The following article by Jack Metzgar, author of Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered, professor emeritus of Humanities at Roosevelt University in Chicago and former president of the Working-Class Studies Association, is cross-posted from Working-Class Perspectives:

In 2015, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg advised Hillary Clinton to run on a promise to “level the playing field” and “rewrite the rules of the economy.”  She didn’t take his advice. Instead, she told voters she would “build on the progress” of the Obama administration and “create ladders of opportunity.”

Professors like me, who get to speak in full paragraphs all the time, can easily dismiss campaign slogans as superficial and manipulative.  But they are organizing principles that can align basic vision with both policy proposals and organizing strategies.  These two slogans still reflect two possible organizing principles for the Democratic Party in 2019-20.  Biden wants to build on Obama’s progress, and Sanders and Warren aim to rewrite the rules of the economy, boldly addressing our runaway inequality of income and wealth.  Like Greenberg four years ago, I believe that candidates who articulate a broad left-populist approach will be more electable in 2020.   And as we face a future filled with peril, they are the only leaders who can govern in a way that could repair our toxic race and class dynamics.

Greenberg skewers the “build on the progress” trope by showing how many people didn’t see any progress during Obama’s eight years, both in the economic data and in what people told him in surveys and focus groups.  He thinks this slogan actually moved some people to vote for Trump, who in 2016 seemed to many to be the one offering some hope and change.  Greenberg predicts that Trump will hang himself on the same trope next year, if he isn’t impeached and removed from office before then.

But I think it’s the second part of Clinton’s 2016 message that reflects the real problem: there’s an important difference between aspiring to “ladders of opportunity” versus “leveling the playing field.”  The first emphasizes equality of opportunity, while the second is about equality of condition.  Equality of opportunity aims to give everybody an equal chance to climb a ladder to get one of the limited number of spots on a playing field that is severely titled by race, gender, and class.  Equality of condition is about getting everybody on a level playing field, not necessarily in equally desirable spots but with some substantial narrowing of the best and worst spots and with the worst spots being adequate for a decent and meaningful life.

To get anything close to equality of opportunity, we would have to vote to take away the huge opportunity advantages currently enjoyed by most of the professional middle class.  This is a large group of people and they vote a lot, so no politician will either promise to or do what’s necessary, no matter how much they talk about equality of opportunity in the abstract.

To get close to equality of condition, on the other hand, requires rewriting the rules of the economy by fairly taxing the rich and then greatly expanding social wages – i.e., reducing everybody’s monthly expenses by using tax revenue to subsidize health care, housing, child care, mass transportation, and education.  To finance the expansion of social wages to scale, it’s helpful that a relatively small group of people now have most of our money.  They vote with dollars as well as ballots, but there aren’t very many of them, and as both Sanders and Warren have shown, we can get an enormous amount of money from the outrageously rich while leaving them still very rich.

While equal opportunity is the primary solution and goal for historically marginalized and discriminated-against groups like African-Americans and women, it’s no solution at all for class inequality – and especially not for the top-heavy kind we now have in the U.S.  Having an equal chance to get one of the limited number of spots at the top would still leave most people struggling with poor to mediocre incomes and working conditions.  What’s more, there is no way to achieve equal opportunity unless everybody starts out with some level of equality of condition.

Let’s take jobs, for example.  The equal-opportunity solution is for individuals to get a good education (even if they have to go into $100,000 of debt to get it) so they can then get one of those good professional or managerial jobs in the “knowledge economy.”  Problem is there are not enough of those good jobs for this to work for many people.  Professional and managerial positions, not all of which would count as “good jobs,” represent about two-fifths of all jobs, and the incomes and conditions of the other three-fifths are mostly insufficient and declining in real terms.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest projection, that is not going to change in the future.  In fact, if anything, it’s going to get worse. Of the top 20 occupations estimated to have the largest job growth in the next ten years, the six lowest-paid jobs – five of them with median wages below the poverty level for a family of four – account for the majority of the new jobs.  Fourteen of the top 20 occupations make less than the national median wage of $47,000, and those 14 will account for more than three-fourths of job growth.  Nine of those occupations have medians of less than $30,000 and would thus benefit from a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour.  Those nine occupations account for nearly 60% of all the jobs produced by the top 20.  They include food preparation and serving; personal care aides; home health aides; waiters and waitresses; janitors and cleaners; restaurant cooks; laborers and material movers; nursing assistants; and landscaping workers.  These are the primary jobs of the future.  They do not require college educations.  They are not part of the knowledge economy, except that they are the people who feed, clean, beautify, and care for knowledge workers when we’re not working.

