Local Framing of Economic Issues

Framing Big Issues in Local Terms

Last week’s post talked about the coming split in the Republican Party over two big, economic issues: tariffs and the deportation of undocumented immigrants. The post said that the split will create opportunities for Democrats, and in this post, I want to suggest ways to take advantage of those opportunities by framing issues in ways that will appeal to conservative, rural and small-town voters. The specific framing will depend on the conditions and ways of thinking in each community. People in a community have specific, local concerns and specific ways of expressing them, and effective framing should refer to the local concerns and make use to the local ways of expressing them. However, there are some general principles.

How Tariffs Can Harm a Community

First, effective framing of economic issues is not about social justice. It is about self-interest. So, if we are talking about tariffs, the focus should be on the harm that they are likely to do to a local community and its businesses. That means that in order to create effective framing, we will need to learn a lot about the communities that we want to affect.

Does a community produce agricultural or industrial products for export? If so, what are those products, and what countries are they exported to? What other countries produce the same products and  compete for the same markets? How might the community’s exports be hurt if the countries that are customers were to impose tariffs on the community’s exports? If the community’s businesses were hurt, how would that affect other aspects of its economy? How would it affect its tax base?

How Deporting Immigrants Can Harm a Community

If we are talking about the deportation of undocumented immigrants, we should also talk about the harm that losing them would do to a local community. Who are the community’s employers? Do they hire immigrants? What would happen to the employers if they lost those employees? Could the employers' businesses survive? Could they pay wages high enough to attract other employees? What about other community businesses? Are the immigrants customers of local businesses like grocery stores? If they left, what would happen to those businesses? What about the local housing market? How would the loss of immigrant residents affect the owners of rental properties? What would happen to the value of those properties?

What about the school system? Does it have many students who are immigrants or children of immigrants? If those students had to leave, how would that affect the budget of the local school district? Would the district lose some of the state aid it receives?  What about the local tax base? The immigrants pay sales taxes. How would the loss of that revenue affect the community’s budget?

We Need to Do Our Homework

These are some of the questions that can be asked. The answers should be framed in local terms. They should refer local businesses that might be hurt or to local public projects that might have to be canceled. Finding the answers will entail local research, but we do not have to start from scratch. Local people with interests at stake will be good sources of information. So, we have to go back with new questions to the people we have talked to.

The Coming Crisis of the Republican Party: An Opportunity For Democrats

Republicans Face the Prospect of Enacting the Things that Trump Promised

Now that Trump has been elected, Republicans are going to have to face the reality of his policies, and the result may well destroy their party.  Even if the party survives, the divisions within it will create opportunities for Democrats. 

The coming division within the Republican Party is rooted in the fact that the party is an uneasy coalition between the traditional, business Republicans and Trump’s radical rightists. The business Republicans fund the party, and the radical rightists provide millions of votes. The alliance has worked reasonably well because the business Republicans have controlled the party’s real, policy agenda, while Trump’s radical rightist agenda provided electoral propaganda. When elements of the radical rightist agenda have actually been implemented, the political results have not been so great for the Republicans.

The Abortion Issue: a Preview

Look, for example, at the abortion issue. As long as Roe v. Wade was in force, the issue worked well for the Republicans, but then Trump fulfilled his promise to appoint judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and they did overturn it. The result was to activate millions of women in support of their right to choose whether or not to have abortions. In 2022, the Republicans lost congressional elections, and yesterday, several states where Trump won enacted laws to protect a woman’s right to choose. Republicans split over the issue, but the party did not break up because the business Republicans don't care about the abortion issue. Companies can make money whether or not a woman’s right to choose is protected. 

This Time is Different: Tariffs

This time, Trump campaigned on issues that the business Republicans care about deeply, especially in the deeply Republican states of the Midwest and the Great Plains. One of those issues is tariffs. Trump promised to enact high tariffs on imported products. If he enacts the tariffs, the countries that lose exports to the United States will surely retaliate by putting tariffs on American goods including agricultural products. 

Farmers in places like Iowa, Missouri, Texas or South Dakota know that, and they will not want to lose the profits that come from the export trade, which accounts for about 20% of American agricultural production. So, the farmers along with big, agricultural companies like Cargill or Archer Daniels Midland will oppose the tariffs, and the result will be a deep split in the Republican Party. The tariffs may never be enacted because of Republican opposition. If they are enacted, they will damage the economies of many, Republican states and perhaps drive some big financial supporters of the Republican Party out of business. Whether or not the tariffs are enacted, the Republican Party will be split.

