The Blind Spot Joe Biden, Chuck Todd, David Brooks, & Max Boot Have in Common
“The evidence over the past twenty years has pointed increasingly to a sclerosis born of elites’ chokehold on power: the problem is at the very, very top…” --Felicia Wong
First, let me introduce the players. I’m sure all of them are nice people.
Former Vice President Joe Biden would be a good president, and I fully intend to vote for him should he be the nominee of the Democratic Party.
Chuck Todd is an NBC moderator/political analyst who believes his livelihood is dependent on access to people in high places.
David Brooks is widely acclaimed as a moderate Republican, whose views boil down to advocacy for an educated elite that knows what’s best for the American people.
Max Boot is a military historian, columnist, and Never Trumper, who defines himself as a contrarian conservative with socially liberal tendencies.
All of them cling to a collective blind spot when it comes to understanding the fundamental crises facing the economy and, by extension, the environment, the social order, and the very nature of the state.
In the wake of the debates last week, whose on-air and streaming audiences were in the same ballpark as the 30 million people voting in the 2016 Democratic primary, there has been a wave of commentary in defense of the once upon a time liberal status quo. Or at least something not challenging the way things used to be before Trump.
Max Boot wrote a column for the Washington Post entitled: It’s the party of no ideas vs. the party of bad ideas. David Brooks penned: Dems, please don’t drive me away. Etcetera, etcetera.
The premise of these and other columns was that somehow Democrats appearing in a Democratic Primary debate were supposed to be sending soothing messages to Republicans.
These folks can clutch their pearls all they want. The Never Trumpers, as one wag on Twitter noted, are like White Russians sitting in a Parisian cafe in 1919 dreaming of what might have been.
Those placated Republicans won’t be the ones turning out voters come election day. Brooks goes so far as to suggest things really are okay with the economy, and that Dems should focus on “a bed of manners, habits, traditions and institutions.”
It is a given that the GOP will --in addition to their cult-worship-- wrap their campaigns around a critique of any Democratic candidate around a perceived fear of “socialism.”
Enough people have fallen or are close to falling out of the middle class dream that it behooves anybody running against Republicans to disown their failed economic and governance theories, along with the false frames they use to sell them.
NBC moderator Chuck Todd during the first night of the debate managed to speak more than seven candidates, as he repeatedly used GOP framing as the basis for his questions.
Take, for instance, gun safety…
Firearms came up multiple times, including when Todd raised the prospect of gun confiscation with former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, asking how he’d talk to voters who are afraid he’s going to “take my gun away”:
Todd’s line of questioning was ripped straight from the National Rifle Association’s playbook. For years, the pro-gun rights organization has been fearmongering that any type of gun safety legislation -- from universal background checks to assault weapons bans and CDC research on gun violence -- is a “slippery slope” that could lead to a national gun registry and ultimately an all-out confiscation of every firearm.
Todd also raised the issue with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, asking her if the federal government should play a role in enforcing any firearm legislation passed, including an assault weapons ban. When she didn’t explicitly address confiscation, he clarified his point:
“You didn’t address -- do you think the federal government needs to go and figure out a way to get the guns that are already out there?”
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What people often don’t see is that a vote for chief executive is actually a vote for an administration more than it is a candidate.
Biden and the rest of the Dems --should one get elected-- will have to choose from (mostly) the same pool of liberal leaning advisers and administrators currently ensconced in academia and think tanks. A few will come from Congress, and the common wisdom is that it’s good to have a few faces from the private sector.
Gone in a Biden era (or otherwise ‘safe’ choice) will be the days of gratuitous cruelty, open plundering, pseudo-science, and failed economic theories.
The ship of state will be righted to once again be sailing upon the course laid out by previous Democratic administrations.
The difference between an economic tradition-based Democrat (I’m using Biden as a stand-in), and Bernie Sanders (again, a stand-in) comes from a shift in how the economy is viewed at the top of the administration.
If the goal is merely the restoration of what was pre-Trump, the underlying realities of corporate power and climate change will devour any attempts at progress.
Felicia Wong, writing in the Boston Review, persuasively makes the argument that a sea-change driven by economic data is changing the very nature of politics.
The outlines of the new economic paradigm are clearer by the day. Most fundamentally, the old paradigm assumed power away, while the new paradigm makes power central. Corporate power—where it hoards and corrodes—must be tamed, while public power must be cultivated as a force for public good. For forty years the dominant political ideology on both sides of the aisle was the opposite, centered around low taxes and small government. We are now seeing the effects of that ideology and re-learning—as has often been the case in U.S. history—that a strong federal government is essential to maintaining public power. Even Republicans are now calling on their party to “stop living in the 1980s” and that “government has a role to play.” Today’s basic economic realization that a strong government is essential to both prosperity and democracy is growing in U.S. political culture…
...Taken all together, this new economics reveals a fundamental shift. Not only is inequality rising, but, in comparison to inequality just a few decades ago, it has changed in character. Modern inequality is not driven by labor disparities (the old common knowledge was that poor skills led to low pay) but by owners of ever-concentrated capital. The evidence over the past twenty years has pointed increasingly to a sclerosis born of elites’ chokehold on power: the problem is at the very, very top—a capital income problem, focused on the one-tenth of the 1 percent…
For a very long time, our basic understanding of increasing inequality did not make economic sense. Suddenly, it did. The problem was not just economic, and it wasn’t just identified by economists. Political inequality, meaning the causal mechanisms linking elite influence and money to politics, became a focus of political science. Nick Carnes measured the effect of wealthier politicians, and the absence of working-class lawmakers, on outcomes. Martin Gilens argued that elites, and often only elites, influence economic policy. In large majorities, the American people support higher taxes on the wealthy, actions to fight climate change, greater regulation of monopoly companies, and higher wages. But, according to Gilens and co-author Ben Page, ordinary voters have no say in these issues, because the structure of our politics is such that the wealthy—and those they fund on their behalf—have tangible political influence, while "the estimated influence of the public is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”
This essay is NOT intended as an endorsement of the candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders.
I am saying his oft-repeated view of the economy provides the basis for actually getting us out of this mess. Other candidates, notably Elizabeth Warren, see the need for fundamental change. Other candidates, I think, are capable of growing their worldview to encompass real solutions. (We’ll see about that as the campaign progresses.)
Once again, I’ll vote for Joe Biden should he be the nominee. But I’ll do so with the understanding that his presidency will only address a symptom, not the disease. And the disease will eventually kill us as a society unless we act.
Some of the clearest thinking about contemporary politics post 2016 has come from Teen Vogue, and I’ll let Lucy Diavolo’s commentary close this post:
But Biden is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the leader of a political revolution. He is a man so emblematic of the 20th century that he seems a walking embodiment of it. As we approach an election that marks one-fifth of the 21st century passing us by, I wonder how much damage he could do, especially for young people. His most potent expressions of his views on today’s youth on the campaign trail have been a complete absence of empathy and telling people to protect their daughters and sisters.
Our nation is in need of radical change. The climate crisis looms darker every day, the current administration is running concentration camps—yes, concentrations camps—on our southern border for migrants, and student loan debt is weighing down millions of people.
I don’t believe Biden represents the possibility for that change. And watching him gaffe his way through the race is not some charming satire from The Onion; it is a reality that makes me sick with fear about what the future looks like
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PS. Speaking of radical ideas...
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Lead image: Photo of Banksy canvas