No matter how much equal opportunity we achieve, somebody has to do these jobs.  These people are doing work that needs to be done.  It would be great if we could equalize educational opportunity for their children, but they need higher incomes now, unions to represent them now, and social wages that can dramatically reduce their household expenses now.

Most of the rest of the workforce also needs those things, if not as urgently and dramatically as low-wage workers, and what’s more, they know it.  As a Vox headline reported earlier this year, “taxing the rich is very popular; it’s Republicans who have the radical position.”  And while the concept of social wages is not yet part of our public discourse, individual elements of it are also popular.  Majorities may not be for totally eliminating private health insurance in four years, as Sanders and Warren propose,  but very large majorities support various forms of expanded public health insurance like “Optional Medicare-for-all” and “Medicaid buy-in.” Likewise, “two-thirds of Americans favor raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.”  Even larger majorities support paid family leave, greatly expanded government spending on child care and early learning, and large increases in infrastructure spending, though a somewhat smaller majority support the Green New Deal.

On these and some related issues, public opinion is what the mainstream media calls “far left,” and the public is unified on these issues across race and class.  Even the white working class, the mainstay of the current Republican Party, basically agrees with the black working class and the Hispanic working class on these social-wage issues, as do majorities of college-educated folks of all races.  Democrats who run on these issues will beat Trump or any other Republican, and they will be positioned to govern us out of our current morass.  Democrats need to make a big promise and then organize like hell to achieve it.  Building on “progress” that most people haven’t seen for 30 or 40 years won’t do it. It’s time to level the playing field and rewrite the rules of the economy.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Could the Democrats Take North Carolina in 2020?

Their chances may be better than you think. From the latest Public Policy Polling North Carolina (note: not an outlier compared to other recent NC polls):

“46% of voters approve of the job Trump is doing to 51% who disapprove of him, in a state that he took by 4 points in 2016. 48% of voters support impeaching Trump, with an equal 48% opposed. At this point disapproval for Trump and support for impeaching Trump have become almost the same thing- only 7% of voters who disapprove of Trump are opposed to impeaching him.

We tested the 5 leading Democratic candidates in head to heads with Trump and he trails 3 of them, while it’s very close against the other two. Joe Biden has a 5 point advantage at 51-46, Elizabeth Warren has a 3 point advantage at 49-46, and Bernie Sanders is up 50-47. Trump and Kamala Harris tie at 47, and Trump has a slight advantage over Pete Buttigieg at 47-46. It’s notable that regardless of the Democrat he’s tested against, Trump always polls at 46-47% in North Carolina.”

Of course, it won’t be easy. Here’s my take on the challenges involved.

Hillary Clinton lost North Carolina by just under 4 points in 2016. This follows Obama’s narrow 2-point loss in 2012 and even narrower victory by one-third of a percentage point in 2008. All these performances were dramatically better for the Democrats compared to losing the state by 12 points in 2004 and 13 points in 2000.

Democrats made some progress in the state in 2018. They did relatively well in the House popular vote, losing it by under 2 points–though they did not succeed in flipping any GOP-held House seats. But they flipped a net of 16 state legislative seats and broke Republican supermajorities in both chambers. This is of considerable significance since North Carolina’s governor is currently a Democrat.

These trends give the Democrats hope they can take the state in 2020. The Trump campaign, on the other hand, is well prepared to defend North Carolina’s 15 electoral voters—essential for their coalition—even though Trump’s current net job approval rating in the state is in danger territory.

North Carolina’s large nonwhite population accounted for 28 percent of voters in 2016. As in Georgia, Blacks in North Carolina dominate the nonwhite vote: 22 percent of all voters, compared to 3 percent for Hispanics and just under 4 percent for Asians/other race. Blacks supported Clinton by 76 points, Hispanics by 15 points and Asians/other race by 2 points. White college graduates in North Carolina, 28 percent of voters, supported Clinto, but it was close, giving her a 4-point advantage, 49-45 percent. White non-college voters, 43 percent of the voting electorate, on the other hand, gave him a whopping advantage of 51 points, 74-23 percent.

