Let's Watch As They Continue To Change Their Brands
Antonio Delgado is Lt Gov for New York’s highly unpopular conservative Governor Kathy Hochul. He may “look” like he’s from NYC, but the Rhodes Scholar, Harvard lawyer and former rapper (briefly) was born and raised in Schenectady before being elected the first African-American (and first Latino) elected to Congress from upstate New York. That was in 2018 when he took on Republican incumbent and Trump rubber stamp John Faso and beat him despite incredibly racist ads the GOP ran against him. He beat Faso anyway, by 5.2 points in a district where most of the voters lived in Ulster, Dutchess, Columbia, Rensselaer, Sullivan and Otsego counties.
He talked a good progressive game during the election but, once elected, settled into a role as garden variety, middle-of-the-road establishment Democrat… a lot less exciting than people had hoped he would be. He’s voting record was shitty enough so that when the very right-of-center Hochul was looking for someone to appoint Lt. Gov. she felt fine plucking Delgado out of Congress. He was succeeded by another establishment Democrat, Pat Ryan, who still holds the redrawn, bluer district.
Delgado, reelected with Hochul in 2022, has mostly kept his head down and stayed out of trouble… until Thursday when the NY Times published a guest essay he penned, Democrats, It’s Time to Say Goodbye to Our Neoliberal Era. I want to believe he’s better now than he was when he was in Congress. The essay is a well-earned blast at his own wing of the party. His first premise is that the election we just went through “was a rejection of our party’s leadership.” And his mini-autopsy is on the right track: “The contemporary Democratic Party emerged from the ‘greed is good’ era of the 1980s in part by co-opting pieces of the Reagan agenda. President Bill Clinton built a coalition— part working class, part Wall Street— that led Democrats back to the White House without redefining the political system. The limitations of this ‘third way’ came to a head during the long recession following the financial crisis, when the party was tasked with charting a new direction. The truth is, it never did. Faced with a global economic crisis, leaders of both parties worked to perpetuate a neoliberal order that people no longer trusted. Rather than create an agenda intimately tied to the people’s pain, the Democratic establishment helped rescue the institutions that had just pushed the economy to the brink of collapse, further cementing the public’s view that our political and economic system was rigged for the rich and powerful. Tragically, our party has failed to rescue itself ever since. Trump’s success in 2016 and this month underscored the flaw inherent in the Democratic approach of promising to move forward while looking backward.”
Clamoring to be the savior of democracy, the Democratic Party engendered disdain from the very people it sought to serve— everyday, hard-working Americans fed up with being lied to and squeezed out of opportunity.
Trump wins over these voters because most Americans distrust both major parties. He campaigns like a populist, even though he governs like an oligarch and couldn’t care less about the fact that the top 1 percent has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.
This presents an opportunity for Democrats, but only if we are willing to challenge the systems and institutions that have caused Americans to lose faith in government. Our philosophy must make clear that the real threat to democracy is widening economic inequality and the colossal power of big money in politics. As Franklin Roosevelt said in 1936, “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
The Democratic Party must lay out a new vision of economic security and independence for working families. That requires remembering that the interests of labor are the counterweight to the interests of capital and that our role as public servants is to ensure balance between the two. Not all solutions should be based on the market; the market tends to reward greed, and cultivating greed should never be the mission of a democratic government.
This vision also means committing to policies like universal pre-K, paid family and medical leave, expanded community banking, raising the minimum wage and a public option for health insurance. And it means taking on the grotesque concentration of wealth among the very few and price fixing, which fuels the affordability crisis and widens economic inequality.
The prospect of upsetting the donor class, lobbyists and special interest groups must not prevent us from doing right by our principles. Common sense should rule the day. Yes, we have to secure the border and protect American workers from bad trade deals made in the name of globalization.
The challenge for Democrats now is to prove we can govern. Republicans will control Washington, but we control cities and states across the country. Let’s prove ourselves to be the party of competence by improving people’s lives with homes they can afford, quality health care, clean air and safe drinking water, high-performing schools and reliable transportation. Promoting these public goods can be done in partnership with the private sector, but never in submission to the profit motive.
Blue America never bought into Delgado’s shtik when he ran and we weren’t surprised when he opposed the Green New Deal and built a voting record that earned him a solid “F” in the House. Is he going to help find an alternative to the Democratic Party’s neoliberal agenda? We’ll be watching.
Another Democrat who wants to break up with neoliberalism is one who Blue America did buy into when he first ran for Congress— Chris Murphy (2006). He disappointed us too— joined the New Dems and… well not as bad as Delgado, but kind of like that. Then, in 2012, when Lieberman was finally forced to retire, he ran for his Senate seat and won (against Trumpist clown Linda McMahon)— and has been improving himself ever since! (This week, for example, he joined Bernie to vote NO on Israel's genocide against Palestinians, one of only 19 senators who did.) His ProgressivePunch score is nothing write to home about, but his grade is “B,” although the methodology may be… generous. He was just reelected to his third Senate term without breaking a sweat and outpolling Kamala in Connecticut 1,002,955 (58.6%) to 994,287 (56.4%).