This Time is Different: Deporting Immigrants

The idea of deporting undocumented immigrants will be similarly controversial within the Republican Party. Grocery stores, restaurants, gas stations and automobile dealers in communities that supported Trump will not want to lose a large share of their customers. Dairy farms, slaughterhouses, factories, hotels and construction companies will not want to lose a large part of their work force. (In my state of Wisconsin, most of the large dairy farms would go out of business without their undocumented workers.)

So, a policy of deporting millions of undocumented people will be strongly opposed by influential Republicans in Republican states. If Trump tries to implement the policy (and many think that he will), the party will lose the support of many of its important financial backers. If he does not try to implement the policy, the party will lose the support of an important part of its base. Either way, there will be a crisis in the Republican Party. Meanwhile, Liz Cheney and her allies will be waiting in the wings to take advantage of the crisis when it comes. They will push to take back control of the party, and we will see the effects of their effort in the election of 2026.

Opportunities for Democrats

The split in the Republican Party will create opportunities for Democrats, and local party leaders will be best able to see what they are. However, to take advantage of them, we Democrats will have to think carefully about how we frame the issues, and I will talk more about that in next week's post.

Immigration and Social Justice

Immigration Raises Issues of Social Justice

In a post two weeks ago, I said that a loyal American must favor immigration because it has been and continues to be the basis of our national wealth and power.  Having said that, I think that we must recognize that using immigrants to grow our economy also creates significant social injustice. Immigration has costs, and they are born mainly by working-class people including both the immigrants themselves and native-born, working-class Americans, especially those with less than high-school educations who compete directly with immigrants for jobs. 

The Social Injustices of Immigration Are Important Politically

The social injustices brought about by immigration are important politically as well as morally. The Democratic Party has lost many working-class votes because the party has failed to take working-class concerns about immigration seriously. The MAGA wing of the Republican Party has attracted working-class votes by claiming to be the voice of "real Americans." Immigration is one of the areas where the Democratic Party is most vulnerable. Instead of admitting that immigration can harm some Americans, we have branded people who are anti-immigration as racists. We should not be surprised to learn that we have not attracted many votes that way.

If we are to promote immigration because it is good for our country as a whole, we will have to frame it in a way that recognizes that, while it is good for the country as a whole, it is not always good for everyone. Some people may be harmed by immigration, and we must mitigate that harm. We must also recognize the potential for harm in our framing of the issue of immigration. The framing must address potential harm to two groups of people: immigrants and native-born Americans.

Social Justice for Immigrants

If we are going to rely on immigrants for the growth of our economy, we must include in our framing a path to citizenship for them. Our economy’s need for immigrant workers has attracted a far larger number of people than our legal system can handle. The result is that we now have more than ten million undocumented immigrants living in our country. Some Republican politicians talk loudly about deporting them, but we all know that is unlikely because our economy depends on them. In my home state of Wisconsin, the large dairy farmers who are among the Republican party’s important supporters would go out of business without their undocumented workers.

However, the undocumented status of the workers makes them vulnerable to exploitation by employers. They are paid low wages, and they work under very unsafe conditions. They are afraid to complain because they are afraid of being deported. They are unable to get drivers’ licenses, but in our automobile-dependent society, they must still drive. So, they are vulnerable to harassment by local police.

Some people say that immigrants should enter the United States only in legal ways, but it must be obvious to everyone that our legal system cannot support the level of immigration that our economy demands. Some people ask why the immigrants cannot come in legally as our grandparents and great-grandparents did. The answer is that at the time of the wave of immigration in the early twentieth century, we did not have laws restricting the number of immigrants. Anyone who came was accepted legally. At Ellis Island and other places, the immigrants were sometimes rejected because they carried communicable diseases like tuberculosis but never for lack of proper visas.

It is wrong for us to build an economy on the backs of immigrants while not giving them the right to live in our country and to be treated as native-born workers are treated. It is unjust, and it is un-American. It is un-American because inconsistent with the belief that we are all created equal. We must reform our immigration laws to be consistent with social justice and with our economy's demand for labor, and in addition, we must include a path to citizenship in our framing of the issue. 

