What is new is that advocates for reform increase their chance of getting the public’s attention and winning elections as a reformer.
To measure the electoral power of these campaign finance reforms, we conducted an experimental exercise with voters in the Senate battleground survey that faced a deluge of campaign advertising. All of the respondents in the survey heard a proposal to publicly fund campaigns and half the respondents also heard a debate about Citizens United and candidates’ positions on campaign money. While the full sample responded positively to the campaign finance proposal and shifted toward the Democratic candidate, the half that also heard about Citizens United shifted even farther. The Democratic candidate who proposed to overturn Citizens United and attacked the Republican candidate’s positions on campaign money performed even better because the candidate made gains with independents, moderate Republicans, and the white working class.43
Survey of 1,000 likely 2014 voters across the 12 most competitive Senate battleground states conducted for Democracy Corps and Every Voice, July 12–16, 2014.
Proposals to reform campaign funding are now testing in the top tier of issues for Democrats. Two-thirds of voters nationally were more positive about an economic plan when it proposed to overturn Citizens United and bring in public funding of campaigns.44
Campaign finance reformers are winning the argument when the public hears them, and voters across the political spectrum are embracing proposals to dramatically change how America’s elections work. They are ready to support proposals to go after the money and undermine the special interests’ influence, which is crowding out the role of ordinary citizens. And the voters seem poised to punish candidates who are part of this corrupt nexus and to reward leaders ready to clean the stables.
One of the most effective campaign attacks we tested linked big donations to politicians advancing the interests of wealthy donors who used unlimited secret money to make sure the billionaires and CEOs paid no higher taxes and their loopholes were protected.
* * *
(The named Republican candidate) supports the Supreme Court’s decision to allow wealthy special interests and big corporations to spend unlimited amounts of secret money to buy elections, taking the power away from regular citizens and putting it in the hands of just a few billionaires. (GOP candidate) made sure CEOs paid no higher taxes and that their loopholes are protected, while working men and women struggle.
* * *
The power of this attack comes from the centrality of the corrupt Washington and Wall Street nexus to the new economy. While working men struggled, the Republican candidate was helping government work for big corporations and special interests.
When Democracy Corps tested this attack in Louisiana, North Carolina, Georgia, Iowa, Colorado, and the other Senate battleground states, it was among the most powerful attacks on the Republican candidates. In Louisiana, for example, two-thirds of white persuadable voters said this raised serious doubts about Bill Cassidy, and 40 percent had very serious doubts.45
Statewide survey of 456 white persuadable likely voters in Louisiana conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for Democracy Corps, October 11–14, 2014.
Of course, none of the Democratic candidates ran that ad.
That tells you that the Democratic Party may need to be reformed, too, and that the public is far ahead of the politicians. Are the Democrats prepared to enact the reforms to tackle the roles of big money, big business influence, and the rising inequality that nexus furthers?
This is really the same question asked by Thomas Edsall in a series of tough op-eds in The New York Times. In the end, those challenges really empower those who lean into reform. As the public understands, reform begins with going after the money and the corruption of government.
Sure, the Republican Party is much more dependent on the billionaires and richest donors. Yet it is the Democrats who want to mitigate inequality and limit the growing influence of the top 1 percent and they too have grown increasingly dependent on their donations. Since 2000, a quarter of the Democrats’ contributions have come from the billionaires in the top .01 percent. And since 2008, about half of Democrats’ campaign money came from the top .01 percent and the largest donors.46
Thomas B. Edsall, “Can the Government Actually Do Anything About Inequality,” The New York Times, September 10, 2013. Data from the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenue Service.
That dependence on the largest and billionaire donors is very real and only underscores how Democrats must make a visible break with the big-money and corporate, special-interest influence over government. For the public, that is a precondition for inviting a government activism that can address our biggest economic and social problems.
BEYOND THE REAGAN DEMOCRATS
Democrats will likely get the chance to lead this era of reform simply because they are aligned with the ascendant trends and the new American majority and Republicans are battling ferociously against them. The Constitution allows them to avoid catastrophic defeat by overrepresenting rural parts of the country where Republicans deepen their support.
Having the national stage, however, does not mean that Democrats will build a politics around people’s current struggles and be willing to battle against the inertia and against the powerful forces dominating government. To lead reform, Democrats will have to embrace a disruptive political project focused intensely on the current and emerging contradictions.
Bill Clinton’s formula for winning the national vote and the Electoral College lay in reclaiming the votes of enough of the declining white industrial male workers and combining that with the votes from the Democrats’ growing liberal cultural coalition—a product of the civil rights and women’s movements, the influx of immigrants, and the protests against the Vietnam and Iraq wars. President Clinton and some in the Democratic Leadership Council described this formula as “running to the center,” though as a pollster and strategist for Clinton, I never did. I described it as a formula for building a progressive majority from the bottom up—and it did allow Democrats to win again in the industrial Midwest and run better in some parts of the South.
