narrative that the Democrat and the Republican are indistinguishable, with heavy insinuation that the Democrat may even be worse. Even if Nader doesn’t run–here’s hoping!–that narrative is a godsend for Republicans hoping to chip off votes from the Democrats. If liberals are discouraged from thinking that a vote for the Democrats matters, they’re not going to vote, which will help the Republican, likely Jeb Bush, coast to victory.

Many believe that the fallout from Nader’s 2000 foray into presidential politics includes two wars, a depression, the extremist conquest of the GOP and the destruction of countless norms of democracy. Enough Nader already.

Amid the fading euphoria after the Supreme Court rulings favoring Obamacare and same-sex marriage, here is a sobering reminder from Michael Tomasky’s Daily Beast column, “Hey, Liberals: SCOTUS Ain’t Your Friend“:

It would be understandable if liberals were feeling kind of relaxed, kind of “Supreme Court, what’s so bad?” over the weekend. John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy delivered for our team on Obamacare, and then Kennedy came through again on same-sex marriage. If this is a conservative court, is getting a liberal one–which will be one of the trump-card arguments for voting for Hillary Clinton next fall–really a matter of such pressing urgency?
Well, yes. As we saw yesterday with the court’s death-penalty and EPA rulings, it’s still a long way from being a liberal court. But there’s more to it than that. People should remember that if a Republican is elected president next year and has the chance to replace Kennedy and/or Ruth Bader Ginsburg with another Samuel Alito, the Obamacare and same-sex marriage standings could easily be reversed. And don’t think there aren’t conservatives out there thinking about it, because there most certainly are, and they literally want to roll back the judicial clock to 1905.

Tomasky goes on to cite the evaporation of judicial restraint as the guiding principle of conservative jurisprudence. He notes the very real possibility that, if a Republicans wins the white house, there is a danger that they will push forward Supreme Court nominees who are opposed to Medicare, Social Security and even child labor laws. Tomasky concludes with the nightmare scenario that electing a Republican president could mean that “we could end up with two or three more Alitos on the bench.”
On the spectrum of issues including campaign finance reform, voting rights, economic justice and worker rights, the Supreme Court’s majority is already quite reactionary, despite the Obamacare and gay marriage rulings. If a Republican wins the white house next year, the high court could get even worse. Progressive unity behind the Democratic presidential nominee in the fall of 2016 is an imperative, not only for the survival of the Democratic Party, but perhaps also for American democracy.

The following article by George Lakoff, author of “Don’t Think of an Elephant,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Beginning with my book Moral Politics in 1996 (Ch. 12), I have been arguing that environmental issues are moral issues. There I reviewed and critiqued conservative metaphors of nature as a resource, as property, as an adversary to be conquered.
Instead I argued that we needed to conceptualize nature as the giver of all life, as sustainer and provider, as having inherent value, imposing responsibility, and deserving gratitude, love, adoration, and commitment.
I suggested alternative metaphors of nature as mother, as a divine being, as a living organism, as a home, as a victim to be cared for, and a whole with us as parts inseparable from nature and from each other.
This week, Pope Francis in his Encyclical used all of these and then went much further. First, he got all the science right — no small task. I have been writing for some time about role of systemic causation in global warming and the environment. The Pope not only got the ecological system effects right, but he went much, much further linking the environmental effects to effects on those most oppressed on earth by poverty, weather disasters, disease, ocean rise, lack of drinking water, the degradation of agriculture, and the of the essential aesthetic and spiritual contact with unspoiled nature. And more, he spoke of our moral responsibility toward animals.
He spoke in metaphors that might sound strange coming in a scientific or political speech, but somehow seem entirely natural for the Pope.
The title of the encyclical is “On Care for our Common Home.” This simple phrase establishes the most important frame right from the start. Using the metaphor of the “Earth as Home”, he triggers a frame in which all the people of the world are a family, living in a common home.
This frame carries with it many assumptions: As one family, we should care for each other and take responsibility for each other. A home is something we all depend on, physically and emotionally. A home is something inherently worth maintaining and protecting.
164. “…there has been a growing conviction that our planet is a homeland and that humanity is one people living in a common home.”
61. “…our common home is falling into seri­ous disrepair.”
13. “Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home.”
Pope Francis explicitly states what most progressives implicitly believe but rarely say out loud: “The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all.” The “Common Good” frame is about interdependence, shared responsibility and shared benefit.
156. Human ecology is inseparable from the notion of the common good, a central and uni­fying principle of social ethics.
157. Society as a whole, and the state in particular, are obliged to defend and promote the common good.
Critics of Pope Francis have attacked him as having a naïve understanding of the economy, of being anti-technology, or of denying the so-called productive role of self-interest. But he is doing much more, suggesting that business and technology can, and ought to, have moral ends, especially in the face of the looming worldwide disaster of global warming. He is further pointing out, correctly, that the global warming disaster and hugely disastrous other effects were created by the business-technology axis seeking profit above all, without being structured to serve the common good.
129. Business is a noble vocation, directed to producing wealth and improving our world. It can be a fruitful source of prosperity for the areas in which it operates, especially if it sees the creation of jobs as an essential part of its service to the common good.
54. The alliance between the economy and technology ends up sidelining anything unrelated to its immediate interests.

