Blue Mass Group

This post is inspired by my social media feeds filled with attacks on an assortment of Democrats running for President, who are not “pure enough” in the eyes of progressive activists because of their lack of unquestioned support for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

Yet one of the biggest constituency of the progressive coalition, labor unions, are not big fans of either.

A simple search for “Union support for Medicare for All” is met with scores of articles of various unions either skeptical or down right opposed to the plan.

The same is true with labor unions who lack of enthusiasm for the Green New Deal…even if it is being billed as a big job creator, unions apparently are only looking at the jobs it will kill.

The point of this post is not to attack unions. No, it is to point of the lack of honest debate and the group think that is poisoning public discourse. Just as Trump fans live in a world where the Mueller report exonerates Trump, we progressives live in our own group think in which anyone that opposes “obvious truths” like M4A or the GND are so wrong that the only explanation is they have ulterior motives that are driven political expediency and not by sincere concerns.

So the forces advocating for Medicare for All will be dumbfounded when they try and pass the bill and find people who they thought were allies–unions–are opposed to the bill because these unions are part of the 180 million US families that have private health insurance. And why would a union who negotiated hard–sometimes going on strike–for those medical benefits, let politicians take away these for benefits?

Same is true for many unions who fear the GND will eliminate their coal jobs, or phase out the factories where they have jobs building SUVs. Sure the GND will create more jobs, but the 55 yr old auto worker in OH is smart enough to realize that they won’t be getting a new job in the solar industry that will be created elsewhere.

Nor is my post intended to be critical of M4A or the GND. Rather it is to suggest the supporters of these two measures are doing a terrible job of selling these ideas to the US electorate. Instead they simply insist on purity in the Primary and complete intolerance to people (and candidates) that suggest an 4 year transition to M4A is bad policy and that a public option maybe a safer course, or that they’d like to support zero-carbon emissions by 2030, but it is scientifically impossible and they are proposing goals that are based on facts and not “aspirational” falsehoods.

And when these kind of truths are articulated, the bearer of the bad news is labeled as a corporate sell-out who is not a true progressive.  This is all par for the times we live in. When one side says if you don’t want to build a wall, then your for open borders and the other says if you don’t support scientifically impossible goals, then you are a corporate sell out.

We have met the enemy and it is us.

Paul Krugman lays out a great case for why authentic populism is NOT Trumpism. Trumpism as its been practiced in reality, is Reagan era trickle down economics with a far more overtly racist appeal to the base instincts of downscale white voters. This is how Trump has kept together the Republican coalition. Lip service and judges for the religious right, tax cuts to mollify Wall Street, and twitter fights with the woke snowflakes to appease the secular identity rightists in his party and among swing voters.

It is starting to fail and his voters are starting to wake up to it.

First off, while he emulated Viktor Orban in a lot of ways, particularly when it comes to using constitutional mechanisms to accrue unconstitutional powers, he has failed at basic populist economics.

Orban’s success has depended in part on throwing his base at least a few bones. Hungary has instituted a public jobs program for rural areas; offered debt relief, free schoolbooks and lunches; and so on, paid for in part by a significant rise in taxes.

Trump has done none of this. His tax cuts were nakedly partisan giveaways to the 1% and swamp creatures, not to the Main Streets he promised to fight. Infrastructure week is a joke and Bannons Trump New Deal went nowhere. The fact that he scoffs at the popular jobs programs sponsored by the left such as the Green New Deal or a federal jobs guarantee shows he is unserious about middle class jobs.

Voters are starting to wake up:

here’s the thing: White working-class voters seem to have noticed that Trump isn’t working for them. A new Fox News poll finds that only 5 percent of whites without a college degree believe that Trump’s economic policies benefit “people like me,” compared with 45 percent who believe that the benefits go to “people with more money.”

Trump may believe that he can make up for his pro-plutocrat tax and health policies with tariffs, his one significant deviation from G.O.P. orthodoxy. But despite Trump’s insistence that foreigners will pay the tariffs, an overwhelming majority of noncollege whites believe that they will end up paying more for the things they buy.

Kurgman ends with a warning about Democratic complacency:

Whatever the reasons, the simple fact is that Trump isn’t a populist, unless we redefine populism as nothing but a synonym for racism. At least some in the white working class seem to have realized that he’s not on their side. And Democrats would be foolish not to make the most of this opening.

I second this, which is why I am still skeptical that an Obama-Biden restoration/return to normalcy campaign will work in this climate. Not when the same voters who defected from that ticket are again up for grabs and eager for an authentic populism that lifts all boats instead of Trump doubling down on trickle down. Whoever our nominee is, and I believe Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg thus far have been our best messengers on these issues, has to be an ally of every working class voter. This is how we win. Make Trump out to be a racist bully and the Dem nominee a nice guy, and we will lose. Make Trump out to be a rich bully who doesn’t care about ordinary Americans, as we did in the midterms, and we will win.

Back in November, after Election Day, I shared on BMG a list of seven Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives that I hoped would get primary challengers in this 2019-2020 election cycle due to not being reflective of the progressive/left-of-center natures of their respective districts. The top two names on that list, Dan Lipinski of Illinois and Henry Cuellar of Texas, happen to be two of the three most anti-choice Democratic members of the House. And, since last November, there have been substantial developments regarding primary challengers for those two incumbents. So I wanted to update you accordingly.

In 2017, only three House Democrats voted for the national 20-week abortion ban, and the exact same three Democrats were the only three Democrats to vote to make permanent a ban on the use of federal funds for abortion-related services. One of the three is Collin Peterson of Minnesota’s 7th Congressional district. MN-07 is actually a relative conservative and more-rightward-moving district, and Peterson only won re-election last year by 4 points, his narrowest margin. Further, Peterson turns 75 years old later this month. As such, he is likely to exit Congress either by defeat or retirement in the not-too-distant future. The other two virulently anti-choice Democrats to take these votes were, of course, Lipinski (IL-03) and Cuellar (TX-28). Read More…

The incomparable Elizabeth Bruenig methodically lays out the differences between Sanders and Warren. Revolution or regulation? Democratic socialism or democratic capitalism?

Warren’s many plans for that are activist liberalism at its best. Using an activist government to creatively solve problems by changing policy through legislation.

Warren believes today’s socioeconomic ills are the result of high concentrations of power and wealth that can be resolved with certain regulatory tools and interventions.

Bernie is vaguer on policy specifics but very clear that only a revolution that changes the power structure of the country can create real change.

But for Sanders, those solutions come up short. For a number of reasons — alienation and disengagement among the electorate, and the extraordinary power of big business and finance over government — he doesn’t believe that even the cleverest, most uniformly applied regulations will solve what he views as a political and economic crisis.

So who is right?