Appealing to a Class-Based Coalition

Framing is Key

The key to taking a class-based approach is to frame policy recommendations in terms of broadly held values and to link those values to specific policies that are designed to make our economy work for all working-class people.  But first, we need to change our attitude toward the working class. We must liberate the term “working class” from its association with white people. We should stop using the phrase “white working class” and make it clear that the working class includes people of all races and that all of them are oppressed. Some may be more oppressed than others because of the effects of racism, but all are oppressed by an economy that is rigged against them.

Stress Values

Once we see that working-class people of all races are oppressed, we can formulate values that express their right to a better life. Here are a few examples:

• It is wrong that the wealth of a few should be based on the oppression, poverty and insecurity of millions of hard-working Americans.
• It is wrong that hard-working people of all races should suffer while the rich pay no attention.
• It is wrong that children of hard-working parents should grow up in families that - at best - struggle to provide them with things that the children of rich families take for granted: a good breakfast in the morning, a warm winter coat, health care.
• It is wrong that we as a society are wasting so much of our human potential.

Frame Policies in Terms of Values

We should frame our policy prescriptions in terms of these moral values. For example:

•  The minimum wage should be raised so that hard-working Americans can receive a fair share of our national income, and so that working people can earn enough to support themselves and their children.
• We need national health insurance so that hard-working people will not be so poor and insecure that they have to choose between taking a sick child to the doctor and buying gas to get to work.
• We should offer inexpensive daycare for small children so that their parents can afford to go to work. We should do this because we do not want to waste our human potential.
• We should provide more affordable housing so that hard-working parents do not need to pay more than half of their incomes for inadequate housing. We should do this so that the children of working parents can provide their children with things like good breakfasts that richer children take for granted.
• We should offer free tuition at community colleges so that young people really can pull themselves up into the middle class, and we do not waste so much of our human potential
• We need a wealth tax so that we can reduce the concentration of wealth in our society and improve the lives of all working-class people. The wealth of the few should not depend on the misery of the many.

Framing the issues in this way will make it clear that working-class people can rise together. We do not need to make white working-class people poorer in order to improve the lot of people of color. Instead, by reducing the extreme concentration of wealth in the upper class, we can make improve the lives of all working-class people.

Repetition is Crucial

We must say these things and others like them over and over and over until they take their places among the generally accepted assumptions. We must make it clear that working-class people can rise together. If we do that, we will not persuade everyone, but we will be able to build a class-based coalition that is strong enough to make our society more just.

What About Reducing the Racial Wealth and Income Gap?

If we adopt the approach suggested here, we will reduce the racial wealth and income gaps. Any policy that benefits the working class as a whole will benefit people of color disproportionately because they are over-represented in the working class. You can read about more about this topic in a post in this blog entitled "Reducing Racial Inequity in the United States by Making Everyone's Life Better."

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How the Left and the Right Collaborate to Split the Working Class

Conservatives and Progressives Collaborate to Split the Working Class 

In American politics, conservatives and progressive collaborate unintentionally to split the working class and to prevent the emergence of a progressive majority. The collaboration has come about because we have forgotten how to talk about class conflict in our politics. During the nineteen fifties, we stopped talking about class differences and instead focused on racial differences in discussions of injustice and inequality in our country. The elimination of class conflict from our discussion of injustice and inequality prevents us from seeing the fundamental basis of injustice in our society and divides the electorate in a way that prevents the emergence of a progressive majority.

The Fundamental Basis of Injustice

The fundamental basis of injustice and inequality in our country is that wealth and income are very unequally distributed. A small upper class and a somewhat larger patrimonial middle class own an outlandish share of the country’s wealth and receive an outlandish share of its income. The bottom half of the population owns practically nothing and receives a very small share of the national income. The result is that a large share of our population lives precariously while the upper class and the patrimonial middle class live well.

The division between the two upper classes and the working class is not primarily racial, although it has a racial aspect. It is true that people of color have on average much less wealth and income than white people, but it is also true that most white people belong to the working class. They are regular, working people who share the precariousness of working-class life in America.

Why Don't We Make Life Less Precarious?

We could provide services to make working-class life less precarious. We could provide a national health care system that would eliminate the financial risk associated with being sick; we could provide a real, national pension system that would allow people to age with dignity; we could finance our system of post-secondary education in a way that would eliminate the need for students to go into debt; we could provide affordable childcare so that parents could afford to go to work; and there are lots of other possibilities.