We expect white non-college eligible voters in 2020 to decline over 2 points relative to 2016, while white college graduates should go up very slightly. Hispanics should increase a point, Black eligible voters by half a point and Asians/other race also by half a point. If 2016 voting patterns remain the same these underlying demographic changes in the eligible electorate would be enough to reduce the Democratic candidate’s projected 2020 deficit in the state by almost 2 points.

As with Georgia, given the relative closeness of Trump’s victory in 2016 plus the projected impact of demographic change, Trump probably needs to go beyond holding his 2016 levels of group support. Increasing his margin among white college voters by 10 points would yield a 5 point victory in 2020, all else equal, while increasing his already-huge lead among white non-college voters by the same amount would project to a 6 point margin.

For the Democratic candidate, the Black vote, as in Georgia, will have great importance. If Black turnout in 2020 matches 2012 levels (there was a large decline in 2016) that would actually project to a Democratic victory of just under a percentage point, all else equal. Matching Black support to 2012 levels would further boost the Democrats’ margin. A 10-point pro-Democratic margin shift among North Carolina’s liberalizing white college graduate population—going from +4 to +14—would project to a narrow victory of the same magnitude as the increased Black turnout scenario. Decreasing Trump’s very large white non-college margin by 10 points would project to a larger victory.

So those are the parameters of battle. Let the jousting begin!

Just how should Democrats make the case for impeachment? Marik Von Rennenkampff, a former State Department analyst and Obama appointee to the Defense Department  shares some thoughts in his link-rich article “Why aren’t Democrats weaponizing Fox News on impeachment?” at The Hill:

If historically-timid Democrats take their dedication to the rule of law and the Constitution seriously, they’ll realize that much of Trump’s political base is impervious to arguments – no matter how logical or factually sound – made outside of the truth-starved, conspiracy theory-peddlingright wing media bubble. Welcome to Trumpian America.

With that reality in mind, Democrats should relentlessly promote the astutely spirited analysis of Fox News’ chief judicial correspondent. Judge Napolitano has stated on multiple live television interviews that in pushing a foreign leader to perform a political “favor” for him, Trump engaged in “criminal and impeachable behavior.” In an era where powerful right wing echo chambers reign supreme, Napolitano’s assessment is a messaging gold mine for constitutionally-minded (yet painfully PR-illiterate) Democrats.

Yes that Fox News. Now take a deep breath and read on.

Indeed, given Fox News’ catnip-like effect on Trump’s red-meat base, one must ask why Democrats are not squeezing every ounce of messaging value out of Napolitano’s spot-on legal analysis. Democrats, apparently, continue to lack the go-for-the-jugular mentality that their right wing counterparts have successfully embraced for decades.

Judge Napolitano’s blistering take, especially in the context of the roiling internal conflict between Fox News’ reporting and commentary divisions, should be a Democratic talking point, repeated ad nauseam, in every single media appearance. The same goes for Fox News characterizing a series of text messages exchanged by U.S. diplomats as “devastating” to Trump. Equally noteworthy is a former Republican senator’s stunning suggestion that “at least 35” of his former GOPcolleagues would privately vote to impeach Trump.

The beauty part is that weak-kneed Republican Senators and House members are extremely worried about the votes of Trump’s MAGA-hats, most of whom either watch the hell out of Fox News or take their voting tips from friends and family members who do so. As Rennenkampff notes, “Relentless promotion of these explosive Fox News pieces knocks the GOP on its heels and forces Trump’s base into the challenging position of defending its own propaganda machine.”

It may be that few hard-core Trump supporters will be swayed by such a campaign. But confronting GOP politicians with Napolitano’s “blistering take” accompanied by the Fox logo should make them squirm. Further, Rennenkampff writes,

Democrats can start with the issue of U.S. security assistance to Ukraine. Why, after five years, did Trump suddenly and unilaterally halt critical American military aid to an ally at war? Trump’s own national security team – let alone Congress, which authorized the funding – was left utterly baffled and blindsided by the decision. The same goes for the Ukrainians.

Make that “an ally who fought alongside Americans against Isis.” Rennenkampff adds that, “While Fox News has reported that Trump engaged in an impeachable “quid pro quo,” his abrupt halt of U.S. assistance to Kyiv strikes at the heart of the crisis.” Also, there’s the corruption redolence: “Democrats should also investigate whether Trump pushed the Ukrainian government to drop criminal investigationsinto his campaign manager’s enormously corrupt dealings in exchange for then-newly approved lethal military aid..In much the same vein, the firing of a widely-respected American diplomat in order to enrich Trump’s cronies reeks of swampian corruption.”

