Is American Society Too Polarized Politically To Accomplish Anything Worthwhile For Its Citizens?

It's Time To Kick The Neo-Liberals To The Curb— Hard

I saw an interesting Monmouth poll while I was sitting in a waiting room yesterday. The part that most interested me was that it shows how if Señor T actually does suspend some laws and constitutional provisions, just 52% of the public would be bothered a lot by it. “This number is down from 65% who felt this way in June. Those who say they would be bothered a lot by this ranges from 77% of Democrats (down from 86% in June) to 55% of independents (down from 68%) and just 23% of Republicans (down from 41%). That chasm between Democrats and Republicans looks pretty daunting.

I wonder where Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, who caucuses with the Republicans, would fit in there. She told a No Labels audience this week that she felt “more comfortable” with no party label than with “an identity as a Republican. I’m not attached to a label, I'd rather be that ‘no label.’ I'd rather be that person that is just known for trying to do right by the state and the people that I serve, regardless of party, and I'm totally good and comfortable with that… “I don't think I've made any secret of the fact that I'm more of a Ronald Reagan Republican than I am a Trump Republican. And someone said, ‘Well, you aren’t really a Republican at all.’ And I said, ‘You can call me whatever you want to call me.’”

Presumably you’ve noticed that Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy has been working extra hard lately to raise his national name recognition. It takes a lot of effort and he’s giving it his all. He would like to run for president and he needs the media to name him when they list potential candidates, so he’s out there talking up a storm, just as Ro Khanna has been. Ro isn’t included on lists like this either yet. This one’s from Wikipedia:

Both Murphy and Khanna are trying to identify their political brands with populism. Yesterday The Atlantic featured Murphy in a compellingly-titled column about it by Tyler Harper called Is This How Democrats Win Back the Working Class?. He wanted to talk with Harper about how the Democrats could learn from their loss and win over— or win back— voters in 2026 and 2028. “‘I have thought for a long time that there’s a race between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party,’ Murphy told me. ‘And the question is: Does the Republican Party become more economically populist in a genuine way before the Democratic Party opens itself up to people who don’t agree with us on 100 percent of our social and cultural issues?’ Murphy is onto something. The politics of the average American are not well represented by either party right now. On economic issues, large majorities of the electorate support progressive positions: They say that making sure everyone has health-care coverage is the government’s responsibility (62 percent), support raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour (62 percent), strongly or somewhat support free public college (63 percent), and are in favor of federal investment in paid family and medical leave  (73 percent). They also support more government regulation of a variety of industries including banking (53 percent), social media (60 percent), pharmaceuticals (68 percent), and artificial intelligence (72 percent).” Those would have been the bottom line for the Democratic Party for years if not for the losing strategy cobbled together by dinosaurs Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Jim Clyburn and their allies, who are still pushing cautious GOP-lite stance for the FDR Party. 

Presumably they pay more attention to another part of Harper’s reporting, that points to “large majorities” who favor the conservative positions the GOP has been running on, like, this cycle, their transphobic hate messaging. Elderly neoliberal Democratic leaders are always so risk averse that they hold the party back from being Democrats. Pelosi, once a progressive has turned into a raging reactionary whose shelf life as a Democrat has long passed. Schumer was a progressive for a few month of his first term in the House; that was in 1981. Since then he has become the Senator for Wall Street, not the Senator for working class New Yorkers. Clyburn… I’ve only known him as a relatively-reactionary careerist attached whole hog to identity politics since I first ran across him.

Harper wrote that “Substantial obstacles confront populists on both the left and right. Democrats must contend with a college-educated base and party establishment that embraces maximalist positions on social issues, while Republicans must contend with substantial libertarian cliques. But whichever party figures out how to advance a meaningful post-neoliberal platform could unlock a winning and durable political coalition.

Murphy is doing his best to make sure that his side of the aisle beats the Republicans, but he seems far from certain that it will. In an MSNBC interview after the election, the senator sketched out something of a road map for Democrats: ‘We should return to the party we were in the ’70s and ’80s, when we had economics as the tent pole and then we let in people who thought differently than us on other social and cultural issues.’ Murphy was quick to add that this reinvention— or rather, reversion— will be challenging to pull off. ‘That’s a difficult thing for the Democratic Party to do, because we’ve applied a lot of litmus tests over the years,’ he observed. ‘Those litmus tests have added up to a party that is pretty exclusionary and is shrinking, not growing.’”

