Why the 99 Percent Keeps
Losing
By Robert Kuttner
March 22, 2015 "ICH"
- "HP"
- Our current political
situation is unprecedented. The vast
majority of Americans keep falling behind
economically because of changes in society's
ground rules, while the rich get even richer
-- yet this situation doesn't translate into
a winning politics.
If anything, the right
keeps gaining and the wealthy keep pulling
away. How can this possibly be?
Let me suggest seven
reasons:
Reason One. The
Discrediting of Politics Itself.
The Republican Party has devised a strategy
of hamstringing government and making any
remediation impossible.
Instead of the voters
punishing Republicans, the result is
cynicism and passivity, so the Republican
strategy is vindicated and rewarded.
The media plays into this
pattern by adopting a misleading narrative
that makes the gridlock in Washington
roughly the equal fault of both parties --
with lazy phrases such as "Washington is
broken," or "politics is broken," or
"partisan bickering." (Do a Google search of
those clichés. It will make you sick.)
Eminent political
scientists such as Jacob Hacker (Off-Center)
and Thomas E. Mann and co-author Norman
Ornstein, a self-described Republican (It's
Even Worse Than It Looks) have
thoroughly debunked the premise of
symmetrical blame. It's Republicans who are
the blockers. But these scholars and their
evidence fail to alter the media storyline,
and the damage has been done.
The very people who have
given up on politics, and on Democrats as
stewards of a social compact that helps
regular working people, are precisely those
regular working people -- who see the Dream
getting away from them and government not
helping.
Reason Two.
Compromised Democrats.
But the Democrats are hardly blameless.
Instead of seizing on the collapse of 2008
as a disgrace for laissez-faire economics,
deregulation, Wall Street and the Republican
Party, Barack Obama tried to make nice with
the GOP, refrained from cleaning out the big
banks that caused the mess, and drank the
Kool-Aid of budget balance.
The result: working people
frustrated with economic backsliding had no
party that really championed their
interests. The fateful year 2008 may have
been the worst missed moment for
revolutionary reform in the history of the
Republic -- and depending on who gets the
Democratic nomination next time and what she
does with it, 2016 could rival 2008 as a
lost opportunity.
Republicans made big gains
in the off-year elections of 2010 and 2014.
Skeptical or cynical voters on the
Democratic side (young people, poor people,
African Americans, single women) are less
likely to vote in off-years, while the
rightwing base stays ferociously engaged.
The more that potentially Democratic voters
are disaffected, the more the Right can
block any progress on inequality.
Reason Three. The
Reign of Politicized Courts and Big Money.
The Supreme Court's usual majority has
become an opportunistic subsidiary of the
Republican Party. Two key decisions,
reflecting outrageous misreading of both the
Constitution and the abuses of recent
history, undermined citizenship and
entrenched the rule of big money.
In the Citizens United
case of 2010,the Court majority gave
unlimited license to big personal and
corporate money. And in the Shelby
County v. Holder decision of 2013, the
Court invalidated a key provision of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, declaring open
season for a new era of voter suppression.
As a consequence, the
potential role of invigorated democracy as
the antidote to concentrated wealth has been
weakened. Economic inequality translates
into inequality of political influence.
Reason Four. The
Collapse of Equalizing Institutions.
During the postwar boom, America actually
became more equal. The bottom quarter gained
more income share than the top quarter. This
was no historical or technological accident.
Shared prosperity was built on government
activism promoting opportunity, strong
unions providing decent wages even for the
less educated, enforcement of other labor
laws, debt-free public higher education,
well-regulated financial institutions, a
genuinely progressive income tax, and a
trading system that did not promote
outsourcing.
Politics -- not technology
-- caused the evisceration of these
instruments. Politics could take back a
fairer America.
Reason Five.
Bewildering Changes in How Jobs Are
Structured.
In the past couple of decades, regular
payroll jobs with career prospects have
increasingly been displaced by an economy of
short-term gigs, contract work, and crappy
payroll jobs without decent pay and
benefits, or even regular hours. This shift
often gets blamed on technology or
education, but that's malarkey.
With a different political
balance of forces, regular employees could
not be disguised as contract workers;
corporate executives could face felony
convictions for wage theft; the right to
unionize would be enforced; the windfall
profits of the "share economy" would
actually be shared with workers; large
corporations like McDonalds could not
pretend that the wages and working
conditions in its franchises were somebody
else's problem -- and full employment would
give workers more bargaining power
generally.
Reason Six. The
Internalization of a Generation's Plight.
Compared to my age cohort, Millennials are
the screwed generation. The dream of
homeownership has been undercut; good jobs
with career prospects are in short supply;
young adults begin economic life saddled
with student debt; the pension system has
been blown up; and if you want to have kids,
society doesn't do anything to help the
work-family straddle.
You'd expect young adults
to be in the streets, but here the cynicism
about politics blends with a natural
inclination to make a virtue of necessity.
Maybe I'll never own a home but I have to
move around a lot anyway. I have all I need
on my iPad, which means I'm less
materialistic than my parents. And hey, I
don't get to be a millionaire like the
people who created Uber, but maybe I'll be
an Uber driver, which is cool. Not to
mention airbnb.
On the other hand, the
political leader who called for a one-time
write off of all past student debt might
still rally a lot of Millennials. In the
distribution of income and opportunity, a
lot of questions that are actually political
have been personalized and internalized. The
assumption that we are all on our own is
deeply political. But that can be changed.
Reason Seven. The
Absence of a Movement.
In the face of all these assaults on the
working and middle class, there are many
movements but no Movement. The Occupy
movement, which gave us the phrase, "The One
Percent," was too hung up on its own
procedural purity to create a broad movement
for economic justice.
Looking out at the
plethora of local and national groups
pursuing greater economic equality, one sees
mainly idealism and fragmentation.
Some of it is caused by
that dread phrase, 501 c 3. Well-meaning
foundations fall in love with the
charismatic activist leader de jour,
seem intent on creating yet another grass
roots group or coalition, and then that
group needs to differentiate itself from
rivals and dance to the foundation's tune.
(This is a column for another day.)
The remedies that would
restore economic opportunity and security to
ordinary Americans are far outside
mainstream political conversation, and will
not become mainstream until forced onto the
agenda by a genuine mass movement. Sometimes
that movement gets lucky and finds a
rendezvous with a sympathetic national
leader.
This has occurred before
-- in the Roosevelt Revolution of the 1930s
and the Civil Rights Revolution of the
1960s. But without a potent movement on the
ground, mainstream electoral politics is
likely to remain stuck with remedies too
weak either to rouse public imagination and
participation, or to provide more than token
relief for today's extreme inequality.
This vicious circle --
really a downward spiral about depressed
expectations and diminished participation --
can be reversed, as it has been reversed at
moments in the American past. As that noted
political consultant Joe Hill put it, as
they were taking him to the gallows, "Don't
mourn, organize."
Robert Kuttner is
co-editor of The American Prospect and a
visiting professor at Brandeis University's
Heller School. His latest book is
Debtors' Prison: The Politics
of Austerity Versus Possibility.
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