Centrism Is the Wrong Prescription in the Age of Trump
Deval Patrick, former two-term governor of Massachusetts who left office and joined one of the nation’s more famous money movers, Bain Capital, has announced he’s running for president. I’ll say it again: WTF?
Patrick enters the race at an odd time. More than a half dozen would-be candidates have participated in the process, taking to the debate stage and putting their cards on the table in a battle over policy ideas and electability that Patrick (and Michael Bloomberg, who’s likely to join the race shortly) has sat out.
Patrick’s argument points to one made by Barack Obama early in his campaign: That the Democrats should run on unity. Obama, in The Audacity of Hope, his campaign book, made a fetish of bipartisanship and pointed to the execrable Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut senator who bolted the party when he lost a primary, as a lodestar.
This left Obama at the mercy of the extremists who had already taken over the Republican Party, men who explicitly said they had no interest in reaching across the aisle and then blamed Obama for not listening to them.
Patrick’s main argument betrays this kind of thinking. He told The New York Times that the vibrant and necessary debate taking place among Democrats over ideas was divisive — mischaracterizing much of the progressive side of the debate in the process.
“We seem to be migrating to, on the one camp, sort of nostalgia — let’s just get rid, if you will, of the incumbent president and we can go back to doing what we used to do,” he said, an implicit shot at Mr. Biden’s call for a return to normalcy. “Or, it’s our way, our big idea, or no way,” he continued, taking up a criticism that Mr. Biden has leveled at Ms. Warren in recent days.
“Neither of those, it seems to me, seizes the moment to pull the nation together and bring some humility,” Mr. Patrick said.
The Times, deep in its story, hints at the real reason for Patrick’s announcement (and Bloomberg’s public flirtation) — that there is “unease among some Democrats,” which should be read as the money men in the party, “around the current state of the race.” Three candidates — the centrist/nostalgist Joe Biden, the progressive technocrat Elizabeth Warren, and the Socialist Bernie Sanders — have remained near the top of the polls throughout the campaign, with different candidates sliding into the fourth-place slot at different moments. The current flavor of the month is Peter Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who has focused his campaign on the same kind of stale unity language we are already hearing from Patrick, while attempting to stay above the policy fray.
This seems to contradict the Times’ contention that “no candidate has yet emerged as a dominant force,” unless they mean that no one has run away with the race. We forget that Hillary Clinton appeared to be that “dominant force” as late as December 2007, holding a 45–27 lead in the polls over Obama, with John Edwards at 15 percent.
Donald Trump’s presidency hangs over all of this, of course, which leaves many Democrats claiming only one qualification matters: the ability to defeat Trump. A chief feature of this argument is that Democrats cannot have any association with left-leaning policies for fear that they will drive votes to the other side — an argument the part has been making in every campaign since the Nixon landslide of 1972.
This is not 1972 — nor is it 1992, when the right-centrist Bill Clinton won in a three-way race. Trump has upended the debate, but not in the ways we are used to. Trump is a proto-fascist, a right-wing demagogue who has fused economic populism with strongman rhetoric, racism, and Christian Dominionism. Democrats can run to the past, like Biden, or pretend that moderation will win back swing voters, and they may squeak past Trump, which is the primary short-term goal. What it does not do is address the very real anxieties that exist among the American electorate that allowed someone like Trump to rise in the first place.
Trump is not the disease. He is just the ugliest manifestation of it we have seen — like an abscess on the gums that indicates an infection. Remove the abscess and the infection remains.
The disease is capitalism itself, which is designed to maximize profit and which is driving the system collapse we are experiencing. Widening income inequality and accelerating environmental decay — which contribute to resource wars, despotism, colonialism and empire building, and eventually the essentially forced migration of millions around the globe — must be addressed, and they can’t be as long as the greed that is central to all capitalist systems is left unchecked.
That’s why the Green New Deal, which remains a rough blueprint, focuses so much on income inequality, universal health care, and other issues that seem unrelated to the environment, and why wealth and financial transaction taxes, labor union empowerment, a jobs guarantee and living wage, free college, and a democratic foreign policy that privileges human rights and diplomacy should be at the center of any Democratic Party platform.
The centrists in the race like Patrick, Biden, Buttigieg, and most of those who have fallen to the side, disagree.
