The Clintonite wisdom embodied by the headline has held the Democratic Party in its thrall for going on 30 years now. In spite of the mountains of evidence that it is pure bullshit and should have been shit-canned years ago, it has the survival instincts of Rasputin.
And yet… all of my yelling on a shitty little blog in Delaware feels like it is beginning to pay off.
We are supposed to be the workers’ party. Democrats must be that party again. We must sharpen the difference between us—historically, America’s party of workers—and the party of big business.
Many are waking up to this reality.
As inflation continues to batter families’ bank accounts—and the president’s poll numbers—even free-traders of yesteryear are beginning to admit the problems of a labyrinthine supply chain stretched across the globe.
And for the first time in my memory, there’s real momentum to take action to fix it. Democrats just passed the kind of industrial policy we haven’t seen in many decades, to build out domestic supply chains of key inputs like semiconductors.
It will create the kind of jobs that too many communities have lost. And it sends a clear message to these Americans that we have not forgotten them.
None of this requires compromising on our values. A commitment to populist economics and fair trade isn’t just compatible with a commitment to social justice—the two naturally go together. One need only read Martin Luther King’s dozens of speeches to unions, and ponder what he was doing when he was killed, to remember the deep connection between workers’ rights and civil rights.
A relentless focus on populist economics wins out over Republicans’ manufactured culture war.