How To Win In 2020

What's more important to Democratic primary voters-- candidates' visions for a post-Trump America or who is most likely to beat Trump in the election? In a NY Times piece yesterday--Democrats Want to Run on Issues in 2020. But Does Beating Trump Matter Most?-- Jonathan Martin asserts that "the most consequential political question facing the Democratic Party is whether liberals will insist on imposing policy litmus tests on 2020 presidential hopefuls, or whether voters will rally behind the candidate most capable of defeating the president even if that Democrat is imperfect on some issues." In other words, will the corrupt Democratic Establishment that sold low-info primary voters Hillary, be able to now sell a broken down old hack and avatar of the status quo-ante, Biden, based on a lack of knowledge about how truly vile a political career he had before being white-washed as Obama's vice president?

Most polls-- though not all-- show Biden besting Trump more easily than any of the other candidates who would also beat Trump. Biden's ageless record as a public official show he would be the clear lesser of two evils in a matchup against Trump. But who wants an evil, even a lesser evil? Martin wrote that "these dual priorities-- and which one is emphasized more in the coming primary race-- will help determine how the party approaches 2020. Will candidates sprint to the left on issues and risk hurting themselves with intraparty policy fights and in the general election? Or will they keep the focus squarely on Mr. Trump and possibly disappoint liberals by not being bolder on policy?" A status quo journalist from head to toe, Martin asserts that "the two paths may help determine the electoral fortunes of potential left-wing candidates"-- he offers Bernie as the example, though he could be talking about Warren or Merkley-- and the more conservative establishment ones like Biden, Bloomberg, Frackenlooper and McAuliffe. And then there are the candidates who try to determine where they are politically via polls and focus testing, careerists with sketchy records like Kamala Harris, Beto, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, "who have a history of appealing to both liberals and moderates and drawing ire from some leftists for not being aggressive enough on policy."

Senator Elizabeth Warren showed one way of dealing with these party tensions on her first campaign swing as a presidential candidate to Iowa last weekend. Ms. Warren chose not to talk about Medicare for All, a signature issue for the ascendant left. But she seized every opportunity before overwhelmingly white audiences to highlight challenges facing people of color.

In doing so, Ms. Warren signaled to voters that she believes addressing matters of race and identity will prove as crucial to winning over Democrats as proving her bona fides on every element of economic populism.

If opposing the Iraq War was the crucial red line for Democratic candidates in 2008, many in the party believe that proving oneself as the antidote to Mr. Trump and his brand of incendiary politics will become the ultimate litmus test in 2020, more than demonstrating policy purity. Yet some activists want both: fierce resistance to Mr. Trump and unwavering fidelity to the left’s catechism of issues.

Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who is eying a Senate race in 2020, said that while many voters will expect the presidential hopefuls to meet threshold tests of being progressive, the most important factors in the race are going to be an ability to inspire the party’s voters and defeat Mr. Trump.

“I don’t believe the electorate is going to be so purist that they’re going to knock somebody out because they’re not 100 percent down-the-line,” said Mr. Gallego, who added, “People are excited about candidates they think have a potential to win.”

Or, as Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland put it: “If there’s a litmus test, it’s going to be righting the country.”

Voters, said Mr. Cummings, “are scared.”

This is exactly what alarms some on the left, who do not want the perceived threat of Mr. Trump and horse race political concerns to undercut major policy priorities.

“Fear is a useful tactic to override underlying ideological debate,” said Matt Stoller, a populist writer and former congressional aide, recalling that similar emotions about finding “electable” Democrats in the George W. Bush era led the party to embrace moderate politicians and policies to the frustration of many on the left.

As Mr. Stoller noted, much of the recent left-wing criticism against Mr. O’Rourke, the former Texas representative, was rooted in the dread that his nomination would represent a triumph of he-can-win, personality-based politics-- and that he would mark a continuation rather than a break from the incremental economic policies of the last two Democratic presidents.

When many on the left listen to Mr. O’Rourke or Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, another likely candidate, plead for a better kind of politics or healing the country after Mr. Trump, they hear an Obama-style call for stylistic change rather than a case for truly confronting entrenched power.

“We tried that and it didn’t work,” Mr. Stoller said. “And it’s pretty obvious to everybody now that it didn’t work.”