Although few on the populist right view Trump as the genuine article— they tend to politely describe the president-elect as a “transitional figure”— he has nominated post-neoliberal and populist sympathizers to major positions in his second administration: Senator Marco Rubio, an industrial-policy aficionado, for secretary of state; the pro-union Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer for labor secretary; the Big Tech skeptic Gail Slater to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division; and, of course, J. D. Vance, whose rise to vice president–elect was greeted with trepidation by Wall Street despite his tech-venture-capital background. Still, most of those I interviewed shared the view that Trump will likely squander his populist goodwill with tax cuts for billionaires and other anti-populist agenda items during his term.

This should produce an opening for the populist left, but there remains a deeper and perhaps more intractable problem: The GOP appears to be locking into place a multiracial coalition of the non-college-educated. These are voters who may prove easier for liberals to lose than to win back. If the Democrats have any hope of once again being the party of the working class, Murphy and others believe, they need to recognize that Americans are desperate for meaning and community.

The language Murphy used in his New Republic essay— invoking morality, self-worth, and social connection— is omnipresent in post-neoliberal discourse. The movement’s chief exponents believe that neoliberalism has not only created an economic disaster, but its emphasis on ruthless individualism has also created a crisis of political and social meaning. In the view of Murphy and others, any post-neoliberal politics must cultivate a new social ethic rooted in dignified and fairly remunerated labor. Many of these prominent post-neoliberals, some of them affiliated with the same think tanks and nonprofits that once helped establish the neoliberal consensus, seem convinced that there’s a massive voting bloc waiting to be activated: Americans who are moderate or even small-c conservative on social issues, but who also favor a more aggressive, rabble-rousing attack on the country’s existing economic system.

“We have not convinced voters in this country that we are serious about redistributing power from people who have it to people who don’t have it,” Murphy lamented to me. “The solutions we’ve proposed are largely small-ball, largely adjustments to the existing market. We don’t talk about power in the way that Republicans talk about power.” Others agreed.

Although many observed that Joe Biden has been arguably the most pro-labor president in decades and has often broken with neoliberal orthodoxy in areas such as industrial policy, they also felt that he never quite captured the narrative or claimed credit for his substantial accomplishments. In other words: There was a widespread sense among the people I spoke with that Biden had working-class policies without working-class politics. “The Democratic Party didn’t show that it was really backing the concerns of ordinary people strongly enough, and wasn’t identifying well enough with how they saw the world,” Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize–winning economist and longtime critic of neoliberalism, told me.

For many (though not all) post-neoliberals, the heart of their economic vision is “pre-distribution,” a concept popularized by the political scientist Jacob Hacker. Whereas center-left neoliberals tend to favor redistributive tax-and-transfer policies— allowing an unchained market to generate robust growth, and then blunting resulting economic disparities by taking some of the gains from the system’s winners and redistributing them to the system’s working-class “losers,” reducing inequality after the fact— post-neoliberals generally believe that it is better to avoid generating such inequalities in the first place. “The moral of this story,” Hacker explains in a 2011 paper, “is that progressive reformers need to focus on market reforms that encourage a more equal distribution of economic power and rewards even before government collects taxes or pays out benefits.”

As Hacker (perhaps accidentally) implies with his invocation of the story’s “moral,” pre-distribution advocates often justify this strategy in ethical or even spiritual terms: Empowering workers to secure better pay and working conditions— say, through unions and sectoral bargaining— is about restoring dignity and revitalizing labor-based forms of community.

“Most people don’t want a handout,” Chris Murphy recently posted on social media. “They want the rules unrigged so they can succeed on their own.” Although some on the left (not unreasonably) disliked the way the senator described certain redistributionist policies as “handouts,” these vocabulary complaints distract from Murphy’s deeper point. Honest labor is a source of pride, and populists should want an economy where most Americans are paid fairly for work they feel good about rather than suffering poverty wages and waiting for cash floats that keep them above water.

…Many democratic insiders believe that post-neoliberal economic policies alone are not sufficient to win back American workers. Social issues will also need to be reconsidered. Stiglitz pointed to immigration as one place where Democrats may need to compromise, a view he shares with others in his post-neoliberal cohort. Murphy helped write a defeated bipartisan border-security bill that would have added Border Patrol officers and made asylum standards more stringent; some critics characterized it as “hard-right.” Last year, a hotly discussed book by the socialist journalist John Judis and the liberal political scientist Ruy Teixeira likewise packaged a withering critique of neoliberalism with a call to embrace more conservative positions on immigration. [philosopher Daniel] Chandler’s Free and Equal also quietly endorsed claims that increased immigration depresses wages for low earners and strains public resources. As Chandler argues, “High levels of immigration can make it more difficult to create a stable sense of political community and national identity.”