We are unable to do any of these things because the political constituency for such reforms is fragmented along racial lines, and that fragmentation is not simply an unintended result of our history and culture. It has been deliberately fomented by conservatives to split the working class and thereby t prevent the passage of the needed reforms. The racial differences and prejudices that characterize our large and diverse country have provided fertile ground for the deliberate creation of “populist” conservative political movements like the movement that supports Mr. Trump, but such political movements do not emerge magically from a culture. Building them takes effort, and that effort requires lots of money.

Conservatives Fund Racist Political Movements

The money is provided by extremely wealthy individuals. They fund populist movements to provide political support for conservative, political candidates who vote to keep taxes low.  In other words, white, working-class people are persuaded that their problems – which are real – are due to factors related to race like “unfair competition” from cheap immigrant labor.  White workers are told that “welfare queens” are living a life of ease while “real Americans” have to work hard just to survive. White workers are told that shadowy “elites” want to replace them with non-whites. Many white people are thus persuaded to vote their racial identity rather than their class identity, and their votes provide electoral support for policies that benefit the very rich.

Is there danger that taxes might increase to support a national healthcare system? The danger can be averted if people can be induced to vote their racial prejudices. Is there a danger that taxes might be increased to support a system of affordable childcare? That danger too may be averted if people can be persuaded to vote their racial identities. Thus, the very wealthy work to split the constituency for progressive reforms.

Progressives Accept the Racist Definition of the Conflict

Progressives could offer an alternative view. They could emphasize class solidarity, but they do not do so. Instead, they merely turn the right’s appeal on its head. They agree that the axis of conflict is racial but say that white people are the oppressors while people of color are the oppressed. This race-based explanation cannot attract the support of white working-class people because it denies the reality of their lived experience. They can see easily that they do not belong to the ruling class. They are in fact oppressed by our system, but the racial analysis offered by the left denies the reality of their oppression by saying that in our society, only people of color are oppressed. In contrast, the right's analysis speaks directly to white working-class people. It explains the reasons for their suffering in terms that are easily understood. 

White people who are driving for Uber, working as pickers in a warehouse or operating cash registers at Walmart know that they are struggling to live. They know that they live in a system that is rigged against them. Perhaps they are marginally better off than black people in the same occupations, but that difference is not apparent to them. The left’s appeal to racism as the cause of the suffering of working Americans denies the reality of the suffering of white working-class people, and we should not be surprised that such an appeal does not attract their votes. 

Thus, the left collaborates unwittingly with the right to split the working-class vote. If the axis of oppression is exclusively racial, white people are on one side and people of color are on the other. White workers and white capitalists are on the same team, and people of color are on the opposing team. This situation supports the interests of the very rich by preventing the formation of a coalition with enough strength to pass legislation to advance social justice in the United States. The effect of the focus on race is ironically that we are unable to advance the cause of social justice even for people of color.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Next week's post will take up this question. Stay tuned.

Harris is the Only Choice

From My Heart

This post was originally published last February. It was updated on August 10 to reflect the fact that Pres. Biden had dropped out of the presidential race, and Kamala Harris had become the Democratic candidate.

In this post, I write from my heart as a Jew for my fellow Jews. I truly believe that in the coming election, we must all vote to elect Kamala Harris. For us, she is the only choice.

The Only Choice for a Progressive

If you are a Jew on the left wing of the Democratic party who is angered by Pres. Biden’s support for Israel’s actions in Gaza, consider what will happen if you sit out this election or vote for a third party. If you do that, you will help to elect Donald Trump as president. His supporters include the neo-Nazis and White Christian Nationalists who deny that you are really American.

Moreover, Trump's campaign is openly antisemitic. On December 19, the NY Times quoted a Trump campaign spokesman as saying,

Unsurprisingly, the all-Democrat appointed Colorado Supreme Court has ruled against President Trump, supporting a Soros-funded, left-wing group’s scheme to interfere in an election on behalf of Crooked Joe Biden by removing President Trump’s name from the ballot ....

"Soros-funded" means "funded by a rich Jew." The phrase implies falsely that the Democratic Party is controlled by rich Jews, and we must do what we can to prevent a candidate who spreads such lies from becoming president. Trump's Republican Party is dependent on a racist base that includes many, virulent antisemites. Do you really want to elect a government that will empower them?

Moreover, you know that there are many things we need to do in our country. We need to deal with the effects of climate change; we need to lighten the burden of student debt; we need to build a decent, national health care system; we need to provide a path to citizenship for our undocumented immigrants; we need to make sure that women can control their own bodies; and there are many other things we need to do. You know that if we elect Ms. Harris, we will make progress on at least some of those tasks, but if we elect Mr. Trump, we will make no progress, and on some issues, we will move backward. How much do you want to damage our country? How far do you want to set back the cause of social justice here? Would you be willing to sacrifice Social Security or Medicare? Would you sacrifice a woman's right to control her own body to protest our government's support of Israel's war in Gaza?

