THE WORKING CLASS CAN'T EAT "MEANING"

The Atlantic's Tyler Austin Harper has some thoughts about how Democrats can win back working-class voters they've lost to the GOP:

The politics of the average American are not well represented by either party right now. On economic issues, large majorities of the electorate support progressive positions: They say that making sure everyone has health-care coverage is the government’s responsibility (62 percent), support raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour (62 percent), strongly or somewhat support free public college (63 percent), and are in favor of federal investment in paid family and medical leave (73 percent). They also support more government regulation of a variety of industries including banking (53 percent), social media (60 percent), pharmaceuticals (68 percent), and artificial intelligence (72 percent).

So I guess we're all economic lefties now? Maybe not, but apparently economic populism is the new hotness -- in both parties, according to Harper.

... lately, more political insiders from both parties have been willing to acknowledge the problem and admit that it’s time to move on from neoliberalism, the political ideology that champions market solutions, deregulation, the privatization of public services, and a general laissez-faire approach to the economy.

Yes, Harper really said that "political insiders from both parties" are economic populists now. He and a Democrat he quotes, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, spend quite a bit of time in this piece considering the possibility that Republicans might beat Democrats to the punch by backing and enacting policies that make the non-rich more economically secure.

Let me say this categorically: That will never happen. The core principle of the Republican Party is that the rich must be made more wealthy and less regulated.

A rejection of economic neoliberalism would need to come from Democrats -- but as Harper discusses this, the whole thing begins to seem awfully complicated. Apparently we can't just stop the endless flow of money from the have-nots to the haves. We have to give people meaning.

The movement’s chief exponents believe that neoliberalism has not only created an economic disaster, but its emphasis on ruthless individualism has also created a crisis of political and social meaning....

For many (though not all) post-neoliberals, the heart of their economic vision is “pre-distribution,” a concept popularized by the political scientist Jacob Hacker. Whereas center-left neoliberals tend to favor redistributive tax-and-transfer policies—allowing an unchained market to generate robust growth, and then blunting resulting economic disparities by taking some of the gains from the system’s winners and redistributing them to the system’s working-class “losers,” reducing inequality after the fact—post-neoliberals generally believe that it is better to avoid generating such inequalities in the first place....

“Most people don’t want a handout,” Chris Murphy recently posted on social media. “They want the rules unrigged so they can succeed on their own.”

The implication here is that working-class voters object to redistribution in the abstract. But do they really? They had no objections to the three rounds of pandemic relief they received in 2020 and 2021. They're not grumbling about New York governor Kathy Hochul's plan to send $500 to every family in the state making less than $300,000 and $300 to every individual making less than $150,000. They seem okay with this kind of redistribution because it goes to everyone under a certain income level -- it seems to be for every ordinary citizen, like Social Security and Medicare, which remain extremely popular, and unlike, in their view, student loan relief or real or imagined handouts to undocumented immigrants.

I'm not saying working-class voters oppose better jobs at better wages. But I'm sure they want those because they seem to offer a more solid economic footing than temporary handouts (which are clearly inadequate). I think they want the whole package -- better pay and the government interventions they clearly approve of, as noted in the polls quoted above. And why shouldn't they want all this? Ordinary people have been screwed by the system for decades.

But senators and Atlantic writers are going to fixate on the moral benefits of The Dignity Of Work and miss the point that these people just want life to be fairer economically, however that can happen.

And then the rich donors who tolerate a tiny bit of Democratic redistribution but don't want it to ever get out of hand won't allow the non-rich to get what they really want, so we'll get the rest of the package -- which, of course, is right-wing culture-war populism:

Many Democratic insiders believe that post-neoliberal economic policies alone are not sufficient to win back American workers. Social issues will also need to be reconsidered. [Joseph] Stiglitz pointed to immigration as one place where Democrats may need to compromise, a view he shares with others in his post-neoliberal cohort. Murphy helped write a defeated bipartisan border-security bill that would have added Border Patrol officers and made asylum standards more stringent.... Last year, a hotly discussed book by the socialist journalist John B. Judis and the liberal political scientist Ruy Teixeira likewise packaged a withering critique of neoliberalism with a call to embrace more conservative positions on immigration.

Gun control is another area where flexibility may be prudent in order to be competitive in certain parts of the country. Democrats will have to accommodate people like Dan Osborn, the independent who, though he lost his bid to represent Nebraska in the Senate, outperformed Kamala Harris while combining a vocal defense of the Second Amendment with proudly pro-union politics....

Teixeira and Judis flagged a third topic, gender identity, where Democrats ought to respond to the public’s concerns. That begins by making room for conversations that don’t involve accusations of bigotry, or insisting that the very act of asking questions about terms such as people with the capacity for pregnancy is tantamount to challenging the right of trans Americans to exist or exposing them to harm.

I can guess where this is going: Many Democrats have already joined Republicans as immigration hawks and trans-bashers, and they'll probably move right on guns, too. And then the other half of the bargain -- more money for ordinary Americans -- will somehow never materialize. Democrats won't win back the working class, but Murphy, Harper, Teixiera, and Judis will get some nice book deals. Those books will talk a lot about "meaning" and "the dignity of work." But the rich will still get richer.