Going green

Joe Biden’s win did not translate into Democratic party wins. The party lost seats in the House, failed to take back the Senate, did not turn a single governorship, and lost massively in down-ballot races across the country. That leaves a majority of statehouses in Republican hands for the all-important, once-a-decade redrawing of Congressional districts. Save for Biden’s win, itself an isolated event, a more comprehensive failure would be hard to conceive.

Without the noxious, corrupt, and catastrophically failed Donald Trump to run against, Democrats do not have a compelling story or a compelling set of economic policies to run on. If they did, they wouldn’t have lost so massively down ballot. This bodes poorly – or worse – for their prospects in the 2022 midterms.

Fortunately, the Green New Deal, or something equivalent, can revive Democratic chances in the next election and over future decades. It can do that by directly addressing the impetus that gave rise to Trump and Trumpism. In the bargain, GND can restore the competitiveness of the US economy and secure a major advance in the fight against climate change. There is no other policy construct on the horizon that has any chance of delivering so many salutary outcomes.

Trumpism is not an accidental phenomenon. It has been in gestation for over four decades. It began in the 1980s, with Reagan, when the US made the explicit policy decision to transfer massive shares of national income and wealth from the working and middle classes to those who were already the most-wealthy. This was the notorious ‘Supply Side Economics’.

Supply Side Economics lowered tax rates on the highest income earners from 71 percent to 35 percent. It did this without any requirement that the Titans of Capitalism invest their new-found gains in the US economy. So, they didn’t. They invested them in the Asian Tigers: Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, and China. Over the next four decades, US financiers and industrialists moved trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of factories, and tens of millions of high-paying working-class jobs out of the country, mainly to Asia.

The consequence was that tens of millions of poorly educated working-class whites lost their high-paying jobs and their affluent livelihoods. It is their rage at the system that inflicted this life-loss on them which forms the core of Trumpism. That rage is amplified by the ascent of minorities over the same period, with poorly-educated whites seeing not just their incomes and economic security devastated, but their relative social standing undermined as well. It is social humiliation compounding economic devastation and its effect is all too real.

Unless Biden and the Democratic party reverse this dynamic, by restoring high-paying jobs to tens of millions of working-class citizens, Trumpism will only grow.

Excerpted: ‘How the Green New Deal Can Save Joe Biden and America’

Commondreams.org