Read more…

In her NYT column Linda Greenhouse nicely summarizes the 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court decision saving Obamacare from the shameless partisan hackwork of Scalia, Thomas and Alito. Referring to Chief Justice Roberts eloquent shredding of Justice Scalia’s tortured argument for the destruction of the Affordable Care Act, Greenhouse explained it well:

The chief justice’s masterful opinion showed that line of argument for the simplistic and agenda-driven construct that it was. Parsing the 1,000-plus-page statute in a succinct 21-page opinion, he deftly wove in quotations from recent Supreme Court opinions.
…And so a case that once looked easy, almost cost-free, became a trap. Justice Scalia derided the majority opinion as a “defense of the indefensible.” But what would be truly indefensible, I believe the chief justice and Justice Kennedy came to understand, was the Supreme Court itself, if it bought a cynically manufactured and meritless argument and thus came to be perceived as a partisan tool.
This whole exercise was unnecessary, the outcome too close for comfort. But there is cause for celebration in a disaster narrowly averted — for the country and the court, which is to say, for us all.

In his column, Paul Krugman echoes Greenhouse’s relief:

…The big distractions — the teething problems of the website, the objectively ludicrous but nonetheless menacing attempts at legal sabotage — are behind us, and we can focus on the reality of health reform. The Affordable Care Act is now in its second year of full operation; how’s it doing?
The answer is, better than even many supporters realize.

Krugman chronicles the impressive achievements of the ACA and adds,

Put all these things together, and what you have is a portrait of policy triumph — a law that, despite everything its opponents have done to undermine it, is achieving its goals, costing less than expected, and making the lives of millions of Americans better and more secure.
what conservatives have always feared about health reform is the possibility that it might succeed, and in so doing remind voters that sometimes government action can improve ordinary Americans’ lives.
That’s why the right went all out to destroy the Clinton health plan in 1993, and tried to do the same to the Affordable Care Act. But Obamacare has survived, it’s here, and it’s working. The great conservative nightmare has come true. And it’s a beautiful thing.

In a saner Republican Party of previous years this would be the end of the kamikaze GOP ideologues’ quest to nuke Obamacare. Sweet reason would prevail and the Republicans would grumble their way to a workable compromise. Millions of Americans would not have to worry about losing their health security, such as it is.
But the fever swamps of the right are already roiling, and there will be more unmerited challenges. We can only hope that the high court will refuse to hear them.
We can hope, further, that this latest blow to the Obama-haters will prove instructive to political moderates and reasonable conservatives. Obamacare-bashing is now more clearly a waste of time.
The U.S. Supreme Court may actually have saved the Republican Parrty from a political disaster. Had Scalia, Thomas and Alito gotten their way, millions of Americans would today have reduced health security and millions more would likely be perceiving the GOP as an extremist party of reckless ideologues. In the end, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy may have saved the GOP from a rout in 2016.