Mr. Trump’s fixation on immigration only makes it easier for a would-be candidate like Mr. O’Rourke to skirt questions about his specific policy views and instead draw broad contrasts between himself and the president on issues related to the border and the character of the country, as he has done on social media in recent days.

He and Ms. Warren are not the only potential contenders road-testing a message that spotlights their differences with the president.

“Trump is a lying populist; Democrats need an optimistic realist,” said former Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, who is considering a presidential run and trumpets his progressive record on race, gender and sexual orientation but believes that Democrats must resist the temptation of lashing the business community.

“We can’t go through this campaign demonizing folks,” Mr. McAuliffe said.

Another question ahead of 2020 is which candidate will be able to portray himself or herself most effectively as the antidote to Trump and Trumpism. Will this contrast be rendered most vividly by nominating a candidate whose platform differs from the president’s policies the most; one who can speak most articulately about changing course; or one who-- through their age, gender or race-- represents the starkest departure from the president?

In the midterms, Democratic primary voters rallied behind a historic number of female congressional candidates who spanned the party’s ideological gamut.

And some Democratic strategists believe that the only real issue-based tests that primary voters will put to candidates revolve around matters of race and identity.

“I don’t think you can be for stop-and-frisk in a primary,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster, referring to the policing tactic of Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, that critics say targets black people. “It’s less about economic issues than culture and issues of the heart.”

Anyone else?

Yet to supporters of Mr. Sanders and some others on the left, it is folly to assume that voter hunger to defeat Mr. Trump will somehow obviate the need to offer a bold economic agenda. In their eyes, pursuing an aggressive populist agenda is essential to proving to voters that you will confront Mr. Trump.

“The party is in a different place-- we need somebody to stand up and defend our core progressive values,” Ben Tulchin, Mr. Sanders’s pollster, said. “And if you’re waffling on key issues like Medicare for All, or if you lack clarity on it because you want to give yourself flexibility in governing, voters will see that.”

This moment, said Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, will require a candidate who sounds clarion opposition to Mr. Trump on race and gender while also embracing a full-spectrum, left-wing agenda.

“It has to be somebody who is really willing to take on race, racism and immigration, but also is willing to take on these big corporations in a way that just hasn’t happened,” said Ms. Jayapal, a rising member co-chair of the House’s Progressive Caucus.

To strategists who worked on the 2018 midterms, however, the enormous attention being paid to a handful of outspoken liberals like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York misses the non-ideological approach of many of the party’s successful candidates for governor and Congress.

“There wasn’t a demand among Democratic primary voters for litmus tests,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster.

And Ms. Greenberg, who is working for former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, a possible 2020 candidate, contends that electoral viability will be more central in the coming Democratic presidential primary than in any recent election.

“Trump has framed our politics,” she said. “Everything is a reaction to Trump.”

Or, as Mr. Belcher put it: “This anger about our divisions and where our country is going will be front and center-- and the candidate who can speak to this division and be a direct contrast to Trump is going to do really well.”

On Monday morning, New York Magazine published an important essay by Eric Levitz on the role of conservative elites in contemporary politics: We Need Less of Them. "Four decades ago," he wrote, "America’s rapacious capitalists and conservative moralists were singing in harmony. As the former lamented liberalism’s assault on free enterprise (i.e., their own power and profitability), the latter decried its corruption of the urban poor’s moral rectitude. In their collective telling, the welfare state didn’t just crowd out private investment or burden taxpayers-- it also fostered a culture of single-motherhood, idleness, and instant gratification; a.k.a. a 'culture of poverty'." Dream solution to all the country's problems: "slashing the safety net would facilitate tax cuts for the rich, and a rediscovery of the Protestant work ethic for the inner cities’ indigent. Curbing inflation would restore capital’s profitability, and discourage workers’ profligacy. And as poor men returned to work, and poor women lost their handouts, the patriarchal family would rise from the ashes of the welfare state-- and social reproduction would once again be financed by women’s uncompensated labor, instead of the progressive income tax. Free market dynamism and moral traditionalism would go together like Ronald Reagan and Pat Robertson." The "invisible hand," he wrote, didn't play ball:

[T]he one percent’s ascent coincided with the traditional family’s decline. Deregulated markets didn’t reinforce conservative moral values-- they sucked capital from the most conservative parts of America, and concentrated it in coastal Gomorrahs. Breaking inflation broke the labor movement-- and thus, the single-income family. Male wages fell, women’s liberation continued apace, and marriage rates plummeted. Adding insult to injury, the corporate titans of the second Gilded Age stopped feigning solidarity with the moral majority, and started getting “woke.”

