At the root of the challenge is a fundamental disconnect between our worker-training and welfare systems. For example, caseworkers are pushed to focus on finding jobs for those who are easiest to return back to work and to avoid those who need the most help. Those left behind often end up in “make work” jobs that may count for federal work requirements, but do absolutely nothing to help people get ahead by giving them the skills they need for meaningful employment
The Republican Party’s 50-State Solution
The Koch brothers’ have invested in such state-regulated areas as refining, chemicals, biofuels and ingredients; forest products; fertilizers; polymers and fibers. For the extractive industries, in particular, along with chemical, pharmaceutical, and lumber concerns, Republican-led deregulatory efforts can increase profits.
Wealthy liberal donors, on the other hand, are driven by ideological convictions that can be volatile and vulnerable, as Hertel-Fernandez and Skocpol put it, “to shifting donor fashions.”
.. Rob Stein, a founder of the Democracy Alliance — a “partnership” of liberal donors established in 2005 — pointed out in a phone interview that the right can tap into an embedded
structure of community-based cultural, religious, social organizations — churches, Elks, veterans halls, gun groups, local business organizations, etc. — that are gathering places with offices, meeting halls, phones and computers that can be used by activist troops for logistical and operational support.
.. It has begun to appear that the twenty-first century progressive brain is not as interested in clubs, communities and cultural sharing as the conservative brain is.
.. How, Stein asked, “could we have lost that? How does a communitarian world view lose its communitarian sense of self?”
The short answer to Stein’s question may be that the nature of political liberalism has changed.
.. The left has, in part, shifted focus, with more stress on the values of self-expression and self-fulfillment, on individual liberation from the constraints of traditional morality, especially sexual morality — what my colleague Ross Douthat calls “The Liberalism of Adult Autonomy” or “the morality of rights.” Economic liberalism – despite progress on the minimum wage – has lost salience.