The Only Choice for a Conservative

If you are a conservative who is disgusted and angered by the antisemitism of the extreme left, you need to remind yourself where the real danger lies. The antisemites of the left are noisy; they march with placards; they sometimes harass Jewish students. But they have not gone into synagogues to kill people. Remember the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

The really dangerous antisemites in our country are on the extreme political right. It is the neo-Nazis and White Christian Nationalists who have made us afraid and who have caused every synagogue in the United States to increase its spending on security. We can tolerate noisy, antisemitic leftists, but we cannot tolerate people who walk into our synagogues to kill us, and we do not want to elect a president who will empower those killers. If you ask yourself which candidate is “good for the Jews,” you will find only one answer: Kamala Harris. If you sit this election out or vote for a Republican, you will empower our country’s most dangerous antisemites. Is that what you want?

The Only Choice

So, I say again, a Jew must vote for Kamala Harris in 2024. There is no other choice.

The Humanities and National Identity

 What is the Point of the Study of the Humanities?

The New York Times recently published an opinion piece entitled “I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don ‘t Know What Their Value Is.” Many Americans share that ignorance, and we wonder why anyone should study subjects like literature or history. I think that the humanities have a key role in the education of the people of a nation.

The humanities are the means by which we create a national identity through a shared culture and history. A nation must be more than a collection of individuals who happen to reside within the borders of a territory. The people of a nation must have a shared identity that answers the question, "Who are we?" In a large territory, such an identity cannot emerge automatically. In every country, it is and has been a deliberate creation.

A National Identity Must Have Depth  

A shared, national identity should not be a shallow or a momentary thing. We Americans cannot be merely the people who eat hamburgers or the people who love the music of Taylor Swift. A national identity should have historical depth and cultural richness. When I was in school in France, I had to memorize poems written in the sixteenth century. I now understand that the point of that exercise was to impress on us that being French meant having a share in a literary tradition that went back for centuries. Memorizing those poems was part of learning what it meant to be French.

We can use works of American culture in the same way. We are the people who produced the literary works of Richard Wright and Emily Dickenson, the plays of Arthur Miller and August Wilson, the paintings of Jackson Pollock and Georgia O'Keefe, the music of Aaron Copeland and Scott Joplin. We are the people who have created a unified and distinctive culture from the contributions of an unimaginable variety of immigrant influences.

A National Identity Can Have Variants

A national identity does not have to erase regional or ethnic identities. We can have both. The American South has a distinctive culture, but southerners also share our American culture. American Blacks have a distinctive culture, too, but they remain Americans as they learn when they visit Africa. Spain has four official languages, but despite their protestations to the contrary, the people of Barcelona remain Spaniards.

A National Identity Can Change

A national identity is not static. It can change over time as people come to understand their society and their history from new perspectives. That is why the literary canon matters so much. When I was in college, the canon didn't include many female or nonwhite writers, and that had to change. We now study works by Black writers, by Hispanic writers and by women. We learn that their contributions have not diluted our culture. They have enriched it. We are a people with a rich culture that has many strands.

History and National Identity

The study of history also plays a role in our sense of who we are. When I was in school, I learned that we were the people whose ancestors arrived at Plymouth Rock, wrote the Declaration of Independence, fought the Civil War and crossed the prairies in covered wagons. We have since realized that the view that I learned is incomplete, and we have started to come to terms with the fact that we are also the people who exterminated the Native Americans, enslaved millions of Africans and imprisoned innocent Japanese in camps in WWII.

That dark view of who we are has been very hard for some people to accept, but it must in the end be incorporated into our sense of who we are. The solution cannot be that we stop studying history. It must be that we learn to tell our story in a new way. Perhaps, we will learn to accept that our history - like the history of every nation - is morally ambiguous. It contains both elements of heroism and elements of villainy.  

Perhaps the elements of villainy are the most important because we can learn from them. In a wonderful book about engineering failures called To Engineer is Human, the author explains that the study of failures is important because we can learn from them. Successes teach us nothing new. Perhaps the study of the villainous parts of our history will help us to build a more just society in the future. We can come to see ourselves as the people who created "Jim Crow" and also as the people who overcame it.

We Cannot Be a Nation Without the Humanities

The study of the humanities is the way that a national culture and a national identity are built. Without a shared culture and identity, patriotism becomes racism or shallow jingoism. We cannot be a nation if we learn only the things that benefit us directly as individuals. The study of accounting, computer science or chemistry does not help to create a shared identity. If we are to be a nation at all, we must learn to see ourselves as the inheritors of a shared culture and history. We can learn that only through the study of the humanities.