At Campaign for America’s Future website Bill Scher evaluates some of the latest political self-i.d. data and concludes that “The Political Center Is Moving Left.” While other observers have noted leftward drift in public opinion, Scher’s perspective adds revealing context:

Eight years ago, when Campaign for America’s Future and Media Matters for America issued the report “Progressive Majority: Why a Conservative America Is a Myth,” George W. Bush was still president, Barack Obama was trailing by 15 points in the Democratic primary and gays could only legally marry in Massachusetts.
Back then, the report had to explain if the nation was more liberal than perceived by pundits and politicians, then why didn’t more Americans choose to label themselves “liberal.” The word was a “victim of a relentless conservative marketing campaign” and yet “many people who hold liberal issue positions call themselves moderates.”
This may have seemed like a stretch to some at the time. But now the ideological landscape is even clearer, as overt liberal pride is on the rise.
As I explain in Politico Magazine, there’s a big jump in Democrats that describe themselves as “socially liberal” and a notable bump in voters overall who embrace “liberal,” while “conservative” has taken a hit. The vast majority of Americans consider Obama a “liberal,” and elected him twice with solid margins.

NYT columnist/ Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman has noted “Growing ethnic diversity is producing what should be a more favorable electorate; growing tolerance is turning social issues, once a source of Republican strength, into a Democratic advantage instead. Reagan was elected by a nation in which half the public still disapproved of interracial marriage; Mrs. Clinton is running to lead a nation in which 60 percent support same-sex marriage.”
Scher acknowledges that midterm elections usually bring a conservative backlash going back to FDR. But he adds that “in the 2014 elections, Republican wins in blue states only came off when candidates leaned left on key issues.”
Scher cautions that “Bad surprises on Obama’s watch could change the current trajectory.” Yet, “The current one is promising, and Republicans need to watch it carefully. If the center of gravity moves from under their feet, 2016 is going to be their 1988 – the last gasp before their ideological dead weight has to be thrown overboard.”
For now the “blue wave” election Democrats long for is a distant hope. But that’s better than a fading dream. It’s only a matter of time before Democrats win a landslide — that’s part of the rhythm of American politics. The Republicans’ overwhelming advantages in terms of gerrymandering and midterm turnouts could be offset by their ideological rigidity and their inability to adapt to rapidly-changing American values — in a more progressive direction.

At New York magazine’s National Interest, Jonathan Chait cuts through the fog and challenges his readers to get real and face the central issue of the 2016 campaign, which is being largely ignored by our easily-distracted media. As Chait explains:

In her official presidential campaign announcement speech, Hillary Clinton endorsed a bevy of liberal policy initiatives: She would reform the tax code, increase public investment in research, help communities transitioning to cleaner energy sources, establish an infrastructure bank, make preschool and child care universally available, increase college affordability, expand leave time for illness and family needs, raise the minimum wage, ban discrimination against gay people, reform campaign finance, and create automatic voter registration.
Clinton’s campaign rollout has taken shape amidst a fervent struggle to define the ideological character of her platform. Is it timid and cautious, as some liberals charge? Radically progressive, as some of her critics claim? For the purposes of evaluating a prospective Clinton presidency, this is all beside the point, because the number of these proposals she will sign into law hovers around zero.

Barring a blue wave election, Dems are going to have a tough struggle winning back the senate, Chait observes, and have no real chance of taking back the house. What the Democratic nominee must do is defeat an extremely serious threat that is getting overlooked by the candidate-focused reportage:

The presidential election carries hugely important stakes, not just in policy realms where the president wields significant influence on her own, like foreign policy and judicial appointments, but also on domestic policy. It’s just that the stakes have nothing to do with Clinton’s proposals. What’s at stake is the Paul Ryan budget.
The influential Republican activist Grover Norquist explained this in 2012:
We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. … We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate. …Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.

