As Super Tuesday approaches, in which my home state of California is to vote, I just want to make a final appeal to whoever reads this to vote for Elizabeth Warren.
The argument for Warren essentially comes down to these items:
- She is has the greatest potential for having the broadest level of support among the various groups within the Democratic coalition, which means she has the greatest potential to unite the party.
- She best understands the obstacles to a progressive agenda and how to work past those obstacles to make a progressive agenda reality.
- She best represents the American tradition of populist-progressivism as espoused by Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt
Regarding Warren’s potential to appeal to the broadest number of Democrats, this is apparent by several indicators. One is that when Dems are polled about which candidate they would be most disappointed with, Warren consistently is the candidate who the fewest Democratic voters would be disappointed as nominee:
To spell out the meaning of this, in a year when Democrats are incredibly fractious, there should be quite a premium on having a nominee who the most Democrats possible could live with. Warren is clearly that person — she’s the one candidate who has some credibility with both traditional and social liberals and with leftists and economic populists.
But in addition to that, there is also the fact that in head to head match-ups with the current Democratic front-runner, Bernie Sanders, Warren does best against Sanders of all the Democratic candidates.
Which again would indicate that, if people are looking for an alternative to Sanders who also has the potential to unite the party’s wings, Warren would seem to be that candidate.
In addition to Warren’s potential for unifying a badly divided party, she also I think understands perhaps the biggest obstacle to a progressive agenda, namely the public’s distrust of government.
As Warren put it in her Medium piece back in September of last year:
In 1958, the National Election Survey first asked Americans a simple question: Do you trust the government to do the right thing most of the time? That year, 73% of Americans said yes.
In 2019, that number is just 17%. Five out of every six Americans do not trust their government to do the right thing.
A progressive agenda will necessitate an enormous expansion of government spending and responsibility. This, in my view, is the biggest blind spot for many progressives and particularly the Democratic front-runner Sanders who often dismisses away any concerns about the difficulty of passing his ambitious agenda that would by definition mean an unprecedented expansion of government outside of war.
What many progressives and leftists haven’t quite grappled with is that at a time when just 17% of Americans trust government to do the right thing, do you really think they’re just going to hand over control of health insurance, the payment mechanism for a health care sector that makes up 1/6 of the economy and involves the most emotional and personal considerations of all the issues we have to address, to a government that they do not trust?
Furthermore, Americans have historically had a distrust of centralized government, which is why among western nations we’ve been the last to enact virtually every progressive reform from old age pensions to unemployment insurance, and obviously we still don’t have universal health insurance.
There’s a reason why reforming health care in this country, even in a modest way, has been so difficult throughout our history. People will surely point out that Medicare for All has wide support in some polls, but Hillarycare and Obamacare both started as popular, as have all attempts to pass single payer at the state level, but as people start to mull over the expansion of government, regulation, and taxation that such efforts would require, the popularity of all these reforms dropped. In fact Medicare for All itself has dropped in the polls considerably especially when it’s mentioned that it would get rid of private insurance.
At the end of the day, the reason is the public’s distrust of government. And as Warren acknowledges, to an extent the public has good reason to distrust government.
Why have so many people lost faith in government?
It’s true that right-wing politicians have spent a generation attacking the very idea of government. But it’s also true that these days, our government doesn’t work for most people. Sure, it works great for the wealthy and the well-connected – but for everybody else, it doesn’t.
It doesn’t work because big insurance companies and hospital conglomerates put profits ahead of the health and well-being of the American people, and dump piles of money into political campaigns and lobbying efforts to block any move toward Medicare for All.
It doesn’t work because big oil companies that have concealed climate studies – and funded bought-and-paid-for climate denial research – bury regulators in an avalanche of shady, bad-faith pseudoscience and then spend freely on influence peddling in Congress to make sure nothing like a Green New Deal ever sees the light of day.
It doesn’t work because giant pharmaceutical companies want to squeeze every last penny out of the people who depend on their prescriptions, while their army of lobbyists suffocates reform any time there’s a discussion in Congress on drug pricing.
If you look at polls, public opinion confirms Warren’s diagnosis that corruption is at the heart of people’s distrust of government.
The poll finds that 70 percent of Americans say they feel angry “because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power, like those on Wall Street or in Washington.” Forty-three percent say that statement describes them "very well."
www.nbcnews.com/...
Warren uniquely understands that tackling corruption in government and restoring faith in government is a prerequisite to passing a progressive agenda. And unlike Sanders, Warren actually grapples with the reality of the obstacles to progressive change and what exactly must be done to fix the problem, as David Roberts of Vox recently explained:
Warren shares many elements of Sanders’s populist rhetoric. She, too, is focused on how the rich and powerful have rigged the system against ordinary people. But she does not propose to blow the system up or sweep it aside. She proposes to fix it. She (legendarily) has a plan for that, a clear sense of which institutions are broken, what new institutions need to be created, and what kind of people she wants running them. As Ezra Klein documents, her entire career in politics has been focused on battling for better institutions and better personnel.