Why Our Broken Immigration System Stays Broken

This is my last post in January. I am going on vacation, and my next post will be on February.

Unscrupulous Employers Benefit  

If you want to know why we are unable to reform our broken immigration system, look no further. Our immigration system remains broken because thousands of unscrupulous employers profit from the broken system. This story tells about the extensive exploitation of undocumented immigrant children in the roofing business. The children do dangerous work. They are paid less than the minimum wage; they do not receive benefits like Social Security, unemployment insurance or health insurance. They die at six times the rate of children in other occupations. The children are vulnerable to this exploitation for fear of losing their jobs and for fear of being deported. The children's vulnerability forms the basis of the business model on which their employers operate. The model allows the employers to reduce their costs and thus, to offer lower prices than their competitors who follow the law.

This business model is not limited the roofing business, and it is not limited to children. All over the United States, businesses make huge profits by exploiting the vulnerability of undocumented, immigrant workers. The state of Wisconsin has documented widespread misclassification of workers as independent contractors rather than as employees, and a union official told me that immigrants are especially subject to this practice. A recent NY Times article detailed the extensive illegal use of immigrant child labor in factories and on industrial farms all over the United States. Practices like misclassification and the illegal use of child labor allow employers to pay their workers less than the minimum wage and to avoid the cost of Social Security, unemployment insurance and health insurance. The workers are unable to complain because they fear being deported.

A Pool of Vulnerable Workers

Our broken immigration system has thus created a huge pool of vulnerable workers. Their existence allows employers to make big profits illegally and also limits the growth of unions that could fight for the workers' rights.  If the immigration status of these workers were regularized, they would no longer be vulnerable. The businesses that hire them would lose their illegal profits and would have to compete on an equal basis with law-abiding business. Naturally, the businesses that profit from our broken system resist any changes that threaten their illegal business model. 

Our Broken Immigration System Helps to Elect Republican Politicians

The fact that undocumented immigrants may be paid less than American workers is used in propaganda to weaken unions and divide the working class. Workers are told that immigrants are taking American jobs and that workers should vote for Republican candidates who promise to limit immigration. The workers are not told that the root of the problem is not in the immigrants themselves but in the broken immigration system that keeps them in a position where they can be exploited. If they became citizens, they would not be so vulnerable to exploitation, and all workers would benefit. Unsurprisingly, the companies that exploit the undocumented workers do not want American voters to see that. 

Of course, the Republican candidates who promise to shut down immigration do not really do so because if they did, they would eliminate the pool of exploitable workers. However, the candidates do vote for low taxes and reduced environmental regulation, and that benefits our corporate oligarchs. Most businesses benefit from low taxes and reduced regulation even if they do not themselves exploit undocumented workers. So, most businesses benefit from our broken immigration system as long as it can be used to induce American workers to vote for Republicans. However, the issue can be used in that way only as long as the pool of undocumented immigrants remains large. So, our oligarchs have no interest in reforming our immigration system, and therefore, it remains broken. Our broken immigration system is a weapon in the war on America's workers.

We Need a Wealth Tax

Should You Carry a Heavier Tax Burden Than the Extremely Wealthy? 

Why should you pay a substantial tax on a big part of your wealth while the very wealthy do not? A wealth tax would make our system fairer.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has proposed a “wealth tax” of 2% that would be paid only by families with wealth of more than $50 million. The idea is that such a tax would raise a substantial amount of revenue and would help to limit our country’s large and growing inequality. The tax would be on all types of assets including stocks, bonds, and luxury goods like yachts or jewelry as well as real estate.

The inclusion of real estate shows that in reality, we already have a type of wealth tax, and it is the property tax that homeowners pay on their houses. This tax hits the middle class very heavily because a middle-class person’s home is usually a very large share of his/her wealth. Most middle-class people own relatively small amounts in stock, bonds or other financial assets. The very wealthy, in contrast, hold most of their wealth in forms like stocks and bonds. Such forms of wealth escape taxation today, and therefore, the wealthy pay a much smaller percentage of their wealth in taxes than middle class people do. Even the income from such assets is often taxed at the low rate applied to “long term capital gains.” Thus, the wealthy do not pay anything like their fair share.