The measure of success for candidate Bill Clinton was his ability to win over the “Reagan Democrats” in Macomb County, Michigan, at the heart of the unionized auto industry. Bill Clinton famously ran to govern for “the forgotten middle class,” and winning back and running respectably with those working-class voters set Democrats on a course to build a winning national coalition in five of the past six elections.
Barack Obama has evolved the formula in a pretty fundamental way. He embraced the new diversity and changes in gender roles and the family, which built the Democrats’ electoral support among America’s new majority. Obama could get by with just 36 percent of the white working-class in 2012 because the Democratic formula increasingly depends on the two-to-one support the party gets from minority voters, new immigrants, Millennials, and unmarried women, as well as the party’s big majorities among the college-educated and professional women.47
So in the end, Obama’s big election victories in 2008 and 2012 were the political triumph of the ascendant trends. In 2008, the huge crowd in Grant Park celebrating the election of a young, mixed-race president was celebrating a changed America. The next Democratic president might celebrate victory in New York City as a million people gather in Central Park and hundreds of millions around the world watch. This, too, would be a victory of the new America.
Any new Democratic president will very quickly discover, however, as Barack Obama did all too soon, that the American mood can easily darken. Two-thirds will very quickly say the country is headed in the wrong direction. This was Obama’s experience by 2010. Whether that occurs again will depend on how the new president decides to address the growing economic and cultural contradictions described in this book, and if he or she embraces the reform agenda described in this chapter—a project Obama did not undertake as the defining challenge of his preside
ncy.48
When President Obama assumed office after the economic collapse of 2008, he did not view it as a Roosevelt moment when a Democratic president might have educated the public on the fundamentals of the new economy and advanced a bold reform agenda. The financial crisis and Great Recession forced him to focus like a laser on the economy and to enact Wall Street reforms, but restructuring the economy was not the defining project of his presidency and he never educated the country on his economic path.
Obama’s political project was transcending the division of the country into blue and red America and the resulting dysfunction in Washington. President Obama won the party nomination running as an outsider demanding change, aligned with the forces mobilized to oppose George W. Bush and the Iraq war. He won the nomination fully aligned with the country’s rising cultural liberalism and racial diversity, but what animated him was his exasperation with Karl Rove’s culture war that had willfully polarized the country since 2004. Even when the president turned his focus to the middle class late in his presidency, he reminded the country, “We are still more than a collection of red states and blue states,” and “together, we can do great things.” In the end, his presidency will have made critical progress on health care, climate change, and tax equity, but his political project was more transitional to the new politics centered on the new majority and bold reforms.49
The American citizenry and new majority celebrate the ascendant trends, values, and changing way of life, but they live the contradictions. They struggle daily with the pay gap and work that doesn’t pay enough to live on, piecing together several jobs and participating in the freelance economy while managing work and kids, many of them as single parents. The majority live with the social consequences that arise from more and more households being unmarried; from the reality that working-class men today face a dimmer future than their fathers did; and from the lack of public policies that support women who are fully in the labor force. All the while they are watching the top 1 percent use their money to influence political connections and rig the system so the economy works in their favor, not for the working and middle class.
With those problems unaddressed, the public simmers, waiting for political leaders who “get it” and who will reform government and bring real changes. Large percentages of the new American majority—the progressive base for change—believe the country is headed in the wrong direction and still give Obama high disapproval ratings. So while Republicans are deeply engaged in a battle against the changing trends, the new American majority is much less engaged because they see politics failing them. The rising American electorate could be the Democrats’ salvation—but that electorate first has to be engaged and motivated to vote.
The new political formula for a real national electoral majority does not depend on winning the “Reagan Democrats” or a “forgotten middle class.” We now know that identifying with the emergent trends and joining the battle for American values will still leave the Democrats short of the momentum they need to bring change. Democrats have to show they get it and have finally joined the battle over the central contradictions of our times and advance a reform agenda. Then, they will have a majority that defends its gains year in and year out.
Part V
NEW PROGRESSIVE ERA
11 THE PROGRESSIVE ERA: “TO CLEANSE, TO RECONSIDER, TO RESTORE, TO CORRECT THE EVIL”
America in the two decades closing out the nineteenth century was a wonder, an emergent powerhouse industrializing at a breathtaking pace, sucking in immigrants from across Europe to work in its mines and factories, and building the first railways connecting New York City and San Francisco. It was poised to be the exceptional nation, economically, culturally, and militarily ascendant. The twentieth century was to be “the American century.”