Now, the face of the long-term underemployed has white skin and a rural zip code-- and the base of the Republican Party has grown less affluent and suburban. And all of this has led some conservatives to voice a heretical thought: If “big government” can induce moral degeneracy and cultural decline, perhaps big business can do the same?

Who's been addressing this (before putting themselves forward as potential nominees)? Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley. From his announcement speech this past weekend, you might think Julian Castro has been as well. But you'd be wrong. His record is... uninspiring. And the others? Mostly on the wrong side of this divide, especially Biden, Bloomberg and McAuliffe. But Gillibrand, Beto and Kamala as well. And the stakes of this argument, beyond the election, "are," wrote Levitz, "considerable. The notion that economic well-being lies downstream of moral health has been indispensable to American conservatism. If cultural values determine material conditions, then helping the poor requires spreading the gospel; if material conditions shape cultural values, then helping them requires spreading the wealth around-- and that is one conclusion that conservative thought was born to avoid." Levitz, of course, had characters like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney in mind. But it's not too much of a stretch to look at it through a lens fashioned out of the records of Biden, Bloomberg, McAuliffe and early-day Gillibrand and Booker. "Reconciling this ideological obligation with rural America’s lived reality," Levitz continued, "is no easy task for plutocracy’s apologists. After all, deindustrialization wasn’t a product of blue-collar workers’ moral choices, but of corporations’ financial ones. And it is hard to argue that the disappearance of stable, blue-collar employment played no role in reshaping civic culture-- or depressing labor force participation-- in the places that 'market forces' left behind."

The Gilded Age is not remembered as a time of “left-wing moral relativism.” If anything, America’s moral culture was even less permissive in that era than it was during the postwar period of corporate responsibility that Brooks champions. And yet, the hegemony of traditional, Christian values did not compel Gilded Age corporations to put social responsibility above profit maximization. On the contrary, the barons of industry sent Appalachian children into the coal mines until the dust consumed their lungs; paid industrial workers sub-subsistence wages and then met their strikes with gunfire; used their power over the state to preserve a deflationary monetary policy that turned small farmers into ruined debtors; and claimed a share of economic growth so disproportionate, ordinary Americans’ average height and life expectancy declined during the closing decades of the late 19th century, even as the country attained unprecedented prosperity.

Changes in moral norms cannot explain the comparative benevolence of New Deal–era elites. But changes in the balance of power between labor and capital can.

The Great Depression wiped out a great deal of ruling-class wealth, and opened up political space for progressive economic reform. The New Deal gave trade unions the protection of the state, and World War II enabled them to drastically expand their membership. Robust antitrust laws limited the scope of corporate consolidation, the Bretton Woods system constrained capital mobility, and confiscatory top tax rates disincentivized the contemporary equivalent of billion-dollar salaries. Meanwhile, the emergence of a second great power-- with a competing, putatively egalitarian economic model-- served as an external deterrent to the one percent’s rapacity.

In other words: Mid-century American corporations didn’t funnel a smaller share of their profits to top executives, shareholders, and overseas tax havens because they were morally superior; they did so because they were politically and economically weaker. They did not choose to devote a higher proportion of their earnings to labor compensation. Their workers had the unions and political clout necessary to demand as much.

These material conditions may have fostered a more communitarian corporate ideology and elite self-conception. If so, such moral norms proved highly contingent: When growth slowed in the 1970s-- and high wages ceased to appear compatible with high profits-- corporate America wasted little time in prioritizing profitability above noblesse oblige. Overseas competition, culture wars, and stagflation had badly weakened organized labor. Reagan didn’t kick the unions while they were down so much as he disemboweled them.

...Ideas matter. But they matter within limits. American history demonstrates that vast disparities in economic power have predictable effects on the “moral norms” of for-profit enterprises. When companies see a competitive advantage in exploiting workers, bribing legislators, evading taxes, or polluting the environment, sternly worded New York Times columns will not stop them. Only an organized working class can. All that “us versus them” talk might make David Brooks uncomfortable. But the choice before us is between “tribal emotionalism” and barbarism.