Social Justice for Native-Born Workers

While immigration benefits our country as a whole, it has a cost which is born by native-born workers who suffer from competition with immigrants who are willing to work for low wages under unsafe conditions. Workers without high school diplomas are especially vulnerable. The availability of immigrant workers keeps wages low for native-born workers who must compete with the immigrants. The fact that immigrant workers are vulnerable to exploitation weakens the bargaining power of unions and makes jobs unsafe for all workers. Reforms to our immigration system to legalize the status of undocumented workers will help all workers by taking away employers’ opportunities to hire workers who will work for less than native-born workers. In our framing of the issue of immigration, we must talk about preventing native-born workers from suffering.

In addition, we must make sure that our native-born workers are not left behind. To do that, we must provide opportunities for unemployed and underemployed workers to retrain. This means that we should provide free or very cheap post-secondary education and that we should pay generous unemployment benefits and childcare benefits to workers who take advantage of opportunities to retrain. We have a precedent for this in the GI Bill. After WWII, returning veterans were able to obtain education and training at almost no cost, and that contributed to their ability to rise economically during the post-war economic boom. Inequality declined during that period, which saw the height of the American Dream.

Providing free or very cheap post-secondary education also means increasing the tax-support for it. Over the last fifty years, we have shifted the cost of post-secondary education from the taxpayers to the students, and the effect has been to increase inequality because working-class people must take on crippling levels of debt to obtain post-secondary education. This was not always true. In the nineteen fifties, post-secondary education was extremely cheap for the students as I can attest. I attended the University of California from 1958 to 1962, and at that time, the tuition was free, and the fees were $140 per semester. Our framing of the immigration issue must stress the connection between growing our economy on the one hand and providing opportunities for our people on the other.

Social Justice in the Framing of the Immigration Issue

If our framing of the immigration issue is to be effective in appealing to working-class voters, we should stress the idea that immigration is one part of an effort to make our economy work for all Americans. Economic growth can enable us to fund the initiatives to make our country more just. We should stress our commitment to increasing opportunities for all Americans, and we should link our ability to do that to our ability to grow our economy. 

WHEN IS ENOUGH ENOUGH?

 This piece was written by my friend Lisa Weiner.

As a holocaust survivor I never thought I would see the day that someone like Donald Trump would run as a Republican for the greatest office in the world.

I am terribly afraid of the future-the future of my children and grandchildren.

What has happened our country?

It should have been enough when Donald Trump made fun of the disabled reporter

It should have been enough when he maligned Gold Star Mothers

It should have been enough when he told 30,000 plus lies while in office

It should have been enough when he encouraged the January 5 attack on the Capitol.

It should have been enough when he said there are “good people on both sides”

It should have been enough when he maligned John McCain

It should have been enough when he cozied up to Putin and Kim Jong Un

It should have been enough when he allowed children to be taken away from their illegal immigrant parents.

I am a legal immigrant and a proud and grateful citizen of the United States. By maligning illegal immigrants, he is maligning all immigrants who come to this great country to seek a better life.  Our country was built on the backs of immigrants.

Never forget that 6 million Jews and another 5 million ethnic and minority groups and gays were systematically wiped out by Hitler when he was elected to office by millions of people who believed his lies- some of them similar to the ones that Trump tells every day-people who thought he would cure all their ills and make “Germany great again”.  And the world was never the same after that.  The same hateful, divisive and lying rhetoric that is now common among Trump and other leaders of the Republican party is dangerously close to destroying the greatest democracy in the world.

 When is Enough Enough?   

In This Election, We Do Not Want to Be Like the Lady Who Rode on a Tiger

 Is Trump a Fascist?

We are coming down to the wire in our presidential election, and every voter is going to have to make a choice. In making that choice, we must ask ourselves this question: Is Trump is a fascist, and does the answer to that question matter? 

The "fascist" label fits Trump himself very well. Like other fascist leaders, he believes that he embodies the will of the people, and he thinks that because he embodies the will of the people, he can use military force in civil society to suppress or punish his enemies. Since he embodies the will of the people, anything that he does is by definition democratic. He has contested the results of the election of 2020 for the same reason: if he embodies the will of the people, any election that he does not win must by definition be fraudulent. The fascist label also fits the character of his appeal to his base. His campaign is full of racism, antisemitism and xenophobia. He mirrors Nazi rhetoric directly when he says that immigrants are poisoning the blood our country,

Can The Republican Party Control Trump's Fascist Impulses?