“I don’t think that wealth is the problem. I think greed is the problem,” Patrick told the Times, adding that “taxes should go up on the most prosperous and the most fortunate,” but “not as a penalty.”
Why not as a penalty? The most prosperous have gotten that way by sucking much of the cash from the system and tucking it away in their own pockets. Some — like Tom Steyer, George Soros, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg — have engaged in philanthropy, funding educational, environmental, and political foundations and campaigns that have had some positive effects. But let’s not fool ourselves. This ultimately is anti-democratic, replacing the will of the populace with a kind of noblesse oblige — the rich will fix things through their largesse, choosing the issues that matter to them and expecting us to be grateful when their priorities just happen to coincide with ours.
This is how we should read the objections by Gates, Mark Cuban and others to Elizabeth Warren’s rather mild wealth tax proposal. Gates, speaking at a conference organized by The New York Times, told Andrew Ross Sorkin that “he agrees with the super rich paying higher taxes, but that at some point, ultra high taxes can be counter-productive.”
(M)any of the super rich got there by taking big chances to start companies, and super high taxes become a disincentive to build those companies, which ultimately create the wealth that makes high taxes and philanthropy possible.
“You really want the incentive system to be there, and you can go a long way without threatening that,” Gates said.
The language here is important. Gates is defending a particular definition of wealth at the same time that he is allowing the reader and listener to conflate it with a more benign definition. Wealth means both accumulated assets and the state of being rich of having an abundance, and Gates is an example of the latter. He is defending the latter, even as far too many Americans — and citizens around the world — lack any resources.
Nearly 90 percent of accumulated assets in the United States are owned by just 20 percent of the population, which also takes in about two thirds of the income generated from work and other sources, as Equitable Growth points out.
This wealth disparity is compounded by the inequitable distribution of income this chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities indicates.
The wealth issue is also a race issue. As Equitable Growth reports, blacks and Latinos own a fraction of the wealth of white families.
Median wealth for families in which the survey respondent was white and not Hispanic or Latino in 2016 was $171,000. Median wealth for families in which the survey respondent was black or African American and not Hispanic or Latino was $17,000, and median wealth for families in which the survey respondent was Hispanic or Latino was $21,000.
Conservative orthodoxy in both parties has long attributed this disparity to non-economic factors.
Conservative orthodoxy in both parties has long attributed this disparity to non-economic factors. As Adolph Reed wrote earlier this year in The New Republic, during the years between Nixon and Clinton a consensus had developed in which “Conservatives attributed black socioeconomic inequalities to bad values; liberals attributed them to bad values and racism.” That led to a reductive “decoupl(ing)” of race and class leading “racism” to become “increasingly amorphous as a charge or diagnosis — a blur of attitudes, utterances, individual actions, and patterned disparities, an autonomous force that acts outside of historically specific social relations.”
Today it serves as a single, all-purpose explanation for mass incarceration, the wealth gap, the wage gap, police brutality, racially disproportionate rates of poverty and unemployment, slavery, the Southern Jim Crow regime, health disparities, the drug war, random outbursts of individual bigotry, voter suppression, and more.
While race and racism are important factors, they cannot be disconnected from economics. Capitalism’s brutal logic hits people of color hardest not just because of simple racism, but because race historically has been used as a stand-in for citizenship and Americanness. Elites have long understood this, making a point to fan the flames of racism and resentment and, in turn, making class solidarity impossible. Reed points to an earlier time in which left movements saw direct links between race, gender, and class struggles. Those “leftists saw those struggles as inextricable from the more general goal of social transformation along egalitarian lines; they properly understood the battles for racial and gender equity as constitutive elements of the struggle for working-class power.”
Racism is a significant and legitimate concern, as I’ve written repeatedly, but we cannot ignore the class issues that should be at the forefront of the debate of the 2020 election.Trump is playing his version of the race card by trafficking in a variety of racist, sexist, and religious slurs, and he’s been successful because his language plays both to a white supremacist underbelly and to whites who feel the economy is moving beyond them. Absent a strongly left-populist message, the middle-American middle and working class are left to their resentments, ripe for appeals to racial rather than class solidarity.
Patrick has made it clear that, like the other milquetoast centrists in the race, he has no interest in left-populism, which calls into question his implication that he is the one who can seize (the moment to pull the nation together and bring some humility.”