It is becoming a constant struggle to combat despondency, as I watch USA Democratic Party leaders shuck and jive, wriggle and squirm, to avoid having to accept any responsibility for their disastrous and destructive neoliberal economic policies of the past half-century. It's a tragedy having Donald Trump as President, with reactionary Republicans in control of the House and Senate. But having Democrats unwilling to address their own role in creating the widespread misery and discontent that is fueling political populism, thus crippling their ability to oppose Trump and the Republicans, is a catastrophe. Because without the Democratic Party in USA renouncing neoliberalism and putting forward a grand vision for a $100 trillion rebuilding of the world economy to stop global climate change, that political populism has no where to go except to the right.

The origins of the Democratic Party's insouciance today is the Party's response to the Republican victories of 1968 and 1980. The latter was an especially severe blow, because the common wisdom held that the Republican Party was on the verge of extinction because of the Watergate scandal. Democratic control of the Senate with 61 seats, flipped to Republican control of 53 seats. The Democratic majority in the House was reduced from 292 Representatives to 242.

The Democratic Party leadership responded to these electoral disasters by abandoning their traditional alliance with organized labor and beginning to shun, then actually attack, the working class--explicitly. The future of the Party, they declared, lay in embracing instead the rising new “professional class.” This is abundantly documented by Thomas Frank in his most recent book, Listen Liberal. A shorter summary is by Matt Stoller in The Atlantic this past October, just before the election: How Democrats Lost Their Populist Soul. Summaries of Stoller’s article are available on TOP/GOS here and here. There are a number of reviews of Frank’s book available with a search of the InterTubez, but I have yet to read one that is a truly adequate summary. The book is just too chock full of details, names, and dates, and it packs a wallop. Anyone still thinking in terms of Hillary versus Bernie should be shamed into silence if they manage to read the entire book. Unfortunately, I think most Hillary partisans will find the book much too painful and discomfiting to read in its entirety.

However, the key to understanding why the embrace of a “post-industrial” new “professional class” was such a disaster eludes both Frank and Stoller. First, no modern economy can ever be truly post-industrial. Modern standards of living would simply collapse without the products of industrial mass production. Just think of what would happen if there were no longer so simple a thing as medicine bottles. How would you store and distribute anti-biotics? Pain relievers? The special medications that today keep hundreds of millions of people alive, who a century or two ago would quickly expire because of their illness or disorder? I’d be willing to bet that without continued production of the trillions of medicine bottles each year, about half the human population would die off within five years. The really sick thing is: there are many so called “liberals” and “progressives” who think such a die off is not such a bad thing.

Second, the embrace of one specific class or another directly violates the republican (small “r”, not Republican Party) political economy of the U.S. republic, which is founded on the Constitutional mandate to promote the General Welfare. It is this Constitutional mandate that sets the USA apart from and above all other governments before it—monarchies, aristocracies, oligarchies, and dictatorships. It is what is supposed to distinguish the USA economy from the mercantalist economies of old Europe: all economic activity is supposed to strengthen not the state and the elites who control it (as was the case with mercantalism), but the entire nation—all the people. (And note that conservative and libertarian scholars explicitly attack the General Welfare principle for being the bedrock of the “nanny state.” The Confederacy that split the Union and fought to preserve slavery copied the U.S. Constitution, but deliberately removed any mention of the General Welfare—and conservative and libertarian scholars have written that this was an “important improvement.”)

This second point also directs us toward the reason why many people make the oversimplified argument that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans, which is implicit in the results of this poll we are considering. Embracing one specific class or another—for the Democrats, the “professional class”; for the Republicans, “entrepreneurs” or “job creators” or whatever—must be accompanied by the belief that the prosperity of that favored class will “trickle down” and “lift all boats.” Broken down in this way, it is easily apparent that Democratic economic policies are not that different from Republican economic policies. The major differences between the two parties is in their approach to how much of a social safety net there should be to alleviate the poverty that inevitably results from deindustrialization and an abandonment of the principle of promoting the General Welfare.