INTRODUCTION.

A PEOPLE’S MANIFESTO: UNPOPULAR POLICIES AND THE POPULAR MIND

The official rant these days is that the economy is in recovery from the Great Recession of 2008. The economy owned by those in the upper income brackets, the 1% or more broadly the 5% or even the 20%, has certainly recovered. The stock market is at record levels, profits for many major corporations are the highest in history, CEO and upper management salaries have spiked, and the housing market has nearly recovered its pre-recession value, according to a recent report by the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

The not-so-official rant, however, is that we’re still mired in recession. The unemployment rate, a defective measure anyway that excludes those who stop looking for work and fails to reflect the epidemic of under-employment, remains relatively high. Wages are stagnant, small businesses are still being wiped out, foreclosures continue in the communities most impacted by the sub-prime loan policies the banks profited from, and housing values remain repressed for many in the lower and middle classes, with many homes still under water. These values, again according to the St. Louis Fed, will likely never return for this sector. This is especially worrisome since these values were the source of retirement and start-up businesses for many citizens before the recession.

Since the new jobs being created are mostly low-wage and temporary ones, what will “recovery” mean to the struggling victims when we return to pre-recession employment levels? Taken together these deficits could retard the catch-up process for generations. The increasing spread between these different economies, an issue even before the recession, is increasing inequality to the point where we’ll need an overhaul of the system before we can return to the conditions that expanded the middle class during the fifties and sixties.

What’s striking is that seven years into this crisis we still don’t have a credible policy to deal with these issues. President Obama’s responses to emerging problems and issues are mostly ad hoc reactions. His approach lacks a consistency of purpose and action. Congress has been polarized for some time, and is mostly responsive to the funders that promise to get it elected in the next cycle of voting, and not to the people who clearly, as polls show, want real change. The people’s will is obviously being thwarted by a broken system.

Have the victims who occupy this “other economy” been abandoned, and their fates left blowing in the wind by an oligarchy so entrenched in power that it only wants to reproduce itself? Are they too alienated to at least hit the streets in sufficient numbers and make some noise? It seems years of abandonment have left them with little sense of empowerment or hope for real change. And now they’ve learned to ignore the process that ignores them. In this shared refusal the institutions that once served the lower and middle classes, and helped secure and protect their piece of the American Dream, have been reshaped or eliminated by the oligarchy.

Consider education, traditionally the vehicle for the excluded to improve their state in life. It was central to the broad policy of inclusion during the era of middle class expansion, roughly between 1945 and 1973. It was affordable. Higher education in California, for example, was tuition-free until the 70s, providing many citizens access to upward mobility. The arrival of perpetual budget-cutting, to a great extent a response to new tax reductions for the upper tier of citizens, helped reverse this trend. Budget-cutting was a national affectation, and it contributed to the erosion of the safety net as well. The US has one of the weakest welfare systems in the advanced industrial world. This forerunner of “austerity” politics severely weakened the New Deal/Great Society legacy premised on greater inclusion. TANF, the 1996 “revision” of the welfare law that removed the right to benefits, dealt this institution a severe blow. The decline of unions has been responsible for the flattening of wages over the past forty years, leaving us with a low-wage economy where far too many citizens must work multiple jobs to survive, as Barbara Ehrenreich’s masterful book, Nickel and Dimed, documents.

And housing, which traditionally helped many advance into and through stages of the middle class, lacks a policy design like what helped expand home ownership during healthier economic times. It has been dwarfed by bubble economics and policies that encourage speculation in land and property, all of which mostly benefit those at the top.

These deficits leave many unequipped to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even if there were good options in the real economy to choose from.

Bipartisan Bloc

The problem is that a bipartisan bloc of establishment insiders, conservative republicans as well as democrats, owns the narrative for change, and this commonsense has little to do with practical policy solutions. This is very curious since, as Ian Masters noted recently on Pacifica’s “Background Briefing,” their policies were responsible for the 2008 collapse and our continuing economic woes. To compound the irony, many on the fringe work to block Obama’s team from doing anything whatsoever, even sacrificing workers to budget-balancing schemes. They’re now embracing moments in the past when we were supposedly freer, before the New Deal and certainly before any deals that included ordinary citizens. It seems that turning back can make you feel and appear liberated in the face of crises.

But how has it come to pass that no change, the undoing of change and a return to the past can be sold as change? Liberals want to go back as well, but to a different moment with greater opportunity and more equality. Perhaps Obama’s “hope and change” was so empty and disappointing to many conservatives, and even some liberals, that they now distrust promises of moving ahead, and welcome a turn back to better times when change didn’t seem necessary. And certainly before the left’s heyday of the 60s when issues like civil rights and feminism, and the anti-poverty and anti-war movements, stamped society with the pedigree of future shock because of so much fast-paced change. The right does get hyper-motivated in the 70s to erase these advances from memory.

And they’ve been very successful since then at fighting to undo change under the guise of providing it. In the 70s they got very well organized and built the base to elect Ronald Reagan, achieving the success that would help secure future gains. They were able to change the way we view society in relation to government.

The liberal establishment has always been a weak agent for change, mostly talking progress and legislating individual advantages without paying serious attention to structures and institutions. But the crisis of liberalism is married to this conservative success. This crisis is reflected already in the 1968 election when the democrats chose a candidate, Hubert Humphrey, whom many felt was not all that different from Richard Nixon. When Nixon won, the “radical” left moved to the fringe, and groups like SDS dropped out of politics. The democrats floundered for a few years, vesting its fortunes in the anti-war McGovern wing of the party for the 1972 elections. They lost again, by one of the largest margins in history, and their players moved toward the center, fearing their party might cease to be a serious threat.

Faced with the greater presence of this conservative bloc, which tended to pull democrats to the right, they became more and more like the republicans over the course of the decade in order to restore their competitive position.

This helps explain why there are now fewer liberal democrats in Congress, and even fewer progressives, to represent marginalized groups. And it also helps explain why the democrats’ proposals and policies are often lite versions of what the republicans offer. They’re for balanced budgets but not as urgently, and with a different mix of trade-offs between spending cuts and revenue increases; less austerity; more taxes on the rich but no progressive restructuring of the tax code; more regulation of corporations without any appreciable resistance to deregulation; free markets with a dash of planning, etc. With regard to defense both are players, as the reactions to Syria, the Ukraine “crisis” and ISIL showed.

As polls and focus groups reveal, people can easily identify and repeat the republican pitch but are fuzzy about what the democrats stand for. Perhaps we rush to embrace the story that sounds and feels better in the absence of clearly explained alternatives that make sense. Are we lured by images when options appear similar and we’re unable to clearly discern the differences?

The 2012 election results suggest that while the democrats picked up a few good seats in Congress, and Elizabeth Warren’s victory is especially notable, not much has changed in terms of the balance of power. Obama’s subsequent speeches were mostly a mild redux of his “hope and change” singsong. He renewed his support for the jobs bill the republicans blocked some months before the election, and to raise taxes on the super rich, claiming the voters gave the democrats a mandate to reverse course and improve the lives of the middle class. But business as usual quickly replaced the rhetoric. He...