Warren’s history, experience, and ideology give her progressive populism an importantly different character from Sanders’s. Wilkinson captures it well:
Because the American republic is, in fact, in the midst of a spiraling crisis of corruption, there is more than a whiff of radicalism in a reform agenda focused on rooting out graft and restoring popular sovereignty. But Warren’s program is animated by earnest devotion to sturdy procedural ideals — fair elections, the rule of law, equitable and responsive political representation, and clean public administration — not left-wing ideology. It aims to realize a homely republican vision of America in which equal democratic citizens of every gender, color, and creed can vote their way to a system that gives everybody a fair shot at a sound education and a decent wage sufficient to raise a family in a comfortable home without becoming indentured to creditors or wrecked by the vicissitudes of capitalist dislocation.
As Warren used to say frequently, she is a “capitalist to her bones.” She believes in the generative power of markets; she just believes they need to be operated transparently and fairly, with everyone protected from immiseration and offered opportunities for full participation. She wants well-regulated capitalism with a healthy welfare state — which is how the Danes themselves think of their system.
This is why, unlike Sanders, she explicitly cites her anti-corruption reform agenda as her first and top priority if she becomes president. It’s why she, unlike Sanders, supports getting rid of the filibuster. For her, procedural reforms are not an afterthought, but a vital part of the agenda in and of themselves, because they are the only reliable way to generate the trust needed to support the rest of the agenda and progress beyond it.
Finally, for all of Sanders’ channeling of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, it is Warren who is the true descendant of the rich tradition of American progressivism of which Roosevelt and his distant cousin and fellow President Theodore Roosevelt were a part.
While Sanders uses much of the same rhetoric that FDR used, particularly the “I welcome their hatred” line, and while many Sanders supporters claim that he’s just proposing policies that FDR supported, the reality is that Sanders is a much different creature from FDR.
For one, Sanders has long made known his dislike of capitalism. On the other hand, Raymond Moley, one of the members of FDR's Brains Trust, said of FDR’s actions during the banking crisis, "He saved capitalism in eight days."
FDR himself said this in 1934:
"One of my principal tasks," Roosevelt wrote in November (of 1934), expressing a deeply-held conviction, "is to prevent bankers and businessmen from committing suicide!" (Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 503)
There is also the fact that FDR, unlike Sanders, never proposed nationalizing any industries nor did he propose anything like wiping out the debt of tens of millions of people.
A great example of this is how FDR dealt with the banking crisis he faced upon taking office. As historian Robert McElvaine described it:
Given the magnitude of the problem and his unprecedented support, Roosevelt could have done whatever he pleased with the unpopular 'money changers' and their institutions. Had he wanted, he could have taken an important step by nationalizing the banking system. He did nothing of the sort. Instead he submitted to Congress a distinctly unradical Emergency Banking bill drawn up largely by bankers and Hoover appointees in the Treasury Department. (McElvaine, The Great Depression: American, 1929-1941,140)
When in 1935, when Senator Leslie Frazier and Congressman William Lemke of North Dakota introduced a bill to “refinance farm mortgages through the issuance of $8 billion worth of greenbacks by the federal government”, which basically was a bill to wipe out a bunch of debts incurred by struggling farmer, FDR failed to back it which is what led to Lemke deciding on a third party run against FDR in 1936.
The fact was that FDR, unlike Sanders, was not calling for revolution or blowing up the system. As FDR himself said of his philosophy:
“Say that civilization is a tree which, as it grows, continually produces rot and dead wood. The radical says: ‘Cut it down.’ The conservative says: ‘Don’t touch it.’ The liberal compromises: ‘Let’s prune, so that we lose neither the old trunk nor the new branches.’ (Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 648)
When you read that quote, it is clear that Sanders is of the radical “cut it down” school whereas Warren is of the liberal, FDR school that seeks to prune the tree rather than cutting it down.
This is the spirit in which Warren is acting. It's a progressivism that is very much part of the American tradition in a way that Sanders' class-based, European style-socialism, which has simply never taken root here on a widespread basis, simply isn't, at least not in our history so far. As a history nerd, this is a big reason why I supported Warren over Sanders, who I’d supported in 2016. Warren wouldn't be attempting anything unprecedented so much as reviving a brand of progressive populism that's seared into our country's identity but has been dormant for awhile. And I am still hoping she can somehow bring about that revival.
So these are my reasons for supporting Elizabeth Warren, and it’s why I continue to hold out against hope that she can somehow emerge from the pack next Tuesday and beyond. I hope you find them persuasive and that you will vote for Warren in whatever contest you will participate in.