The Republican Party is not a merely fascist party. It is an electoral coalition based on a tacit bargain between Trump's fascists and the traditional, business Republicans whose money funds the party. They put up with Trump's fascistic appeal because he can bring in votes for Republican candidates who - the business Republicans believe - will be able to enact policies that are friendly to business. The business Republicans have accepted this bargain because they believe that they can control Trump and his base, and they were able to control him in his first term. The main achievement of Trump’s first term was a tax cut that benefited mainly business and the very wealthy. However, Trump now appears to have taken over the party. He is now in control, and there is no predicting how far his fascistic predilections will take us.

We Should Worry

We should worry about this because something very similar happened in Germany in the nineteen thirties. German business leaders supported Hitler because they saw him as a bulwark against Communism.  The German people had been hit hard by the Depression. The German Communist Party was large and strong, and it had strong support from the German labor unions. Moreover, there had been a successful, Communist revolution in Russia only a few years earlier. So, the German business leaders were terrified of communism, and driven by their fear, they supported Hitler in the mistaken belief that he would not really do what he had said he would do. We all know how that turned out.

We now find ourselves in a very similar situation. The business Republicans are supporting a candidate who walks like a fascist and talks like a fascist. They are supporting him because they are betting that he is not really a fascist or that if he is, they can control him. That is a bad bet. It reminds me strongly of a well-known limerick: There was a young lady from Niger/Who smiled as she rode on a tiger/ They came back from the ride/With the lady inside/And the smile on the face of the tiger.

As you vote next week, remember that we don’t want to be that lady. 

Framing Immigration: A Loyal American Must Support Immigration

A Loyal American Must Support Immigration

A loyal American must always support immigration to our country. Anyone who is anti-immigrant is anti-American. If you want to deport our immigrants, you are either very ignorant of the history of our country, or you just hate America. I say this because we became, and we remain the richest and most powerful country in the world because we have always welcomed immigrants.

We Built Our Country With Immigrant Labor

America’s greatness is founded on our hospitality to immigrants. We became a rich and powerful country first by forcing immigration and later by encouraging it. We built our industrial and commercial might using immigrant labor. In 1794, the cotton gin was invented. It made large-scale cotton farming in the American South possible, but we did not have the labor to exploit that possibility. So, through the slave trade, we imported hundreds of thousands of Africans to do the work. We do not usually think of the slaves as immigrants, but they were immigrants who were forced to come here, and a huge share of our country's wealth was created by their labor. Cotton accounted for more than half of American exports before the Civil War, and the wealth created by the cotton trade was later invested in industrial development. We should not be proud of the slavery in our past, but we cannot deny its contribution to our country's wealth.

In the late nineteenth century, the United States was poised to become the world’s greatest industrial and commercial power. We had vast natural resources, endless fertile land and a marvelous water transportation network, but we lacked the labor to develop our industrial capacity. So, we turned again to importing huge numbers of immigrants. Poverty-stricken peasants from all over Europe and China were ready to leave the land that their families had cultivated for centuries to come to the United States.

In the late 1800s, people in many parts of the world decided to leave their homes and immigrate to the United States. Fleeing crop failure, land and job shortages, rising taxes, and famine, many came to the U. S. because it was perceived as the land of economic opportunity. Others came seeking personal freedom or relief from political and religious persecution, and nearly 12 million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1870 and 1900. 

Research tells us that

The large migration of immigrants to North America allowed for a huge rise in the U.S. economy. Lots of factories started up in large cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago. 

Workers Are Needed to Grow an Economy

Why were immigrants necessary for the development of our industrial economy? The answer is that the amount that any economy can produce is limited by the size of its working population. Each worker produces on average a certain amount of goods or services, and the total that is produced in a country must be the sum of all that is produced by its workers. The total amount that is produced in a country is therefore:

The total product produced by an economy = the average product per worker X the number of workers.

We can increase that total in only two ways. First, we can invest to increase the average product per worker, and second, we can bring in more workers. Increasing the average product per worker takes time. So, in the short or medium run, the only way to increase production is to bring in more workers. From 1865 until 1924, we did just that. We encouraged and even promoted immigration, and we became the richest and most powerful country the world had ever seen.

Industrial Countries Have Aging Populations

Today, we and all of the world’s rich, industrial countries face a shortage of workers due to aging populations. As countries industrialize, families become smaller. Women bear fewer children. Today, in every industrial country including the United States, the number of children born to each woman is less than the number required to maintain the current level of the population. So, every industrial country today has a population which is aging, and that means that there are fewer people of working age.  Except in the United States. Our working population continues to grow through immigration, and because of our hospitality to immigrants, our economy can continue to grow. Our economic growth rate is the envy of the world. We outstrip Europe, and we will eventually outstrip China, as well. We can do that only because we have so many immigrants.