Even if Trump’s base is unmoved by all of the above, holding the Republican politicians who rep them accountable to Fox News reports favoring impeachment could help Dems, if not with impeachment, then perhaps with 2020 election ads.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his Facebook page:

Political scientist Alexander Agadjanian conducted an interesting survey experiment recently, whose results he reported in the New York Times. Here’s the description:

“The experiment’s procedure was simple. A random half of participants read a news snippet illustrating the leftward shift, while the other half read about unrelated topics, such as the schedule of election dates. The news item was a few sentences that included policies discussed by the candidates: decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings; expanding undocumented immigrants’ access to government services; replacing private health insurance with a government-run system; and establishing free public college for all children from working-class families. The content was drawn directly from real news coverage.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his Facebook page:

Social Democratic Capitalism!

The excellent Lane Kenworthy has a new book coming out. Pre-order today!

“For nations, as for individuals, it’s good to be rich. Affluent countries are more likely to be democratic, more likely to have government programs that cushion life’s bumps and boost the capabilities and well-being of the less fortunate, and more likely to prioritize personal liberty. Their citizens tend to be more secure, better educated, healthier, freer, and happier.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

The Democrats have been making some significant gains in suburban America. But it’s important to remember that suburbia is a vast section of America and should not be thought of as just the suburban outgrowths of our largest and most dynamic cities. There is much, much more to suburbia than that. And once you get away from these more cosmopolitan suburbs, the voters (more white, less educated) and Democratic progress look quite different.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his Facebook page:

Anne Kim has a good article up on the Washington Monthly site that draws out perhaps the key political implication of the Muro-Whiton Brookings study on economic divergence between Democratic and Republican districts. After summarizing some of the Brookings findings (which I covered in a previous post) and related analyses and connecting them to regional divergence, she points out:

“These kinds of imbalances cry out for a policy agenda aimed at spreading economic opportunity more evenly across the country. But so far, the top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination have stuck to universalist policy ideas like Medicare for All, while discussions of inequality have centered on race or class, but not on geography.

To be sure, a few candidates, including Vice President Joe Biden, have a “rural agenda” in their platforms. But the ideas encapsulated in them include relatively narrow default tropes like expanding broadband and helping family farmers. The one nod toward the disparate regional impacts of economic change is on trade policy, but there again, the prescriptions are less about creating new jobs than about posturing on China or regurgitating standard talking points bashing trade agreements. None of the candidates have put forth signature policy priorities that would rejuvenate the moribund economies of the industrial Midwest, or help heartland economies generate the kind of prosperity that their coastal neighbors enjoy.

The absence of a credible Democratic agenda on regional prosperity is one reason Trump has had free rein to exploit and magnify the economic discontent in large parts of the country for his political gain. As wrong-headed and destructive as his policies have been, his supporters can rightly say that Trump has at least acknowledged the significance of their economic decline.

Democrats shouldn’t continue to leave the field to Trump to romp at will.”

She concludes, and very rightly I think:

“Superimpose a map of the electoral college in 2020 and two things immediately become clear. First, Democratic strongholds such as California, New York, and Illinois are nowhere near sufficient to deliver the 270 votes Democrats need to secure the White House. The University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato, for instance, counts 183 “safe” Democratic electoral votes so far.

Second, many of the swing states Democrats will need to win fall squarely within the “other America” in need of help. These states include the industrial upper Midwest—Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan—as well as Pennsylvania and Colorado. Four of these also happen to be states that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016.

Some liberals no doubt worry that nodding to the economic woes of blue-collar heartland America somehow validates the nationalism, MAGA-ism, and outright racism that Trump has unleashed. Nothing is further from the case. Reviving the heartland to help all Americans prosper is ultimately not about blue states versus red states, but about reviving the national project now in jeopardy.”

Is Warren Electable?, Take 2

Some interesting new data from Democracy Corps, which show her running about as well against Trump as Biden (49-42 vs. 49-41). I was particularly encouraged by the chart below, which shows her doing relatively well among white working class women. This is a trend to keep an eye on, given the probable centrality of these voters to the 2020 election result.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

The release of new data from a Brookings/Wall Street Journal collaboration provides a reason to revisit the utterly bizarre contention that economic trends have nothing to do with the rise of Trumpian politics. I don’t know how anyone can look at the charts below, drawn from the Brookings report, and continue to maintain that economic trends are largely irrelevant to the fissures in our politics and the cultural/racial concerns that, in a proximate sense, seem to drive them.

