How Lack of Political Imagination Resulted in Trump Threatening to End a Civilization |
I’ve been hearing from a lot of candidates and campaigns lately. This one is for them.
In 2015, I sold my food trucks to volunteer for Bernie Sanders. That turned into co-founding Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, then helping elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the US House of Representatives. I worked as her strategist and communications director for a few years after that. I’ve spent the better part of a decade pretty close to the center of the progressive movement. The following is what I learned.
Back in 2016, Hillary Clinton said Bernie Sanders’ policies were “fairy dust and rainbows.” The point wasn’t just that big things were hard. The point was that big things weren’t needed. The system was basically working. America was great. If you thought otherwise you weren’t serious, or you weren’t paying attention, or you were the kind of person who gets dismissed at Brookings as insufficiently realistic.
That was the consensus. Serious people. Credentialed people. New York Times columnists and think tank fellows and television regulars, all reading from the same hymnal. Don’t rock the boat. Take what the system offers. Be grateful.
That consensus didn’t protect us from Donald Trump. It elected him. Twice.
Because when someone came along and said the system is rigged and I’ll burn it down, 80 million people said, "Finally." They were wrong about the messenger. They were completely right about the problem. The “things are actually pretty good” position was the most destabilizing thing anyone could have said. That realism was actually radicalism. And we’re living in the results.
Progressive politics has the same capacity problem that the rest of the country does. We don’t have enough aligned people in power, and we can’t fix that one seat at a time any more than we can fix the housing crisis one subsidy at a time.
The market doesn’t work for the things people actually need to live. Not anymore. Maybe it once did. It doesn’t now and the evidence is everywhere.
We spend $6 trillion a year on healthcare. More than any country on earth, by a lot, and we rank last among wealthy nations in outcomes. Last. Tens of millions of people are one diagnosis away from financial ruin. Rural hospitals are closing. The market has had decades to fix this. It hasn’t fixed it. It has extracted wealth from it while delivering less.
Or consider the mRNA vaccines. The federal government funded the foundational research for 35 years. When COVID hit, the government paid Moderna and Pfizer billions more to finish the job and purchase the doses. Moderna and Pfizer then walked away with over $100 billion in combined revenue. The public got the bill twice, once as taxpayers funding the research, once as patients paying the prices, and the companies kept the patents.
The same pattern shows up in housing. We have been short on housing for decades. The market hasn’t built our way out of it. Cities that people actually want to live in are unaffordable. But so are the rural areas. I live in Lenoir City, Tennessee. Population about 11,000. Here a studio apartment runs you a thousand dollars a month.
And what did our nominee offer? Kamala Harris proposed a $25,000 grant for first-time home buyers. I understand the instinct. But the issue is supply. You pump $25,000 into a market that isn’t building enough homes then prices go up. The money flows straight through the buyer and into the seller or the landlord and the developer, and nothing new gets built. It’s the same story as healthcare. We keep pouring money into broken systems I assume because it seems like a logical solution. But it only makes the problem worse.
Too many people think of American problems as spending problems. But if I walked into my local grocery store and wanted 15,000 pounds of beef, it wouldn’t matter how much money I had. You can’t buy what doesn’t exist. We don’t have enough housing. We don’t have enough doctors. We don’t have enough childcare slots. Pumping money into markets that aren’t producing those things doesn’t produce them. It inflates the price of whatever scraps are left. You fix a capacity problem by building and training, not injecting more cash.
We built our way out of the Depression not just by writing checks but by doing it ourselves. The government built water and irrigation infrastructure that turned the Central Valley into the food supply for half the country. It strung electrical wire to farms and small towns across the rural South and Midwest that private utilities had written off as unprofitable. We built the industrial capacity that became the Arsenal of Democracy. That was public investment. That was us deciding some things are too important to leave to the market.
We don’t believe that anymore. Or rather, our leaders don’t. Those few that do get stopped before they can do anything about it.
AOC won. She scared people badly enough that they spent millions trying to destroy her. She had the right diagnosis. She had the right policies. She had the courage. The things she ran on didn’t happen. Not because she wasn’t good enough. Because she walked in alone. A seat won in isolation gets absorbed. The machinery of this system is designed to absorb individual attacks.
Progressive politics has the same capacity problem that the rest of the country does. We don’t have enough aligned people in........