Norquist, Rove and other top GOP strategists don’t much care which of their candidates gets to the white house, as long as he/she has a pulse and “enough working digits to handle a pen.” No matter which Republican gets elected president, Ryan’s budget will define the quality of life for millions of people under Republican rule. That’s what 2016 is about.
Further, adds Chait:

Jeb Bush has already endorsed the Ryan budget. Marco Rubio has voted for it and said, “by and large, it’s exactly the direction we should be headed.” The other candidates have positioned themselves to their right. Now, it is true that some prospective Republican presidents might insist on some change or another in the details of the Ryan plan. The Ryan plan itself has a lot of wiggle room due to the simple fact that it lacks detail. But the overall thrust is perfectly clear: deep cuts in marginal tax rates along with large reductions in means-tested spending, and a deregulation of the energy and financial industries. Its enactment would amount to the most dramatic rollback of government since the New Deal. Its enormous implications have simply been forgotten because the political world’s attention has moved on.

Don’t expect the media to bring much attention to this sobering reality. As Chait explains, “News coverage has oddly failed to frame this question as the center of the election. Journalists like personal drama, and they prefer to place the candidates and their individual ideas in the center of the portrait. The candidates themselves have every incentive to cooperate in this fiction.”
Chait concludes that “Clinton needs badly to inspire base voters” and “she can’t very well promise gridlock.” However “running mainly to veto Republican legislation is a powerful and consequential rationale. Whether the candidates will sign or veto the Ryan budget is the most important issue of the campaign.”
Candidates avoid talking much about budget issues with a not entirely unjustified concern about glazing over the eyes of voters. Yet Norquist’s nightmare scenario of minimalist government “drowning the baby in the bathtub,” with the Ryan budget as their opening salvo, is a very real threat — no matter which Republican gets elected. The Democratic nominee, whether Clinton, Sanders, Chafee, Biden or otherwise, who prevents this disaster from happening will have accomplished something extremely important for America’s future.

