After I looked at the results from the recent November 7th elections around the country, I wrote a piece called A Realignment That’s a Year Late. Of particular note and interest to me was the historic outcomes in the Philadelphia suburbs where the Democrats took control of local county row seats that they had never won and gained majorities in county government they had never held in the history of the country. It was a seismic event, and it could be explained primarily on a cultural rather than an economic level.
Republican dominance of the Philadelphia suburbs has been a given since we built the first suburbs. It has been based on several factors. The people came from the city where racial minorities and Catholic immigrants had come to dominate every aspect of government. The local Democratic machines were anything but good government organizations, as they were basically built on patronage and graft. Crime was obviously higher in the city, and schools weren’t exactly optimal learning environments. People fled the city when they were economically capable of leaving, and they wanted racial peace, safe neighborhoods, good schools, sound government that they controlled, and low taxes. Once out of the city, they also weren’t much interested in subsidizing the city, so their state politics developed in opposition to the power brokers in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, their televisions broadcast them a nightly litany of horrors from the city as a constant reminder of the reasons that they chosen not to live there anymore. A short way of summarizing this is that for a very long time it was pretty much unthinkable that the city and the suburbs would vote the same way, as they had developed in opposition to each other. Racism played a huge part in this, but so did just a basic competition for resources. For the suburbs, this was reflected in a strong aversion to taxes.
The Republican representatives from the Philly suburbs who are presently serving in Congress weren’t on the ballot in November which is probably the only reason that they’re still employed. They all voted for the Trump tax bill yesterday, which is probably a legacy of the party’s historic tax aversion. They basically did not know what else to do, since their whole ideology has been built around this issue from the start. But this particular tax bill is designed to hurt states like Pennsylvania that pay relatively high state and local taxes. The people it will hurt the most are property owners in the suburbs. The same suburbanites in New Jersey and New York will be negatively affected which is why most of the twelve Republican votes against the bill came from congresspeople from those two states. In the Philly burbs, however, the weight of history and habit was apparently too much, and these representatives will now have to not only weather the cultural storm that wiped out their county-level brethren in November, but they’ll have to explain why their tax cut is actually a tax bill for so many of their tax-averse constituents.
The Democrats will of course exploit this with everything they have, which will transform them into the party of the tax averse. And that will put them in a tense position, because they’re still the party of the city’s multiethnic underclasses. Does the party have a clear position on this tax bill? Is the problem with the bill that it increases income inequality or that it taxes suburbanites too much? Is the bill going to starve the government of revenue and lead to less investment in schools and infrastructure, and an inevitable slashing in the social safety net, including earned entitlements? Or is the problem that it didn’t go far enough in cutting rates?
Meanwhile, the Republicans will seek to make up for their losses in the suburbs by increasing their growing advantage with small town and rural whites, meaning that the worst kind of populism, based in racial and religious insecurities and bigotry, will continue to be the main component of their media messaging and appeal. At the same time, though, they’ll begin to change how they see themselves. Their makeup will change, too, as more people who come from working class backgrounds get elected as Republicans.
From this, it’s not too hard to picture why socialists are feeling so feisty. As I discussed yesterday, the dream of uniting the lower and working classes and the dispossessed in a multiracial coalition is quickly fading. The Democrats’ focus on cultural issues that help them in the suburbs but which kill them in small towns and rural areas is one major driver of the dissolving hope for a coming socialist revolution. The Republicans’ aggressive efforts to exploit and exacerbate these fault lines are going to get worse, not better.
This is why I emphasize so much that the Democrats cannot abandon their efforts to win support in small towns and rural areas. I don’t share the socialist ideology even if I share most of their goals, but I agree despite myself that the suburban strategy threatens to weaken the Democrats as a party of the poor and needy. I do not want fascism to fill the void, as it clearly is doing right now.
But my strategy isn’t based on pie-in-the-sky theories of racial harmony between white coal miners and Pakistani merchants. It’s based on tackling economic consolidation with a whole box of tools, including revived antitrust enforcement. The goal is to revitalize small town and rural America economically in a way that will also benefit the people of our cities. It’s not about taxing the wealthy. It’s about giving people a chance to compete again. It’s aimed at entrepreneurs as much as it as wage employees, and it’s about creating more regional balance in where our wealth is created and distributed more than it’s about going after the money people have already made.
So, it doesn’t sound like Bernie Sanders railing on about billionaires, but it shares a lot of the same political goals and ideas. The main difference is that doesn’t pit one Democratic faction against another, not does it accept that representing the underclass in one region necessitates selling out the underclass in our cities. It’s my hope that it’s also consistent with the points Sarah Jones raises about how pro-choice Democrats can make inroads in anti-choice districts and communities.
It’s a way around the path we’re on, which is not currently one that will enable the left to come close to reaching its potential in the upcoming elections. The path we’re on is one of increasing polarization and divisiveness, where we have far less power that we should have based on our numbers. And it’s one in which the left will increasingly look like the suburban Republican Party of the 20th Century, while a growing fascist reaction metastasizes on the right.
