A populist economic message could be key to recapturing some of the estimated six million who voted for Obama in 2012 but Trump in 2016
Democratic leaders are calling their new agenda “A Better Deal,” and it’s heavy on populist economics: a higher minimum wage; more working-class access to government health programs; and expanded broadband for rural areas.
.. six million people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 abandoned the Democrats to vote for Mr. Trump in 2016... In these “flip counties” Mrs. Clinton also is personally unpopular; just 30% view her favorably, while 50% have an unfavorable view. Interestingly, though, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who challenged Mrs. Clinton from the left with an antiestablishment populist message, is far more popular there. In the flip counties, 44% have a positive view of Mr. Sanders, while just 29% have a negative view... feelings toward Mrs. Clinton are a net 20-percentage points negative, while they are a net 15-points positive for Mr. Sanders... That suggests Mrs. Clinton, the ultimate representative of the party establishment, was a particularly ill-suited candidate for 2016. It further suggests that a populist economic message of the kind Mr. Sanders brought to the table has resonance in the areas that moved away from the Democrats.
.. A whopping 71% said they aren’t confident their children’s generation will have a better life... they particularly like the suggestion that he is “shaking things up in Washington,” and that he is twisting corporate arms to keep jobs in the U.S. That may be because they are feeling economic strain; 66% say someone in their household has lost a job in the last five years, and 75% say someone in the household has more than $20,000 in student debt... But Mrs. Clinton just as surely lost them because she was seen as part of the political establishment in a year of surging antiestablishment sentiment.. Don’t be surprised if Republicans try to hold on to those voters in next year’s midterm elections by portraying Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a replica of Mrs. Clinton, an out-of-touch embodiment of a hated political establishment.
‘Medicare for All’ Isn’t Sounding So Crazy Anymore
To be able to deliver on its promises, single payer would not only require trillions in new revenue through higher taxes, but also huge cost savings from slashing payments to drug companies, doctors and hospitals. “There are a million and one complexities” to single payer that no one has really dealt with, said Dean Bake
.. Senator Sanders went out of his way to list all the tax hikes he’d use to pay for his 2016 proposal, including an across-the-board 2.2 percent income tax. But two prominent policy analysts said the plan would cost about twice as much as the senator claimed.
.. But many advanced, industrialized democracies with universal coverage don’t have a pure single-payer system. France, for instance, has health care for all that is largely state-financed, but most people also buy private supplemental coverage.
.. Mr. Baker believes the top priority is a credible transition plan. “If you just take everyone with employer-provided insurance and put all of them on a public plan, you’re going to freak people out,” he said. He’s interested in reviving the public option — a government-run plan that would compete with private insurance on the exchanges — as well as opening up Medicare or Medicaid to those who want to buy in.
.. Democrats risk making the same mistake on health care as Republicans: big promises without a plan to follow through.
The End of the Left and the Right as We Knew Them
Trump accelerated a realignment in the electorate around racism, across several different measures of racial animus — and that it helped him win. By contrast, we found little evidence to suggest individual economic distress benefited Trump. The American political system is sorting so that racial progressivism and economic progressivism are aligned in the Democratic Party and racial conservatism and economic conservatism are aligned in the Republican Party.
.. In the French parliamentary elections this month, the ruling Socialist Party saw its 280 seats dwindle to 29 out of 577. In the Netherlands, the number of seats held in parliament by the Dutch Labor Party fell from 38 to 9 after the March election.
.. The Financial Times has documented a steady decline in class-based voting in Britain. In 1987, the British middle class voted for the Conservative Party by 40 points more than the national average, while the working class voted for the Labor Party by 32 points more than the national average — a 72-point spread. By 2017, the spread had dropped to 15 points. Once a Tory stronghold, the British middle class now splits its vote evenly.
.. education emerged as the strongest predictor of votes for a right populist option, where the less educated chose it more often than those with degrees.