A Wealth Tax Would Provide Needed Revenue

A wealth tax would provide a substantial amount of revenue that would allow us to reduce our dependence of government borrowing to pay for the government services that we need. Today, our government’s indebtedness increases regularly because the people who hold the bulk of our national wealth do not pay their fair share of the taxes. Our ever-increasing dependence on government debt endangers the stability of our government. In the 18th century, the French monarchy fell because the aristocrats, who held almost all of the country's wealth, refused to pay taxes. Do we want our democratic government to go the same way?

A Wealth Tax Would Limit the Concentration of Wealth and Power

As Robert Reich explains, we suffer from an ever-increasing concentration of wealth and income in the top 10% or even the top 1% of the population. Today, the top 1% of the population is estimated to own about 42% of our nation's wealth, and that share is increasing. Providing a counter to the increasing concentration of wealth is important because if wealth becomes too concentrated, the economic system fails to provide an acceptable standard of living to the bulk of the population, and as a result people feel that the “system” is rigged against them. In that case,they become susceptible to the appeals of demagogues, and democracy becomes unstable. If we allow the concentration of wealth to continue to grow, our democracy may well not survive.

Moreover, it has been recognized since the founding of our country that democracy is incompatible with the excessive concentration of wealth. With wealth comes political power, and a democracy with an excessive concentration of wealth is likely to become an oligarchy. Our Constitution gives to the federal government the responsibility to prevent this from happening.  Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution says that the federal government shall "guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government," which means that the Constitution requires the federal government to prevent the emergence of an oligarchy that would subvert our democracy. Thus, a wealth tax or some similar means of preventing the emergence of an oligarchy is not merely permitted. It is actually required by our Constitution. This way of understanding our Constitution is not new. It has been used throughout our history to support efforts to maintain and extend our democracy.

We Should Not Be Deterred by the Problems That Will Occur

Of course, there will inevitably be problems with a wealth tax. Estimating the full extent of the wealth of a very wealthy person is difficult, and wealth may be hidden in offshore places and in trusts. These, however, are not new problems. Similar problems exist in the estimation of the incomes of the very wealthy. In addition, some wealth may flee the United States to avoid the tax, but this, too, is not a new problem. The fact that it will be difficult to design a perfect wealth tax should not deter us. We have never designed a perfect tax, and we should not expect a wealth tax to be different.

So, we should have a wealth tax that taxes all forms of wealth and not just real estate because when we tax only real estate, the middle class pays an unfair share of the total. A wealth tax would also reduce our dependence on borrowed money to provide the government services that we need. Finally, a wealth tax would help to prevent the erosion of our democracy through excessive concentration of wealth and power in a small oligarchy. 

Making Politically Effective Use of This Blog (and Others)

 Dear Readers,

I am very pleased that you enjoy my blog posts enough to continue to read them, and I am glad to see that my readership has grown over the last few months. Now, it is time for us to take the next step by using this blog to advance the cause of justice in our society.  In order to make our ideas effective, we have to spread them as widely as possible, and we have to make use of as many channels of communication and as many personal networks as possible. So, let's do that.

Here are a few things that we can do to increase the effectiveness abd reach of our ideas.

First, we can use the posts in this blog and others as bases for on-line discussions. If we comment on the posts, we will end up having discussions. We will not always agree with one another, and that is fine. In fact, it is the whole point. Lively discussions will help to spread our ideas and strengthen our cause not only because the discussions will be interesting but because when you comment on a post, your comment will be seen by your FB friends, and that will broaden the reach of our ideas.  If you are feeling energetic today, you can even go back and comment on previous posts.

Second, we can share the posts. Sharing is one of the keys to making effective use of social media. Sharing increases the number of people who see a post, and that allows us to spread our ideas. I post links to my posts on Facebook, and you can share those. You can also post your own links to blog posts that you particularly like. You don't have to agree with a post to share it. You can say that you think the post is terrible, is wrong, or fails to understand reality. You can even go back and share previous posts.

Third, we can use the blog posts as starting points for letters to the editor. If one of my posts gives you an idea that you would like to write about, please do so, and include a reference to the blog in the letter. If you would like editorial help with a letter, please send it to me at foxcitiesprogressive@gmail.com, and I will be glad to help with editing.

Finally, I invite you to write posts as guests of my blog. You can send them to me at foxcitiesprogressive@gmail.com. I may edit them, but I will not publish the edited versions without your permission. You can choose whether you want to be identified as the author of a post or not. If you don't want to be identified, I will say only that the post was contributed by "A Reader of the Blog."

These actions will help to spread our ideas and to make them politically effective. Local political candidates will pick up our ideas and use them in their campaigns. The ideas will become part of the broader political dialog in our state and our country, and that may lead to real, social change. That is really the point of doing this, isn’t it.