“There is hard data that shows that a centrist Democrat would be a losing candidate:
“There is hard data that shows that a centrist Democrat would be a losing candidate:
Economist Thomas Piketty wrote a paper about this in 2018, though the Democrats paid no attention. The Republican Party has earned a reputation as the anti-science, anti-fact party — understandably, perhaps, given the GOP’s policy of ignoring the evidence for global climate change and insisting on the efficacy of supply-side economics, despite all the research to the contrary.
Yet ironically, it is now the Democratic Party that is wantonly ignoring mounds of social science data that suggests that promoting centrist candidates is a bad, losing strategy when it comes to winning elections. As the Democratic establishment and its pundit class starts to line up behind the centrist nominees for president — mainly, Joe Biden, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris — the party’s head-in-the-sand attitude is especially troubling. […] Piketty’s paper is an inconvenient truth for the Democratic Party. The party’s leaders see themselves as the left wing of capital — supporting social policies that liberal rich people can get behind, never daring to enact economic reforms that might step on rich donors’ toes. Hence, the establishment seems intent on anointing the centrist Democrats of capital, who push liberal social policies and neoliberal economic policies.“. – Via Salon
Piketty’s observation, that the party’s leaders see themselves as the left wing of capital, is one of those insights that is so obvious that it is easy to miss. There is no labor party in the United States, so it is not surprising that Trump was able to entice voters with his vacuous TV celebrity populism.
This is based on the faulty premise that the Democratic establishment and its pundit class would rather win than lose, even if it meant abandoning their fealty to rich donors. I believe they are fully aware of the reality reflected by Pikketty’s data but don’t care.
Upton Sinclair’s observation that it’s difficult to get a man to believe something if his salary depends on him not believing it applies with great force here. What incentive do any of these people have to change anything? Losing an election threatens none of them. Real change on the hand….
Excellent point.
Spencer interprets (“in other words”) Piketty’s “egalitarian-internationalist platform” as a “class-conscience platform that recognizes that rich people are not on the same side as the rest of us, and have different interests and are eager to exploit us.”
Spencer uses that thought as an exhortation for more progressive candidates. That’s all well and good, but he missed the crux of the Piketty’s thoughts and research, which Piketty refers to as the “central contradiction of capitalism” Piketty says, that a “market economy based on private property, if left to itself, contains powerful forces of convergence, associated in particular with the diffusion of knowledge and skills; but it also contains powerful forces of divergence, which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.”
He goes on to explain that his research indicates that the principal destabilizing force is the private rate of return on capital, which can be (and usually is) significantly higher for long periods of time than the rate of growth of income and output. This implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages in the present.
This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a “rentier”, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. And of course, the return on capital is directly correlated to the size of the investment.
Years ago, favorable tax treatment of capital gains was viewed as encouraging investment, hence output, growth, jobs, wages. But Piketty identified the contradiction in that paradigm. He also states that “the best way to increase wages and reduce wage inequalities in the long run is to invest in education and skills.” Over the long run, minimum wages and wage schedules cannot multiply wages by the factors necessary to achieve that level of progress. Education and technology are the decisive forces that will produce that growth.
Progressively taxing capital (such as eliminating the carried interest loophole and taxing gains the same as wages) is one of the primary weapons for combating income inequality. I am forever saying that rich people don’t make their fortunes through wages. Progressive taxation does not hit the truly rich.
Capitalism must be regulated and taxation must address proper and necessary taxation of capital.
A Centrist Democrat is a corporate Democrat also a pay to play politician. My opinion.