Gun control is another area where flexibility may be prudent in order to be competitive in certain parts of the country. Democrats will have to accommodate people like Dan Osborn, the independent who, though he lost his bid to represent Nebraska in the Senate, outperformed Kamala Harris while combining a vocal defense of the Second Amendment with proudly pro-union politics.

…More than anything, liberals need to understand that many Americans— especially those in the working class— feel unheard. Their trust will be won back not through quick fixes, but by treating those without a college education or with more conservative social views as equal participants in our national dialogue.

“The debate is still alive inside our party. But the post-neoliberals are clearly ascendant,” Murphy told me. He argued that his fellow Democrats need to be more open to dissenting viewpoints, and that expanding the tent will involve a fight: “I am not making an argument that the core Democratic Party do a left turn and reorient our position on choice, climate, or guns. I am arguing that we allow people into the tent … so that we have a little bit more robust conversation, and potentially a little bit more diversity on those issues inside the coalition.”

The soul-searching that is before the Democrats will require liberals to engage with views they find discomfiting, and to reckon with the fact that their social values are out of keeping with the working-class majorities they profess to represent. Democrats must figure out where there is room to compromise. And where compromise is not possible— or truly unjust— they must begin the slow-grinding work of persuasion.

“We cannot successfully engage with people whose inner lives we do not even try to understand,” a recent report  from the stalwartly liberal think tank the Roosevelt Institute concludes. Whether left-wing liberals are open to doing this remains to be seen.

“It’s not clear that if we blow it in two or four years time that there’s another shot at this apple for Dems,” Jennifer Harris, a Hewlett Foundation director and former Biden-administration official, suggested when describing the Democratic Party’s need for a post-neoliberal makeover. In her view, the prize for such a transformation may prove to be not just a near-term political victory, but a Franklin D. Roosevelt–style stranglehold on the electorate: “There is potentially a lot of political spoils.”

Spoils indeed. Many on the left and right agree that the stakes are high, the reward prodigious, and the path forward obvious: Whichever party can credibly combine economic populism with moderate social positions will win elections. There is no mystery here. The problem is not the absence of a political solution but a deficit in political willpower. And the next election, and the elections to come, may well hinge on which party can muster the resolve to finally deliver real populism to the people.

Charlie Sykes’ newsletter discussed America’s failing grades in education in terms of the divisive politics America has adopted. “In math, Americans now lag behind their counterparts in places such as Singapore, South Korea, Britain, and Poland,” he wrote. “Only 7 percent of American students scored at the highest levels in math— far behind the 23 percent in South Korea and Japan, and 41 percent in Singapore, who scored at that level. The decline in math scores is part of a much larger decline in educational performance overall— and an exacerbation of the achievement gap between rich and poor students. But despite the appalling numbers, the educational crisis was barely mentioned during the presidential debates, and there is scant evidence of the political will necessary to address it. Any bipartisan consensus on education has shattered; Trump and Republicans at the state level seem more intent on waging culture wars about gender and religion than tackling achievement gaps. The education initiative that Trump has been most vocal about is his threat to abolish the federal Department of Education (which he is unlikely to achieve, because dismantling the department requires an act of Congress). Meanwhile, many congressional and state-level Democrats are reluctant to push back against either the educational establishment or the teachers’ unions. This dynamic appeared most notably in their failure to resist the unions’ push to keep schools closed during the early pandemic.

He concluded by reminding his readers that “For decades, the consequences of underperformance have also been masked by the influx of international students into American higher education. A 2022 study found that foreign students made up a majority— sometimes as much as 80 percent— of students in U.S. graduate programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Meanwhile, immigrants make up about a quarter of all workers in STEM fields. It’s not yet clear how Trump’s massive crackdown on immigrants could affect opportunities for foreign students, or their willingness to come to the United States. The federal government does not have total power to fix the issues in schools, but with the right amount of political motivation, it could increase efforts to enforce states’ accountability for their students. Once upon a time in America, we would have risen to the challenge, mobilizing our national will and resources to confront the crisis.”