By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
It’s beginning to sink in that Democrats are likely to regain the House in November, and Trump’s base-only governing strategy is unlikely to win re-election two years after that. So ideas are beginning to surface about what Democrats should do if they regain power in 2020.
In his 2009 book, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, Democratic strategist Mike Lux argued that progressives have fundamentally reshaped America in a series of relatively brief “big change moments,” lasting only a few years each, in which the vast majority of significant new laws and constitutional amendments have been passed.
We had a taste of what that could be like with Barack Obama’s election, but an excess of caution, a fruitless search for consensus with Republicans and insufficient issue organizing in advance all limited the scope of what was achieved, particularly in the face of the unexpected financial crises. The best way to avoid falling short once again is to prepare in advance.
Some actions should be no-brainers: immigration reform, gun control and climate change all cry out for swift action, and command broad enough popular support to act quickly, within a few months… except for the Senate filibuster, which could block action on any or all of them. Which is why abolishing the filibuster should be a top priority, along with other democratizing reforms, such as reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act.
Beyond that, as explained in the 2016 book Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats, by David Hopkins and Matt Grossman, Democrats have a long-standing problem of how to satisfy multiple constituencies. There should be a premium on policies that benefit their diverse urban base and rural swing voters who are crucial in supplying Senate majorities and were a key part of New Deal coalition. Broadly beneficial economic policies play a key role in this regard—such as a $15/hour minimum wage, a national job guarantee, and a $4,000 child allowance. In addition, the concept of a “just transition” to a post-carbon future, supporting workers and communities in fossil fuel-producing areas, is vital to ensuring that future arrives in time, and its fruits are shared by all.
There are many more things that will need to be done, but getting a few big things right early on will help set the stage for much more to follow. Here, then, is a brief overview of some big ideas worth considering:
Democratization:
Abolish the filibuster. The lack of U.S. climate change action alone in 2009/10 is reason enough to get rid of the filibuster. A larger stimulus, a public option, card check unionization, the list of other lost opportunities is filled with major Democratic goals. It would be foolhardy to go through all of that all over again. And if we do, it would be foolhardy to expect voters to keep coming out, just to elect Democrats to do nothing noticeable to improve their lives. Of course that will make it easier for Republicans to do evil in the future. That puts a premium on passing legislation that really makes a difference in people’s lives. And on the next two reforms.
Statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico:
The Trump administration’s colossal failure to respond to the devastation of Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria sharply underscores Puerto Rico’s need for statehood, and the representation in Washington that comes with it—especially in the Senate. And both would give Democrats more strength in the Senate, making a wide range of other progressive changes more possible.
Renew, strengthen and expand the Voting Rights Act: Under GOP control, Congress has refused to act after the Supreme Court effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act’s preventative “pre-clearance” powers by throwing out the maps used to identify covered areas. Democrats should respond by strengthening the VRA—adding an explicit federal right to vote for all citizens and legal residents, including prisoners and ex-cons—and applying pre-clearance universally, with a broader mandate than protecting minority voting rights: ensuring easy, universal access for all. To facilitate this process, best practice templates should be created for plans to follow.
Expand the Supreme Court to 11 Seats:
The court’s size has long been set, not by law, but by an informal norm. But there are more important norms to consider, as Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet has argued: “The rationale is not (on the surface) to ‘seize control of the judiciary’…. The Democratic proposal for changing the small-c constitutional norm about the Court’s size would be an offer of a new norm – ‘You can’t steal a Supreme Court seat and expect to get away with it.’ Seems like a good new norm to me.”
Economics:
Conservative economic policy turns on the perverse notion that the poor have too much money and the rich have too little. This supports tax cuts for the rich on the one hand and fiscal austerity on the other, so the tax cuts are never blamed for the massive deficits they create, and the broadly shared benefits from social spending aren’t considered, much less counted. Progressives need policies that argue the opposite, and do so in appealing, easily graspable ways. Here are four key examples.
A $15/Hour Minimum Wage:
The federal minimum wage today lags far behind inflation compared to its 1968 peak, and even farther behind the growth in productivity. A $15/hour minimum wage would help set that right. The Fight for Fifteen has been one of the most successful grassroots movements of the decade. Where it has been implemented—even partially—it has demonstrated that a much higher minimum wage is not the catastrophic job-killer that anti-labor ideologues have made it out to be, but instead helps raise the floor for everyone. While a dramatic overnight increase would be needlessly disruptive, a staged increase—such as California’s, which goes up each year, reaching $15 in 2022—gives businesses plenty of time to develop plans about how to accommodate. This is the model Democrats should adopt for a national minimum wage hike, which should be a cornerstone for a broader package of labor law reforms, including much stronger wage theft enforcement which especially targets low-wage workers, as well the next major proposal.