But exceptionalism then, as now, came with deep contradictions that threatened the sustainability of the American model. America’s Industrial Revolution brought industrial monopolies and ever more political corruption. It brought longer hours at subsistence wages for farmers and laborers, and terrible living conditions in teeming slums and such a level of inequality that it became known as “the “Gilded Age.” Toss into the brew the spreading union strikes and police violence, the nativist anti-immigration campaigns, and the populist, socialist, and progressive revolt and you had a formula for growing instability. That only deepened the industrialists’ resolve to defend the new economic order. Before the turn of the century, “muckraking” investigative journalists exposed businessmen and politicians’ special deals that nurtured the endemic corruption at the heart of the Republican and Democratic parties.
The next twenty years and four national elections would be transformative. Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft at the head of the Republican Party, the La Follette Republicans and Bryan Democrats from outside, and President Woodrow Wilson as head of the Democratic Party would bring bold reforms that would mitigate some of the worst outcomes of the industrial era. The radical reforms would reduce inequality, improve living and working conditions for the working class and new immigrants, and make it possible for them to edge up the social ladder. They also limited the influence of the top industrialists and saved democracy from the systemic corporate corruption of government. Even more important reforms would have to await the election of Franklin Roosevelt. Nonetheless, the progressive revolt against the industrial titans and party bosses brought a period of progressive governance and reforms that allowed America to develop in a very different way. America standing astride the twentieth century would not have been possible without this era of reform.
The radical reforms of the progressive era were not achieved in one presidential election or presidential term. The reformers first triumphed and governed with a progressive agenda in key cities and states. Nationally, it took four presidential elections and three presidents with varying commitments to reform that grew bolder and inevitable with time. The voices of muckraking journalists got heard over the tabloid and yellow journalists. Local reform clubs, charities, churches, and some notable philanthropists organized to improve living and working conditions. And together they won the intellectual argument about the nature of this new economy. Progressives came to be hegemonic in civil society before they were ascendant politically.
America has been dealt a not dissimilar hand today, and Democrats and reformers will be called upon to address the dark side of America’s progress. They will have to battle for radical reforms that will allow America to realize its great potential.
The story of the Industrial Revolution in the last decades of the nineteenth century is really an American story of unprecedented economic growth and emerging global dominance. That story began in Britain and had no precedent. All developments in human history that came before the Industrial Revolution barely budged upward the rate of economic output and progress. America would dominate an extraordinary surge in human productivity and economic growth.
Thomas Piketty graphs that story with real historical data. For the first millennium since the beginning of the Christian calendar, the growth rate of world output hovered near zero. While world output grew 0.1 percent between 1000 and 1500, and 0.2 percent between 1500 and 1700, the per capita growth rate remained unchanged until 1700. Total global economic output did not grow more than 0.5 percent a year, and per capita growth did not rise above zero until the 1700–1820 period. However, output tripled with the Industrial Revolution (1.5 percent) and per capita growth reached almost 1 percent. In North America, the per capita rate of growth surged to 1.6 percent a year during the Industrial Revolution, almost twice the global per capita rate at the time.1
The disruptive change that began with the steam engine and portable power, Ian Morris writes, “reduces” everything that came before “to insignificance.” Muscle power, wind, and water have inherent limits. It was the portable steam engine that burst those limits. Look at what happened with cotton. Steam power greatly accelerated the production of cotton as t
he cotton gin separated the sticky seeds from the cotton fiber on America’s plantations. America’s African American slave labor was integral to this first industrial era as production of cotton bales surged from 3,000 in 1790 to 178,000 in 1810 to 4.5 million in 1860, a year before the Civil War began.2
Other inventions slashed the cost of a telegram by 100 percent between the Civil War and First World War, and the first telephones that came into operation in 1876 allowed communication to advance with lightning speed. The steam engine brought the rapid expansion of the railroads that fueled a burgeoning trade among the states, and by the turn of century 200,000 miles of rail crisscrossed America. With steam power, ships could sail much greater distances and made possible the development of an Atlantic economy that American industrialists would dominate.3
The United States and Germany, Morris writes, led the next phase of the Industrial Revolution because they were much more systematic in the application of science to new technology. This would soon be an “age of oil, automobiles, and aircraft.” The internal combustion engine was invented in Germany in 1885, and by 1913 America was producing one million cars a year.4
Because of the technological advancement, Europe and America began “to claim a share of global output that was two to three times greater than their share of the world’s population,” Piketty writes, “simply because the output of each person was two to three times greater than the global average.” Starting in 1870, however, this became an American story. Its share of total world output rose dramatically—doubling to 24 percent—while the European share went flat and then declined between 1913 and 1950. Meanwhile, America’s rising share of global output continued unabated. The Industrial Revolution really did make America ascendant.5
America Ascendant Page 36