A couple of days ago Sarah Jones interviewed Murphy about the path forward for his party. (He would love to run for president at some point and he had tweeted that the Democratic “tent is too small,” and that it is “time to rebuild the left,” which, he said, “has never fully grappled with the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberalism.” That’s what Jones wanted to discuss with him. She began by asking him how he defines “neoliberalism.” He didn't quite go here, but his response wasn't bad.
“Neoliberalism,” he said, “is a belief that markets and in particular global markets will work for the benefit of the common good with light adjustments here or there by the government. I think neoliberalism is also about the belief in the individual as the hero of every story as opposed to the community or the collective. And so as a result, both Democrats and Republicans have been very reluctant over the past 40 years to do anything to disrupt existing markets, in particular international markets, and have sort of let society and culture and our economy slide away from a focus on the common good, instead believing that we should just align incentives so that each individual is able to have a shot at material wealth. So that to me is kind of the definition that I use in my head… I think there’s a fight inside the Democratic Party today about whether or not neoliberalism has permanently failed. There are still plenty of market believers and market fundamentalists inside the Democratic Party, but I would argue Joe Biden made a pretty material break from neoliberal orthodoxy. His unabashed public support for labor unions, his revitalization of industrial policy, albeit targeted industrial policy, and his work to rebuild American antitrust power was all a recognition that we needed to move beyond our neoliberal failures. And one of my frustrations is that President Biden and Vice-President Harris didn’t lead their economic messaging by talking about their break with neoliberalism, their belief in the need to break up corporate power, their belief in the need to revitalize labor unions. So the policy was really good. I just don’t think the rhetoric always matched the policy.”
Take prescription-drug pricing, for instance. I’m all in on bulk negotiation of drug prices, but that seems pretty small ball to a lot of Americans who just think we should cap the price of prescription drugs without some super-elaborate scheme attached to it. Our solutions can be simpler. And we can also decide when talking about prescription drugs to spend 80 percent of our time talking about how the drug companies are screwing people and 20 percent of our time talking about the solutions, instead of what we do today, which is the exact opposite. I think the other critique I would have is that people are not terribly inspired by handouts.
I’m a supporter of the child tax credit. I didn’t mind forgiving people’s student loans. I like the elevated Obamacare subsidies, but those three things didn’t win as many votes. Because people know that the rules of the economy are rigged. And while they appreciate a little extra money in their pocket, they would much rather the rules get unrigged so that if you wanted to start a bookstore, you wouldn’t be run out of business by Amazon within hours of opening your doors. Families want to know that if one parent wants to stay home to raise the kids for five years, their economy allows for one income at least temporarily, to be enough for a family to live on. And they don’t want that solved just by the government writing them a check. So I think that those are my true critiques that we have to talk about power. We have to argue for simpler, more powerful solutions. We need to spend time critiquing the problem, not just explaining the solution. And we need to focus on unrigging the rules rather than just writing checks to people that make it look as if we’re papering over the rigged rules.
… I worry that we have become a party with a dozen litmus tests. And that in all sorts of ways we telegraph, maybe not through official party policy, but through informal control mechanisms that we don’t really want you at the table if you aren’t with us on abortion, gay rights, guns, climate, and a host of other really important issues. And I saw this a year and a half ago when I listened to this guy, Oliver Anthony, sing the song about “Rich Men North of Richmond.” I heard him talk about the soullessness of modern work. I heard him rail against the corporate and billionaire class, and I publicly knew that we should be in a conversation with the people who are listening to his song and finding it so compelling. But the song also had some kind of nasty conservative tropes. It referenced at least one QAnon conspiracy. And the reaction to my suggestion was pretty universal condemnation from the conventional online left who wanted to label Anthony and his followers as racists and not even worthy of a conversation. They’re maybe backwater racists, right?
And so to me, that’s the signaling that we send, and here’s why it’s important. You’re much more likely to convert somebody if they’re inside the tent than outside the tent. Especially today when we have these cordoned-off information ecosystems. You have virtually no chance to convince somebody who is anti-choice to rethink their positioning if they are not inside your tent because they’re listening to people who only agree with them. There is plenty of evidence to show that when our tent was much bigger and more diverse, we were actually able to make pretty significant progress on issues, even on the issues where we had inside disagreements. Even though our coalition wasn’t universally focused on environmental protection during the ’70s and ’80s, we were able to pass significant legislation protecting the environment. So I think from a coalition, from a political coalition-building standpoint, it’s criminal to not grow your tent. But I also am not convinced that we wouldn’t be better off when it comes to winning on the issues we care about if we had some people who disagreed with us inside.
Yesterday Max Cohen reported that Murphy, taking this beyond the media “is circulating a polling memo arguing that Democrats need to embrace populism to win back working-class voters… arguing that a ‘populist message of power deconcentration is a truly unifying message— across income brackets and political ideologies… Democrats must reclaim our identity as the party of the working class,’ Murphy wrote in the memo. His solution? Have Democrats talk about ‘why corporations and billionaires have too much’ and why Democrats ‘are the only party that is serious about putting that power back in the hands of workers.’ Here’s one tidbit from the polling, conducted internally by the Murphy campaign in Connecticut: Most of the respondents, 82%, ‘either strongly or somewhat agree that one of the biggest problems facing America today is that a handful of corporations and economic elites have too much power and the government is doing too little about it.’ Seven in 10 Republicans, 92% of Democrats and 81% of independents agreed with the statement.”