The Party of the Patrimonial Middle Class

 A Critique of Our Party

This is the first in a series of posts in which I will lay out a critique of the direction that the Democratic Party has taken in recent years and suggest a direction for its future. I write as a member of the party in the hope that my comments may help it to change its direction.

I believe that, although my party claims to be the party of the dispossessed and the marginalized members of our society, it has become the party of what Thomas Picketty calls “the patrimonial middle class.” The party has focused mainly on issues that are of concern to the members of that class, and as a result, the party has failed to build a national, political coalition that could enact policies to benefit working Americans of all races. The Republican Party has been able to exploit our failure by promoting a politics of anti-elitism and racism that has drawn the white working class away from the Democratic Party. Our country has become immobilized politically and unable to deal with many of the challenges that face us. As a party of the political left, we must find a way to break the stalemate and move our country forward.

What Is the Role of a Party of the Left?

We live in a society where an outlandishly large share of the income and of the wealth are held by a tiny minority of our people. Our economic system produces enormous wealth, but it distributes the wealth so unequally that it creates enormous inequity and destabilizes our society.  In such a society, the primary task of a party of the political left ought to be to provide the means to redistribute the wealth more equitably. This is a matter of providing economic justice to all classes. It is not primarily a matter of racial justice, although racial inequity is a part of the problem, and it is not primarily a matter of gender-based justice, although gender inequity is a part of the problem. The core of the problem is to find ways to redistribute income from our society’s richest people to the class that makes up the poorest 50% of our society, which corresponds roughly to what used to be called the working class.

Redistributing Wealth

There are various ways to redistribute wealth, but the most common in all rich countries is through tax-supported programs that provide income in kind. For example, a program of affordable child care would charge the families receiving the care less that its cost, and remainder of the cost would be covered by tax revenues. Similarly, a national health care system would reduce the cost of health insurance by paying a part of the cost with tax revenues. Such programs would provide income in kind in the form of services and pay for the services with taxes.

The recipients of the services would not be a minority of our population. They would include most of us, but especially, they would include the poorer half of our population. The bottom half of our wealth distribution includes people of all colors and genders, and they share common problems, which have common solutions. A single woman who is struggling to raise her children on a waitress’s wages would be helped by a system of affordable child care no matter what race she belonged to. Any person struggling to pay off student debt would be helped by forgiveness of the debt. Any person without health insurance who becomes ill would be helped by a decent national health care system. This kind of wealth transfer would help non-whites and women disproportionately because they are overrepresented in the poorer half of our population, but people of all colors and genders would benefit.

What Have We Become?

The Democratic Party used to focus on policies for redistributing income. We passed Social Security, the GI Bill and Medicare.  However, we have lost that focus. We now focus on issues that are mainly of concern to members of the patrimonial middle class while failing to provide strong support for proposals to increase equity across the classes. One result of our change in focus is that conservative propaganda can plausibly claim that white, working-class people have no place in the Democratic Party. The Republican Party has used such propaganda to draw the white working class away from the Democrats. Consequently, the Democratic Party, which ought to be the party of the working class, has become the party of comfortable members of the patrimonial middle class, and our party is weaker than it ought to be. 

How we got into this situation will be the topic of the next post in this series. The third post will deal in more detail with the makeup of the patrimonial middle class and with its connection to the Democratic Party. The fourth post will discuss the ways in which our political actions reflect the makeup of our party. Finally, the fifth post will suggest some ways that we can move forward.