Authors Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton note in the Brookings report:

“[I]t’s clear that a series of genuine, penetrating [economic and demographic] shifts have been happening at warp speed through the last decade. These shifts are massively altering the two parties’ economic identities.

For one thing, the two parties have in just 10 years gone from near-parity on prosperity and income measures to stark, fast-moving divergence.

With their output surging as a result of the big-city tilt of the decade’s “winner-take-most” economy, Democratic districts have seen their median household income soar in a decade—from $54,000 in 2008 to $61,000 in 2018. By contrast, the income level in Republican districts began slightly higher in 2008, but then declined from $55,000 to $53,000.

Underlying these changes have been eye-popping shifts in economic performance. Democratic-voting districts have seen their GDP per seat grow by a third since 2008, from $35.7 billion to $48.5 billion a seat, whereas Republican districts saw their output slightly decline from $33.2 billion to $32.6 billion.”

Muro wrote in response to a query from Tom Edsall:that Democrats are winning in the “very powerful, dense, and prosperous economic areas that increasingly dominate the American economy….Democrats control the places that are most central to American economic power and prosperity.”

And we expect this divergence not to have political effects? That doesn’t seem plausible. As Edsall notes:

“A growing body of work demonstrates that scarcity, economic stagnation and relative decline are powerful factors driving intensified conservatism on issues of race, culture and immigration.”

Edsall also provides some interesting comments from political scientist Ronald Inglehart, whose work is sometimes invoked to defend the thesis that economic change has nothing to do with the current culture clash.

Inglehart made the case that a “combination of economic insecurity and cultural insecurity has contributed to the Trump vote.”…Most critical, in Inglehart’s view, is that treating economic and social issues separately creates a false dichotomy:

“The interaction between insecurity caused by rapid cultural change and economic insecurity drives the xenophobic reaction that brought Trump to power and is fueling similar reactions in other high-income countries. And the rise of the knowledge society is driving this polarization even farther.”

Here Inglehart appears to be departing from the common trope of many of his fellow political scientists whose approach has been simply to emphasize anti-immigrant sentiment and different forms of cultural/racial resentment, since they have tended to be the strongest predictors of Trump support in various quantitative studies. I applaud Inglehart’s view since, after all, how much does the standard political science approach really tell us? After all, it should not be a huge surprise that voting for an anti-immigrant, racially resentful candidate is predicted by, well, being anti-immigrant and racially resentful. But why now and why so much support for a candidate with those views? This is the really interesting and important question.

And frankly I don’t think the answer, in a broad sense is that hard to find. A toxic interaction between economic change and cultural reaction is entirely consistent with the historical record on the rise of right populisms. As political scientists Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick and Christopher Trebesch have shown in their paper , “Going to Extremes: Politics after Financial Crisis, 1870-2014”, covering 140 years, 800 general elections and 20 countries, far right populist parties driven heavily by xenophobia towards immigrants and minorities typically experience a surge in support in the aftermaths of large and lingering crises. And, as economist Claudia Goldin noted in her study of immigration policy debates in the US in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, “Almost all serious calls for the literacy test [to stem the flow immigrants] were preceded by economic downturns. … and few economic downturns of the era were not accompanied by a call for [immigration] restriction in the halls of Congress.”

So whey are we so surprised that Trumpism is happening now? We shouldn’t be. The answer is right in front of our noses. We also shouldn’t be surprised if Trumpian-style populism here and in other countries continues to be a huge problem if current economic divergences continue.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

The public is trying to tell the Democrats how to beat Trump! The latest messages are contained in the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. The poll asked about support for a series of proposals that have been advanced by various political actors. The graphic below helpfully compares the views of Democratic primary voter with those of all registered voters.

Here’s the deal: if Democratic primary voters support a given proposal but the general electorate does not, that’s probably a proposal to shy away from. Really, the public is trying to help the Democrats out here! Note particularly, the very high support among all voters for allowing universal access to Medicare and the poor ratings for banning fracking, eliminating Obamacare, Medicare for All that eliminates private insurance and, at the very bottom, providing government health care to undocumented immigrants.