This post from Jack Metzgar is the ninth contribution to the Washington Monthly/The Democratic Strategist roundtable discussion of Stan Greenberg’s new article on government reform and the white working class from WaMo’s June/July/August issue.
Metzgar is a professor of humanities at Roosevelt University, and a participant in the Chicago Working-Class Studies consortium.
Stan Greenberg is right to focus on “white working-class and downscale voters” as key to a dominant Democratic majority and to advocate a bold progressive economic narrative as a way to attract a larger portion of these voters. But his sketch of such a program is too narrowly focused on the most popular reforms and fails to match the scale of the crisis facing American workers.
The programs Greenberg put “at the heart of” the “middle-class economic narrative” he tested with voters–“assistance with making college and child care affordable and ensuring equal pay for working women,” “tax credits for low-wage workers and the middle class and a promise to protect Medicare and Social Security”–are all both worthwhile and politically attractive. But they are “little helper” programs that promise some relief from economic stagnation and decline, but no fundamental change in direction in economic prospects. The economic narrative they suggest–a version of President Obama’s aim to “help people struggling to get into the middle class”–is thin. Neither “creating jobs” nor “raising wages” make it into the heart of Greenberg’s test program, probably because he thinks that job growth is now “robust.”
Neither job growth nor the economy is anything like robust. The long, painfully slow recovery we are still slogging through comes on the back of decades of erosion and decline in working-class wages, living standards and working conditions. A fundamental change in economic direction is needed. That’s what those big “wrong track” numbers should be telling Democrats. Rather than the current rate of job growth of about 200,000 net new jobs a month, we need at least double that and for a sustained period of time. Any credible program that promises that kind of job creation will get the attention of a wide array of voters, including the white working class. Combine that with a dedicated effort to raise wages, especially but not only at the low end, and Dems can make large inroads into changing their “white working-class problem.” Anything short of that, I fear, and they will also have difficulty turning out their base voters, large patches of whom are all out of whatever audacity of hope they once had.
Fortunately, a much bolder, more thoroughgoing economic vision and program has been articulated by of all people Larry Summers, who arguably speaks for the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party. Summers’ “long-run secular stagnation” thesis argues that the economy has no chance of becoming genuinely healthy without major boosts from government investment to create jobs and increase wages. In a recent report from a commission organized by the Center for American Progress, Summers advocates a large increase in the federal minimum wage, a large increase in infrastructure spending, and a more fair tax system that produces a large amount of new revenue. The key economic concept here is that our outsized inequality of income has so severely weakened worker spending power as to undermine demand and long-term economic growth. The key word for Democratic politicians, however, is “large.”
The value of Summers’ analysis is that anything that increases wages and creates well-paying jobs increases consumer demand, which is what our slow-growing economy needs above all. Likewise, anything that improves the economy’s public infrastructure and human capital improves productivity and U.S. economic competitiveness in the long run. This is a growth narrative that can demolish the Republicans’ empty tropes about “job killers” and “job creators.”
The 10-year infrastructure program that Summers advocates would create 1.1 million jobs a year, heavily tilted toward construction jobs that do not require bachelor’s degrees. That would cost the government about $100 billion a year in increased spending–four times the Obama infrastructure proposal recently rejected by Congressional Republicans. Summers also advocates a residential housing program that would make both rental and owned housing more affordable, while creating additional construction jobs and further stimulating the economy. Likewise, early childhood education and free community college would not only be good for children and young people and improve the economy’s human capital, it would create more jobs, aid in tightening labor markets, and thereby increase wages–all of which would further stimulate our stagnant economy by increasing worker spending power.
So let’s say that to do all these things would cost about $300 billion a year, creating some 2.4 million additional jobs a year–that is, tripling the current average of about 200,000 new jobs a month. How would we pay for such a large increase in government investment spending? It would actually be more stimulative and would create substantially more jobs if the government simply borrowed the money. But besides giving the GOP a “fiscal responsibility” whip to reinitiate the debt-and-deficit debate, borrowing the money would miss the opportunity to right some wrongs in the U.S. tax code.
Summers, like President Obama, attacks some of the most egregious corporate and individual giveaways, but even the ones that are not small are very complicated to explain– like eliminating the “step-up in basis” rule for inherited assets and reforming “earnings stripping” by corporations. These are great things to do “in committee” when you own both the executive and legislative branches. But they are a waste of the precious little explanatory time candidates have to talk taxes during an election campaign.
Where Dems can most clearly differentiate themselves from Republicans is in the economic rationale for using tax hikes on the highest-earning individuals in order to pay for a large government investment in creating jobs. But Dems need to be willing to substantively engage in “class warfare” and to “redistribute” large amounts of money, even if they might understandably want to avoid using those terms.
Both the individual and corporate tax codes are loaded with narrowly targeted and often relatively small special-interest giveaways, but more importantly, the basic structure of the code redistributes money from workers/consumers to investors. In my experience teaching working-class adults, most people do not know that and are incensed when they find out. Here are a few innocent questions I would love to see Democrats asking in 2016: Why do people who work for a living pay higher marginal tax rates than people who gain income from investing? Why do families pay sales tax on meals at McDonald’s, but investors don’t pay sales tax when they buy stocks and bonds? Why do state and local governments tax wealth when it is in the form of real estate, but nobody taxes wealth when it is in the form of financial assets like stocks and bonds?
There are semi-defensible answers to these questions, but they all involve a trickle-down presumption that investors are more important in driving the economy than workers and consumers–a presumption that once may have had a reasonable rationale, but that was long ago when workers had a much larger share of total income than they have now. Such a public discussion about what truly drives the economy and about the classism embedded in the way we tax ourselves would be good for the American soul. But in addition, correcting just the unearned income inequity would produce $160 billion in new revenue annually, and imposing a very small sales tax on the purchase of stocks and bonds would produce another $150 billion every year–more than enough to finance not only a 21st century infrastructure (and the millions of jobs it would take to build it), but early childhood education, free community college, and a lot of other highly popular programs Democrats are associated with. But equally, and possibly more, important is the broad economic principles Dems would have to articulate. Rather than “tax fairness” being one in a list of discrete programs, with “infrastructure investment” another discrete item, the two would be linked to a broader economic narrative of “inclusive prosperity” that would raise wages and living standards for almost everybody.
I can understand why Democratic strategists may be wise to focus on financing their popular spending programs by eliminating or reforming more narrow (and complicated) tax giveaways. They have to raise money for campaigns, after all, and for that they have to go where the money is–the investor class. But if Greenberg is right that “reform of government and the political process is the price of admission with [disenchanted] voters,” then it will be hard to avoid risking a large part of their Wall Street constituency if Dems are to gain a stronger presence among the white working class, let alone give working-class blacks and Latinos a reason to vote despite the obstacles Republicans are putting in their way. In any case, little helper programs won’t do it. Democrats need to think big about jobs and wages–and taxes too.