This has to be worth trying, considering the alternative.
Do you have any evidence that an antitrust message will resonate with the voters you are trying to reach? Some of them may want to start small businesses, but that’s a minority. Everyone shops and benefits from the prices at Walmart, Home Depot, etc. and from Amazon. If the small business interests were not enough to hold those behemoths at bay when they were intact and the status quo, I don’t see how they do it now that they barely exist. The constituency for this policy is one the policy would largely have to (re)create.
Amazon is the biggest antimonopoly argument, but also the greatest boon to the rural. It used to be that living in the country greatly curtailed the variety of goods to which you had access and often meant you had to pay more because merchants could not achieve urban economies of scale, Even the suburbs were pretty constrained next to the city. This is no longer the case.
I’m ideologically sympathetic to antimonopoly policies here, and you’re not selling me, so I’m skeptical that you’re going to sell farmer Joe.
Do you have any evidence that an antitrust message will resonate with the voters you are trying to reach? Some of them may want to start small businesses, but that’s a minority. Everyone shops and benefits from the prices at Walmart, Home Depot, etc. and from Amazon.
Do you like your local cable company? A certain Philly-based company is one of the most hated in the U.S., last time I checked. Do you go to concerts or sporting events? If so, I bet you hate Ticketmaster(aka Ticketbastard). Someone just posted on Twitter that one in three Alabama residents don’t have access to a grocery store. Why? Because rural areas are not profitable enough for the big boys.
If Dems can make stories out of this, pointing to specific people and how and why the lack of competition hurts them, then maybe something can be done about it. Otherwise, it’s kid of dry.
Certainly we can run against the cable monopolies, especially with the end of net neutrality. That’s a very specific issue, though, not a basis for a general campaign. I don’t think Ticketmaster is going to swing many votes, I haven’t looked into that one, but it is not clear to me why they are a monopoly. Seems there is space for a serious competitor to emerge, and, if one doesn’t, what should the government do to force one?
Ticketmaster became a monopoly by buying the competition. They maintain it via contracts restricting competition (the Microsoft strategy).
I get this question every time I write about this and it’s a misguided question. It’s nice if a message resonates, and from I’ve heard from politicians who have run with this message, it resonates far better than you obviously think.
But it’s not something I think is some magic message that will transform things overnight. It’s actually a critically important thing to actually accomplish if you don’t want to live in a fascist country increasingly paralyzed by racial strife and mass shootings and a decimated economic inner core.
It’s also something for a candidate to run on in a conservative district that is fresh, relevant, and not the same shit that is churned out by the Democratic leadership from the coasts. We want them to run on this, or to run on being just as pro-life and pro-gun and and anti-immigrant as their opponents? Do we want more Blue Dog deficit hawk model, or a new model based on brining business back to the parts of the country where it has evaporated in favor of disability checks and opioid prescriptions?
“bringing business back to the parts of the country where it has evaporated in favor of disability checks and opioid prescriptions?”
Well, that answers my question. And to think Marketing was my favorite class when I was getting my MBA. Didn;t take, I guess.
I’m not hearing a case that this is anywhere near as important on the merits as you think it is, particularly since what you are opposing it to in this post is a Sanders’ type platform – essentially hitting on the redistribution of wealth. I don’t see bringing back small scale retail as sufficient to revive rural economies – selling each other goods is not enough. Furthermore, while it will support a local business class and provide some more jobs, it also means goods will be more expensive for everyone, selection and convenience will also suffer. Further, killing big box is secondary unless you also kill Amazon or really the Internet generally as a retail outlet generally. Not clear it’s possible, definitely not clear it’s desirable, and definitely not a winning political program.
On the other hand, redistributing wealth downward will improve the lot of the poor significantly by definition, provided it is done in a way that does not wreck the economy completely. So, no, we don’t want out and out communism, but there is room and historical precedent for a whole lot of redistribution before we run into those problems. Teddy trust-busting did some good –
though the retail monopolies are more of a mixed bag than what he was fighting – but FDRs wealth redistribution did much more to improve the general welfare. And it implicitly involved express hostility to Wall St. (“They hate me, and I welcome their hatred”)
And the Republicans have set up the shot beautifully. They just passed a huge tax cut, and it has 25% approval. When has a tax cut ever had approval so low? Most people will see a modest decrease in their taxes, but they can see that the bulk of the money is going to the rich, and they don’t like it. They’re right not to like it, of course, but the fact that they don’t shows what kind of message they are ready to hear, and it is a better message on the merits too.
For the life of me, I don’t get your point.
that’s probably a good thing.
?????
