Does War in Europe Mean the Death of Reform in The United States or Can California Serve as a Model for a Better Way?

All eyes turned toward Ukraine last week as a brutal Russian invasion aimed at toppling the Democratic government of that country riveted the attention of the world.  Along with stories of the fighting, floods of refugees, and a wave of sanctions imposed on Russia by Western governments, came a flurry of grim assessments of what this new war in Europe would mean for the global economy and global democracy.  

Many pundits evoked images of 1930s fascism, musing that we had just witnessed the end of the Post Cold War era and were headed to a new, suddenly even more dangerous future. While full-on war with Russia is still, at this point, unlikely, the wave of economic and political sanctions imposed on that country will surely mean a prolonged period of acrimony and brinkmanship between the United States and its NATO allies and Putin’s regime.  The end result is not good for anyone other than those who might be profiting from the skyrocketing price of oil in the near and far term.

Nevertheless, Trump and some of his allies on the American Right almost immediately formed a pro-Putin chorus and early polls show Republicans holding a dimmer view of Biden than the Russian autocrat.  

And, as Robert Reich points out in his excellent Guardian piece on the “Eight Sobering Realities about Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine,” the Russian dictator’s strategy has long been to both crush liberal democracy in Ukraine and/or reform inside Russia and to “stoke division inside the west by fueling racist nationalism in Western Europe and the United States” making “Trump and Trumpism” important allies.  

Sadly, along with having to witness a significant slice of the contemporary American Right echo the shameful pro-Fascist rhetoric of many of their plutocratic forebears in the 1930s who had a crush on the Nazis before World War II put an end to that flirtation, we also likely saw the last lingering hopes of any progressive policy being enacted at the national level bite the dust.  

As Reich notes: 

• Foreign policy crises tend to drive domestic policy off the headlines, and weaken reform movements. Putin’s aggression in Ukraine has already quieted conversations in America about voting rights, filibuster reform, and Build Back Better – at least for now. Large-scale war, if it ever comes to that, deadens reform. The first world war brought the progressive era to a halt. The second ended FDR’s New Deal. Vietnam stopped Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

• Wars and the threat of wars also legitimate huge military expenditures and giant military bureaucracies. America is already spending $776bn a year on the military, a sum greater than the next 10 giant military powers (including Russia and China) together. Wars also create fat profits for big corporations in war industries.

The dampening of hope for change at the national level will surely be intensified if the Democrats, as most prognosticators predict, lose control of Congress in the fall and are forced to engage in continual rearguard actions.  Hence, with the door closing on reform at the national level, the only places left to look for opportunity is in the states.  

On that note, amid the tidal wave of bad news last week, one bright spot emerged in California with Assembly member Alex Lee’s proposed wealth tax.  According to the Los Angeles Times:

• The new bill by Assembly Member Alex Lee (D-San Jose) reintroduces a proposed tax hike for the state’s richest residents, potentially affecting about 15,000 Californians, or 0.07% of taxpayers. The proposal would apply a 1% tax on those with a net worth of at least $50 million and a 1.5% tax on those worth more than $1 billion. 

• The proposal is projected to bring in more than $22 billion a year in state revenue, according to an analysis by professors at UC Berkeley and UC Davis   . . . The bill, which would go into effect next year for billionaires and in 2025 for eligible millionaires, would go to the voters for approval in 2022 if it passes the Legislature. The proposal requires voter approval of a constitutional amendment because it would exceed the state’s tax rate limits of 0.4%.

• Lee’s legislation would not constitute an income tax, but a tax on assets and “all wealth” whether it has “been realized as income or not,” he said. Lee pointed to reports of some of the richest people in the world avoiding income taxes as the reasoning behind the approach.

• “There’s a whole other category of wealth where you just own things and can leverage more wealth out of your existing wealth and we’ve seen how that can be evaded,” Lee said in an interview Thursday. “We want the obscenely ultra rich to be paying their fair share.”

Thus, rather than simply putting our tails between our legs and watching dark outcomes unfold, progressives have a chance in California to push the envelope and pass legislation that would address our obscene level of inequality and provide billions of dollars annually toward building a better future for ordinary people by adequately funding education and social services, fighting catastrophic climate change, tackling the state’s homeless crisis, and more.  

Last week I addressed how corporate interests are hard at work in California trying to make it nearly impossible for localities to raise revenue.  Lee’s bill, or an eventual ballot measure modeled on it, represent a way for us to fight back against the economic and political interests that want to close the door on transformative change and murder hope.  

In this way, California could serve as an incubator for reform and a model for a future America unhindered by the shackles of the oligarchic forces that want to undermine our democracy.  Investing in and building a stronger American democracy domestically should be part of standing up for democracy on the global stage.