This post from John Russo is the eighth contribution to the Washington Monthly/The Democratic Strategist roundtable discussion of Stan Greenberg’s new article on government reform and the white working class from WaMo’s June/July/August issue.
Russo is a Visiting Research Fellow at Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute and former Co-director, Center for Working-Class Studies.
The traditionally-defined white working-class and “downscale” voters described by Stan Greenberg have a well-founded disbelief in the Democratic Party. This disbelief has even expanded to include the black working class, which has benefited little from the first African-American Presidency.
The disbelief is based on a history of betrayals of campaign promises and “Republican-lite” economic and social legislation that have undermined working-class support in both the white and black communities. Democrat reforms in the 1990s, such as the Violent Crime and Enforcement Act (VCEA, 1994), the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWOA, 1996), and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, 1994), resulted in policies that had an immediate and devastating impact on people of color, the white working class, and organized labor. Particularly in regions like the Rustbelt, white working-class support for Democrats has shifted increasingly to Republicans. Michael Lind puts this in an historical context, suggesting that Democrats are now largely “anti-New Deal.”
So we should not be surprised that Greenberg found that predominantly white working-class and downscale voters have been leaving the Democratic Party. But Greenberg also found that the disenchantment with Democrats has increased within other segments of the Party’s core constituency. People are not necessarily voting Republican. More likely, they are not voting at all. For example, in 2014, Ohio had second smallest voter turnout in recent history, with Republican voters over 50 overrepresented. In Democrat strongholds in Northeast Ohio, the turnout was below 40%, and in working-class Youngstown, only 12,000 people voted.
Low turnout is a problem, but I think the Democratic Party has a much bigger problem than Greenberg and other pollsters suggest: the party is losing the support of millennials, a core constituency that doesn’t fit easily into the standard pollster definition of working class. Because such definitions emphasize education, they leave out millennials, many of whom belong to the growing precariat [those whose economic existence is characterized by unpredictability and insecurity along with limited means]. Some have high school degrees, so polls identify them as working class, but many have bachelors’ and advanced degrees, so in polls they count as middle class–even though their earnings and working conditions would put them in the working or poverty class. As more people complete college, while polls continue to identify class by education, it can seem like the working class is shrinking. Some pundits have even argued that Democrats can forget the working class.
In many ways, downscale millennials have a different mistrust problem than do older working-class voters. Millennials probably don’t have either a clear memory of or a strong sense of resistance to the policy betrayals of the older working class. Rather, they have learned from their own experience, especially in the workplace, that government is likely to be of little help, regardless of the political party.
While Greenberg doesn’t provide a clear definition of what he means by “downscale voters,” a recent National Employment Law Report may offer some insight. Currently, 42% of the American workforce makes less than $15/hour. This includes retail and service workers, as well as those in manufacturing where, for example, 50% of autoworkers now make less than $15/hour. In the future, while more people will have college degrees, only one out of four jobs will require a college degree. Of the remaining 75% of the workforce, most will work in the lower wage and benefit sectors of the economy. Perhaps this is why a recent Gallup poll showed that fewer people see themselves as middle class and a growing number of Americans self identify as working and lower class. Guy Standing has identified these workers as part of the precariat, and his research shows that their numbers are growing.
These downscale precariat millennials may not share all of the working class’s same ideas about work and cultural values, they do share many economic security issues. But they deal with those issues differently. In Youngstown, researchers have found that millennials have internalized their insecurity, and they justify their precarious work situations as offering more freedom. Many willingly cobble together multiple contingent jobs, pursue avocations over vocations, lack confidence in institutions, and view their personal relationships as contingent and episodic, like their work relations. This leaves them without a sense of agency, and that in turn has led to a growing depoliticization and lack of hope. As the playwright David Mamet has suggested, freedom is what you believe in when you believe in nothing else. If they want to motivate millennials to vote, Democrats must provide something to believe in.
No doubt, as the formal economy increasingly looks like the informal economy, the precariat millennial constituency will only grow and become an increasingly important part of the electorate. That will require political pundits to rethink definitions of “working class” and the questions they use in polls to identify working-class voters. If Democrats recognized the precariat millennials as potential voters, they might develop political programs that could better engage them.
Unfortunately, Greenberg’s strategy is too, well, conservative. Rather than advocating for significant reforms, he and other Dems have focused on modest measures, such as incremental changes in the minimum wage and preserving social security and Medicare. While such policies help to address inequality and have some populist appeal, they won’t either make significant change in the economic reality or engage millennial voters. To give the precariat a reason for civic engagement, Democrats must offer a broader economic and social platform. This will require some serious rethinking of policy reform.
Perhaps a good place for Dems to begin is with Standing’s book, The Precariat Charter. He presents an explicit set of ambitious principles that include, among other ideas, redefining work as productive and reproductive activity, regulating flexible labor, decommodifying education, a universal basic wage, and reviving the commons and deliberative democracy. Using these principles, progressive policies could be crafted that better address issues of fairness, justice, changes in work, and the reestablishment of participatory democracy and citizenship that are central to regaining working-class and millennial support now and in the future. Such a program would also be morally, ethically, and politically responsible. It would give disaffected downscale voters something to believe in.
Unfortunately, some Democratic Party leaders would rather stick with a formula that appeals to an eroding and ill-defined middle class while continuing its conservative trajectory. No wonder the New York Times already reports that Republicans have tried to exploit the inconsistencies that are the basis of the disbelief among more liberal Democrats, the working class, and the growing precariat.