.. Austria to this list. The presidential election there in May of 2016 pitted Van der Bellen, the center-left candidate, against the hard-right populist Norbert Hofer. Polls showed that Van der Bellen won decisively among the well educated and the better paid, while Hofer won workers and the less well educated in a landslide. The election in the Netherlands was also emblematic
.. Macron’s genius has been to argue that he can thread the political needle, by embracing globalization and reinforcing social protections to compensate those exposed to its downside. In the process, he has obliterated traditional parties of the left and the right, while promising a synthesis tailor made for the twenty-first century. If he can bring it off, he will become a model for other leaders to follow — including in the United States.
.. among all voters, Clinton won 52-42 among the college-educated while Trump carried those without degrees 51-44.
.. A candidate making that appeal, however, and seeking to build a broad majority biracial coalition, must in fact have broad biracial appeal. As of now, Sanders is far from personifying broad majority biracial appeal. Worse, existing Democratic candidate recruitment and nomination processes have paid insufficient attention to the selection of candidates who are competent to build bridges across America’s immense cultural gaps.
.. there is a “growing tension” between the Democratic Party’s “ascendant militant wing and Democrats competing in conservative-leaning terrain.”
.. The “ascendant militant wing” — a colorful, if controversial, description of the Sanders-Warren wing of the party — has the moral high ground within Democratic ranks but the votes they want the party to seek are those of some of the least reachable constituencies — white men and women whose views on immigration, race and political correctness are in direct conflict with liberal idealism. It would be an extraordinary challenge to get these particular voters to join with minorities and progressive activists.
.. Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity.
In practical terms, Beinart writes, “it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.”
.. The hard part
is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
.. Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference — the hallmarks of liberal democracy — are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.
.. Americans, Beinart contends,
know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he — a black man with a Muslim-sounding name — twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.
What we are seeing now is the replacement of class-based politics, a trend apparent in the United States and Europe. This gives us a more racialized and xenophobic politics, on one hand, and a politics capitalizing on increasing levels of education and open-mindedness in the electorate on the other.
Bernie Sanders, Theocrat
Why should secular liberals get to dictate religious doctrine to believers?
.. In January 2016, Vought published a blog post at The Resurgent in which he stated that Muslims “do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.”
.. This, Sanders declared at the nominee’s confirmation hearing, was “indefensible,” “hateful,” and “Islamophobic.” “This nominee,” Sanders harrumphed, “is really not someone who is what this country is supposed to be about.”
.. Sanders defended the line of questioning. Vought “and any other American has the right to hold any point of view they want,” said Sanders, but it is “unacceptable” “to have a high-ranking member of the United States government essentially say Islam is a second-class religion.”
.. It was not enough that Farron supported a legal right to abortion and same-sex marriage; the fact that he privately believed them to be sinful acts was not allowed to pass unchallenged. He was routinely attacked in the media — again, not for anything he had done, but for views about matters theological that he held privately. Farron’s resignation speech was striking: “To be a political leader — especially of a progressive, liberal party in 2017 — and to live as a committed Christian, to hold faithfully to the Bible’s teaching, has felt impossible for me.”
.. The BBC demands that Tim Farron not think abortion is a sin — even though virtually no one among Britain’s political and media elite believes in the idea of “sin.”
.. A person of faith might justifiably ask: Why does Bernie Sanders get to decide the appropriate theology of salvation? Why do Sky News anchors get to decide what is and isn’t a sin?
.. There is a long and stupid tradition of believing that the American Right threatens to impose an Evangelical Christian theocracy on the United States — that every Republican lawmaker is looking to erect an official church and make women cover their ankles. In reality, it is the proudly irreligious Left that has smuggled religious debates back into our politics. It is the unabashedly secular Left that has knocked down the “wall of separation” and made the afterlife an immanent political issue.
.. Our new theocrats think differently, though, and no surprise: The dirty little secret of secular liberalism is not that its practitioners don’t believe in God; it’s that they believe they are God.