With Immigrants, We Can Grow Our Economy and Remain Rich and Powerful

Because of our immigration, we can grow our economy more rapidly than other countries. We can continue to be the world’s richest country, and we can continue to be the leader of the free world. Without our immigrants, we could not do those things. So, if you want to see our country continue to be great, you must be in favor of immigration. If you are anti-immigrant, you are anti-American. Every loyal American must support immigration to our country.

Oppenheimer and the Problems of Today's Politics: A Need For New Framing of Issues

 Was Oppenheimer A Communist?

Was J. Robert Oppenheimer a communist or at least a sympathizer? It hardly matters now, but reading the recent New York Times review of this question reminded me of the anti-communist hysteria of the late 1940s and early 50s. I grew up in that period, and one of my early political memories is of watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on TV. As I read the article, it dawned on me that in some ways today's political atmosphere is similar to the political atmosphere of that time as I remember it.

Both periods may be characterized by extreme political divisions and by political views that are held with almost religious fervor. In those days, the supporters of the anti-communist crusade thought that their opponents were deluded, and the opponents of the crusade believed the same about the crusade’s supporters. People on both sides felt that their opponents were a danger to the survival of democracy in our country. Then as now, the political right used lies and inuendo to make their case to the public, and the left was ill-prepared to counter that strategy effectively.

People's Views Harden

The anti-communist investigations conducted by HUAC and by Joe McCarthy were political circuses designed mainly to further the political careers of the politicians who conducted them. The investigations ruined the careers of many people who were no danger to the security of the United States. Many people knew that, and the result was that all of the investigations' findings were thrown into doubt. Oppenheimer may have been a communist. I don't know, and it hardly matters now, but at the time, it was easy to dismiss the accusation because so many such accusations were known to be false. Attitudes toward HUAC and Sen. Joseph McCarthy hardened into quasi-religious beliefs that have endured until today. Hardly anyone who is old enough to remember the anti-communist hysteria of the 1940s and 50s is likely to change his/her views based on new evidence.

The Same Thing Has Happened Today

We can see a similar dynamic at play in the current controversy over the 2020 election. Trump and his supporters have repeatedly claimed that the elections of 2020 were rigged. Numerous investigations have found no evidence of such rigging, but to the believers, that merely proves that the evidence is being covered up by elites or by the deep state. To the rest of us, Trump’s supporters seem either deluded or dishonest. Attitudes toward the question of whether the elections of 2020 were rigged have hardened into quasi-religious beliefs, and hardly anyone is open to changing his/her views. People who are still alive 60 years from now will probably believe just as they do today.

We Cannot Solve Big Problems Because of Ideological Divisions

None of this would matter if it were not for the fact that today as in the early 1950s, intense, ideological conflict has made it hard for us to deal sensibly with real problems. In the 1950s, the anti-communist hysteria made it impossible for us to deal sensibly with crucial issues in foreign policy like the communists’ victory in China or the defeat of the French in Vietnam. We undertook diplomatic and military commitments that led us ultimately into the war in Vietnam and that may soon lead us into another war in the South China Sea.

Today, the intense ideological conflict makes it impossible for us to deal sensibly with a warming world, with our immigration crisis or with the high and rising cost of health care. What is worse is that both sides have interests in maintaining and intensifying the conflict. On immigration, the right mobilizes its troops with visions of rapists and murderers crossing our border, while the left accuses their opponents of racism. Neither side talks about the elephant in the room, which is the millions of undocumented immigrants who have been here for decades. Our discussion of climate change and healthcare are similarly emotional and unproductive.

We Need New Framing To Move Ahead

We will be able to break out of this trap only if we do something that the left did not do in the 1950s. We will have to find new ways to frame our discussions. New frames would provide new perspectives on the key issues that we face. Such new perspectives could be important because while it is rarely possible to change people’s views of an issue through direct argument, it is sometimes possible to get them to see the issue in a new way, and that can cause them to change their positions on the issue. New frames can shake up the electorate and cause it to divide in new ways, and if we can accomplish that, we may be able to find a way around our current ideological impasse.  I have suggested that some of our big issues can be framed in terms of equality of opportunity, but that will not do for everything. I invite my readers to think about suitable frames for the big issues that confront us. The only requirement for a frame is that it must draw on a widely shared moral principle that can be used to drive the discussion in a new direction.