This post from Andrew Levison is the seventh contribution in the Washington Monthly/The Democratic Strategist roundtable discussion of Stan Greenberg’s new article on government reform and the white working class from WaMo’s June/July/August issue.
Levison is the author of The White Working Class Today: Who They Are, How They Think and How Progressives Can Regain Their Support.
The central argument that Stan presents in his Washington Monthly article is the idea that white working class people may express support for populist policies and programs on opinion surveys but this will simply not translate into political support for Democratic candidates so long as these voters perceive government as overwhelmingly corrupt and controlled by special interests.
As Stan says:

These voters, we shall see, are open to an expansive Democratic economic agenda…yet they are only ready to listen when they think Democrats understand their deeply held belief that politics has been corrupted and government has failed. Championing reform is the price of admission with these voters. These white working class and downscale voters are acutely conscious of the growing role of big money in politics and of a government that works for the 1 percent, not them.

Stan has been vocal in insisting on this point for over a decade and has developed a substantial body of survey evidence to support this conclusion. Here are some of the key surveys that his organization, Democracy Corps, has conducted in the last several years regarding attitudes toward government corruption and government reform:
2012 – In Congressional Battleground Voters Intensely Concerned about Money in Politics
2013 – Revolt Against Washington and Corrupted Politics
2014 – Voters Ready to Act against Big Money in Politics Lessons from the 2014 Midterm Election
As Stan notes, however, within this broad national trend there are actually two very distinct challenges:

The hurdles to reaching the white working class look so daunting because of the success of Republicans in building up huge margins with those voters in the South, plains and Rocky Mountain regions. Obama won only 25 percent of white non-college voters in the South and 33 percent in the Mountain West…Voter attitudes do indeed put most of these voters out of reach.
It is important to remember, however, that three-fourths of American voters live outside this GOP Conservative Heartland. In the rest of the country, the battle for the swing white working class and downscale voters is very much alive…On Election Day 2012, Obama won 40 percent of the white non-college voters outside the Republicans’ regional base. That number still poses a problem, but it would not take major gains with these voters to change the Democrats fortunes in these areas.

