When it comes to issues like social justice, abortion, feminism, race, affirmative action, deportations, LGBT, opposing-Trump, etc., the Democratic Party shows plenty of energy and zest in fighting.
When it comes to things like inflation, a higher minimum wage, healthcare reform, income inequality, higher housing…the Ds seem a lot more lackluster and don’t push as much. There has been no serious movement to budge the federal minimum wage above the $7.25/hour it has been stuck at since 2008. Health insurance is as predatory as ever. Income inequality is worse than ever before. Many millions of American households are being pinched brutally by grocery and other price hikes.
Yet if you were to interview a random voter in America, last autumn - “Hey, can you tell me what Kamala Harris’ plan is to reduce inflation?” or, “Can you tell me what the Democrats are going to do to increase wages?” - that voter would have probably “uhhhh…ehhh…” and been a blank. He would have had a hard time naming a single policy.
I’m not saying the Ds don’t have policies or proposals - I’m saying the amount of energy they exhibit in fighting to improve bread-and-butter economic problems is so low that the average voter probably hasn’t got a clue what their plan is. If anything, they might even think the Ds are on the side of the big corporations rather than the little guy. The D’s have only 1 Bernie and 1 Ocasio-Cortez when the party ought to have hundreds of such figures.
What makes this weirder is that bread-and-butter economic issues arguably affect an even wider swath of society than abortion, LGBT, race, etc. Not that the latter are unimportant, but the former should arguably be the biggest vote-winner of all because it hits home for red, purple and blue Americans alike across all 50 states.
All I can think of is that those bread-and-butter issues are just not at the top of their priority list of issues. You can fault them for that, but any issues related to basic human rights seem to top their list. If Republicans manage to tank the economy leading to stagflation you may see economic issues rise in priority in 2028.
Bolding mine, where do you get that the Dem’s don’t fight for healthcare reform? Didn’t they fight tooth and nail just to get the Affordable Care Act passed when they were actually trying for a single payer system?
The Republicans are still to this day pissed off about that one. A lot of the other ideas you mention are also pursued by Dems but get squashed by the party in power before they can get out of commitee.
I don’t want to derail the thread into an ACA discussion but the Ds watered down the ACA so much that it was almost like having no healthcare reform. They had enough majority (if they killed the filibuster) to pass whatever they wanted but refused to. Also, when the UnitedHealthcare CEO was shot last year, the response of some Democrats was, very notably, not to condemn the health insurance CEOs for predatory behavior that kills thousands of patients, but rather, to call for beefed-up security for healthcare CEOs. That says a lot.
Also, since the ACA was passed (many years ago,) there has been no serious push for single payer since.
Again, I don’t want to derail the thread into talking about the ACA alone. This is about a broader lack of Democratic interest (aside from Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie) in household bread-and-butter issues.
Who has a plan to reduce inflation? What politician ever in the history of our country actually had a plan to reduce inflation? Her competition’s plan to reduce inflation was universal 10+% taxes added to every imported product, and we can see how much that hurt him.
Increase wages? What impact does the president have on wages other than to sign a bill to increase the federal minimum wage, which the Dems would have done 15 years ago if there wasn’t a group of (unnamed) people fighting against it tooth and nail.
The Republicans have successfully sold the lie that they are better for the economy than Democrats.
Let’s take the issue of the month, manufacturing jobs. Did you know that since Nixon, basically every Republican administration has ended with fewer manufacturing jobs than they started with, and every Dem has ended with more. And the variance isn’t even close. Peak manufacturing employment in this country was under Jimmy Carter.
Unemployment in this country was 4% when the common clay of our nation decided we needed to elect the guy who was yammering about jobs. He was going to return jobs to this country, he was going to kick out the illegals who were stealing your jobs.
Having a real answer to our problems doesn’t get you elected.
Oh, come on. You know that isn’t the argument. The idea is that he’s guilty of killing significantly more people by creating policies that are designed to maximize profits instead of keeping alive those they insure, finding every little loophole to deny claims.
You can argue that they should have been stopped by the law, but they weren’t, and eventually injustices tend to get taken out by extralegal means if they aren’t handled legally. That’s part of what pushes the powerful to enact and support laws that at least seem fair.
It’s one thing to say that “hey, we get it, but you shouldn’t go out and kill the guy,” and another to advocate for helping out more people like them, when their constituents pretty much all see them as the problem. They should be pushing reforms to actually reduce the number of people they kill.
But that is what you have to know about Democrats: they’re still beholden to monied interests, valuing people who give them more money, rather than their average constituents. They need healthcare providers to support them financially.
The Democrats are not a true left party, and are not a true party for the people. They seem to think they would not have enough power to win if they were.
Kamala campaigned on all of that (increasing min wage, shoring up ACA, lowering home prices/increasing inventory, subsidies for first time home buyers, child care credits, etc, etc). If the random voter didn’t know what she stood for, it’s because they were uninformed. How do we make the random, uniformed voter more informed might be the better question. It wasn’t that Kamala wasn’t talking about the “bread-and-butter”.
This is the actual reason in my opinion. They aren’t willing to actually do much in the way of economic reform because the rich people giving them lots of money don’t want them to.
This is not true- but there are a few things- the Dems in general, know enough about Inflation to know there are no quick fixes. The GOP is free to lie their asses off and promise magic.
Nobel prize winning economists disagree on the details of inflation- there is no quick fix for it, and Harris was smart enough to realize that and not come up with a bald faced lie.
Exactly
Increasing the Minimum wage has always been a Dem issue.
The only federal healthcare plan for everyone- "Obamacare’ was indeed a Dem issue. Truman proposed Medicare, and Johnson made it a reality. So, wrong there.
Right.
Correct.
So, basically, you were wrong on the points you made up.
No, Obama said from the very beginning that he had no intention of trying for a single-payer system. And the fact that he had to “fight tooth and nail” to get anything passed at all, even with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, indicates that many Democratic politicians aren’t interested in healthcare reform, probably because they’re taking massive bribes, excuse me, contributions, from health insurance companies.
That’s true in the sense that everyone talking about raising the minimum wage is a Democrat.
But in the sense that the Democratic Party as a whole supports this, it’s “been a Dem issue” since last October, when Harris desperately needed to come up with something popular. And if she had won and the Dems had a slim majority in Congress, what’s the chance that it would actually have passed? Some “centrist deficit hawk” assholes would have shot it down and been praised for their bipartisanship.
Simply put, any meaningful progress on “bread and butter economic issues” means reversing the massive increase in wealth inequality over the last fifty years. Millionaires will pay much higher taxes, and billionaires will be taxed until they’re millionaires. Too many Democrats are funded largely by millionaires and billionaires, so they can’t support those policies.
Or… they don’t have the political capital to push a heavy left wing agenda successfully.
If this country wanted left wing policies the Dems wouldn’t be working with a razor thin majority to eke out marginal changes.
George Bush took us from 8 years of economic growth and a Federal Budget Surplus, then failed to protect our nation from terrorists, started 2 wars, and helmed the biggest financial crash since the Great Depression. As a result Democrats wound up having to drop the Public Option to woo Joe Lieberman, since they didn’t have enough votes without him.
You want left wing policies? Give Democrats enough breathing room to ignore their DINO wing for once.