Several things. I sent you a link to a Denver Post article describing how the small towns of Colorado’s rural Great Plains counties (close to half of the state) are becoming less white due to immigrants from Africa and Mexico who are willing to work in meat packing and other labor intensive occupations located in these rural areas. I think this is true for other Midwestern and Plains states like Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, eastern Montana and Kansas.
Secondly, what is your prescription for revitalizing small towns? No one else seems to have the answer. In my county tourism and building to house upper middle class retirees have reinvigorated the economy but drastically altered the community. It is generally more liberal than it used to be. However, many of these new jobs are low wage jobs without benefits, compared to the rail road and mining jobs that disappeared. Along with the influx of money has come skyrocketing house prices and many homes now are purchased only to be rented short term to tourists. So we may have shifted to being more liberal politically but along with it we have lower wages, most jobs without benefits and decreased availability of housing, especially affordable housing.
Your county sound quite similar to mine, except here (southern Indiana) the wealthy retires lean mostly R.
Many who come here from TX and OK are conservative, but some are fleeing it 🙂
I – sadly – have in-laws and other acquaintances who are rural right-wingers. Here’s what I think we’re missing:
They don’t use logic – no amount of reasoning is going to help – the best analogy is to dogs barking at cars. They follow strength and anger and will adopt any flimsy and patently false narrative to do so.
It’s the same problem of Bush 43 versus Gore & Kerry. They follow him because he’s more comfortable in his dimwitted macho skin. I don’t know how you get to people like that. They’ve been voting against their economic and cultural self-interest since Reagan and showing them that just makes them angry.
I mean … aren’t there enough suburbanites to give us super-majorities once the gerrymandering is removed after the 2020 census?
And minorities who don’t vote or are only occasional voters.
One of my in-laws (actually step-in-law) and a couple old acquaintances are urban right-wingers. That is a thing, too. You’re right – forget logic with this bunch. It comes down to does Dear Leader purport to hate who they hate? I reckon that’s all that matters. Really, my take on things any more is that there is just a subset of the population that is unreachable here (and they rear their heads from time to time, from the Know-Nothings of the 1850s to the present) as well as in other developed nations. Our best bet is good GOTV efforts among those we can reach, and have enough boots on the ground to get good turnout. That’s all I’ve got these days.
There is no non-socialist road out of our wilderness.
I find your lack of faith in the dialectic disturbing.
The ineluctable process of historical materialism is on the march.
The October Revolution 2.0 is just around the corner, I presume?
The contradictions are almost sufficiently heightened.
Viva la revolución.
Democrats in California have gotten middle-class suburbanites into their coalition without becoming anti-tax. Suburbanites aren’t going to force us into toxic policy stances. They will make it difficult to go hard socialist but that is for another day. Right now the task is to get the neofascists out of power.
OK, just so we not just anti-socialist signaling against THAT SOCIALIST, can we agree:
Public health care is not socialist health care and is about primary care and emergency care as much as about epidemic and pandemic care.
Public education is not socialist education and is about more than earning a living.
Public transportation is about more than demand support for civil engineers and construction companies. It is about the least-cost, best-value for getting from one place to another or getting goods from one place to another.
Public food security activities are about more than subsidizing farmers and the makers of processed foods; it really is about reducing hunger and providing nutrition.
National defense is not at all about jobs and high-tech investments.
I could go on. There is no private enterprise road to public expenditures that does not result in corruption. There is no private enterprise road to regulation that does not result in corruption and further pressure on mindless deregulation.
One thing that has been consistent about the US Congress; it has returned to the mean of despising internal improvements while subsidizing private schemes of the privileged friends of members of Congress. Progressivism was about wiping out that spoils system and corruption. But now it is back bigtime. Will Democrats have a strong answer when the lemmings finally jump the cliff?
What Digby says:
And if a Republican votes with Democrats (cough, Susan Collins) they will be destroyed by their own base.
But the important point is about real, honest-to-goodness independents.
I agree that this is the path. I’m willing to try anything to get off it. But I don’t think we can get off, and I think we should be preparing for the fight.
At some point before the United States stops being majority white, Americans are going to be asked to choose between keeping America white (in privilege and power if not in percentage of population) and keeping what is left of American democracy. That choice is where Trumpism eventually takes the country.
In the face of that, I think we have to take white votes wherever we can get them. I think it is inevitable that those Republicans running from Trump will eventually have a moderating influence on the Democratic party, but that is a problem for later. For now we don’t have to do anything but be anti-Trump to attract them. For now, I say welcome.
In the rural areas, Dems have to run hard using whatever message that will sell in the District as long as that message is anti-Trump and pro-democracy. The biggest challenge, in my opinion, is that it is hard to raise cash to raise the Democratic share of the vote from 25% to 30%.
In the longer run, I think the healthiest possible thing for American democracy is doing away with the electoral college. The college is what is standing in the way of a viable third party. The country would work a lot better with a centrist Democratic party between the tea party remains of the Republicans on their right and the Bernie Sanders left.
https:/www.nationalpopularvote.com