For many Democratic political strategists the immediate reaction to this basic reality has been to conclude that Dems should basically write off the difficult regions and concentrate their resources on areas where Democratic candidates are within striking distance of victory. There are, however, two substantial arguments against this approach:
First, this approach implies depriving grass roots Democratic activists and supporters in the “conservative heartland” regions of anything beyond the most minimal resources. While every national electoral strategy inevitably involves allocating scarce financial resources, this is a morally and socially distasteful option because it implies literally “giving up” on these regions to a substantial degree and accepting the idea that the GOP has them permanently under its control.
Second, this approach effectively insures the perpetuation of very weak state and local party organizations in these regions, a result that inherently guarantees a vicious cycle of continually low Democratic support on Election Day. This approach to allocating resources was deeply debated during and after the 2002 and 2004 elections when Howard Dean proposed the “50 State Strategy” as an alternative to the narrow targeting of only carefully selected states and precincts and the arguments that advocates of the 50 state strategy presented at that time remain as significant today as they were then.
Focusing all resources on only a subset of targeted states and precincts leaves little or no margin for error on Election Day and does nothing to systematically build a progressive political infrastructure that will eventually become vital in many areas where demographic change is gradually creating more competitive political environments for Democratic candidates.
It is important to note that the results of the 2010 and 2014 elections very substantially strengthened the case for continuing to invest more than token effort and resources in currently low support areas because they made it clear that Democrats must eventually attempt to regain control of many of the state legislatures and congressional districts that they have lost in recent years or face a permanent inability to enact their agenda, even if they can consistently win the White House.
But what political strategy can possibly make any significant difference in these heartland areas where the level of support for the Democratic Party is currently so dramatically low?
To analyze this question, Democratic strategists need to begin by focusing on one key fact: that even in these conservative heartland communities many “liberal” policies advocated by Democrats are significantly more popular than the Democratic Party itself.
As Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Rutgers University noted in a recent Washington Post op-ed:

Alaska elected a Republican senator and passed a recreational marijuana initiative, along with an increase in the minimum wage. North Dakota elected a Republican congressman and rejected a Personhood amendment. Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota elected a Republican senator and governor, and passed a minimum wage increase. This led Zachary Goldfarb to write in the Washington Post that: “Americans will vote for Republicans even though they disagree with them on everything…on the biggest issues facing Congress, [voters] still agree with Democrats.
That includes issues like raising the minimum wage, making the rich pay more in taxes, letting illegal immigrants stay in the United States, taking action to stem global warming, legalizing same sex marriage and fixing the Affordable Care Act rather than repealing it.”
My research suggests a key reason why this happened: our partisan identities motivate us far more powerfully than our views about issues. Although voters may insist in the importance of their values and ideologies, they actually care less about policy and more that their team wins.
This “team spirit” is increasingly powerful because our party identities line up with other powerful identities, such as religion and race. Over the last few decades, Republicans have generally grown increasingly white and churchgoing, while Democrats have become more non-white and secular. This sorting of identities makes us care even more about winning, and less about what our government actually gets done.
This helps explain why all of the five states noted above voted for liberal policies even though they have substantial proportions of white churchgoing Republicans. Indeed, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota have some of the highest percentages of white churchgoing Republicans of any state.

When social and partisan identities align, we begin to detach our votes for candidates from our policy interests. The most important thing is to stick with the team. It doesn’t matter if the team you voted for opposes the very policy you voted to enact.
This disjunction between the level of support for liberal or progressive policies on the one hand and for the Democratic Party on the other can be seen in every region of the country but the discrepancy is dramatically more apparent in the “conservative heartland” than in non-heartland areas.
It is easy to say that the heartland areas are “uniquely conservative” because of a volatile mix of historic white racial attitudes in the South and religious fundamentalism and anti-government conservatism throughout the heartland areas as a whole, and in one sense this is self-evidently true. But, considered more carefully, this really does not explain a great deal. In fact, in a certain respect the explanation is tautological–the three factors noted above do not “explain” the increased conservatism of the heartland regions so much as they define it.
To understand the distinct characteristics of these heartland regions that makes their pro-Democratic tilt so much lower not only than the levels of support that exist in other areas but also than the level of support for various liberal reforms, we must begin by distinguishing between two very distinct concepts: cultural traditionalism and conservatism.

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