A Universal Job Guarantee:
America is the richest nation in human history, but its wealth is highly concentrated in the hands of a few, while enormous public needs go unmet: infrastructure, healthcare, education, environmental protection, etc. Unemployment has dropped steadily but slowly since the Great Recession, but millions remain outside the job market, wages lag far behind what they should be, and almost everyone’s job is insecure.
A universal job guarantee—federally funded, but locally administered to meet prioritized public needs—would change all that, and more. A job isn’t just a source of income, it’s part of one’s identity. A job guarantee means everyone belongs in America—from inner-city youth, whose unemployment rates sometimes top 50 percent to rural residents watching their communities slowly die as their youth move away in droves. It helps those out of work by giving them a job. But it also helps those already employed. When workers compete over a scarce supply of jobs, they have no power, but when employers must compete over an inadequate supply of workers, the shoe is on the other foot. Even the lowest-paid workers can demand higher wages, more benefits, and better working conditions, if they know they can always get another job.
On a macro-economic level, it will mean less severe recessions, which in turn means greater long-term growth. Instead of millions being thrown out of work, drastically reducing demand, dragging the economy down with them, they would simply be shifting to other sorts of public sector jobs, with lower pay, perhaps, but still contributing to the economy both as workers and consumers. Preventing mass joblessness will be far cheaper—not to mention far more humane—than spending years struggling to reverse it.
A $4,000 Child Allowance:
Since 1970, US child poverty has averaged 20 percent, far more than in other developed countries, with a cost of $500 billion annually, due to lowering productivity (and income), increasing crime rates and raising health expenditures. A $4,000 child allowance would cut child poverty to 14.8 percent — more in line with other countries — at a cost of $160 billion, for a net savings of $340 billion. America lacks a range of other family-friendly policies other countries take for granted, most notably paid family and sick leave, universal pre-K and daycare. Democrats should support all of these as a comprehensive federal pro-family agenda, but the child allowance plays a unique role by clearly demonstrating the logic of a progressive economic approach.
A Just Transition to a Post-Carbon Future:
Climate change is an existential threat to human civilization as we know it. An estimated $50 billion annually in new public investment is needed for a successful federal climate stabilization program, and just one percent of that—$500 million per year—would be sufficient to provide income, retraining, and relocation support for workers who will lose their jobs in the process as well as transition programs for the broader fossil fuel–dependent communities. The “just transition” concept was pioneered by visionary labor leader Tony Mazzocchi, of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, who played a leading role in the creation of OSHA. Well before climate change emerged as a threat, Mazzocchi argued that society as whole should provide a just transition for workers and communities involved in industries whose toxic downsides have long been ignored or denied. The logic and justice involved are straightforward: all of society has benefited from them in the past, and thus owes them assistance in finding new productive livelihoods in the future.
Summing Up:
Collectively, the above lay out a progressive economic approach that materially benefits the vast majority of the American people—and helps to begin reorienting how people think about economic policy more generally. It’s not offered in place of more specific urgent concerns of core Demographic constituencies, such as immigration reform, gun control, climate change, criminal justice and policing reform, etc. Nor is it meant to neglect the need for increased taxes on the rich and corporations (such as a stock trading transaction tax) or the need for renewed antitrust and other corporate regulation. I do not include those both for matters of space, and because they’re already more widely circulated and discussed, but they definitely warrant inclusion as well. This is merely a starting point for others to join.
But there is one more thing to address: Foreign policy. In that realm, there has been so much done wrong for so long, with one layer of folly laid on top of another, that it’s exceedingly difficult to begin laying out what a popular alternative might look like.
But we can at least begin by reasserting what was originally a conservative response to the Vietnam War: the so-called “Powell Doctrine” (originally the “Weinberger Doctrine”) governing when the US should commit troops to military actions: only when vital national interests are involved, with clearly defined and achievable political and military objectives, a “reasonable assurance” of public support, and only as a last resort.
Had the Powell Doctrine been taken seriously by Colin Powell himself after 9/11, we would have never invaded Afghanistan, much less Iraq. Instead, we would have pursued a criminal justice approach toward the terrorists responsible, and the world today would look dramatically different, dramatically more peaceful than the world we live in now. That seems like an excellent foundation on which we could start to build.