The Democratic Party used to support and draw strength from the working class; the majority of US voters. But the Reagan administration’s anti-union actions diminished union support for Democrats who then turned to rich donors in the emerging high tech industry. Millions of jobs were exported, megastores, cheap imports, and internet retail did nothing to help thousands of communities that had lost their main manufacturing employers.
In 2015, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders motivated large crowds with messages of restoring a level playing field for US workers. Yet their calls for more equitable taxation threatened well-heeled super donors. Recent support for addressing this corrosive failing of our capitalist system, such as a ballot initiative in Oregon to increase the corporate tax rate by 3% for outfits with more than $25,000,000 in sales met with well-financed, deceptive ad campaign and was defeated.
Recently, Governor Gretchen Whitmer and less prominent leaders like Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez have won in hotly contested elections against heavy GOP opposition. Their campaigns provide useful blueprints for reaching working-class voters. But will they be elevated and encouraged?
Party elites failed to prevent President Biden from his aborted run for a second term despite his stated intention that he would be a one-term president. When he did step aside, the party failed to hold an open convention. The rank and file were not allowed to choose from a field of promising candidates. So for a second time, and to much more ruinous results, the party elites blew a crucial election. If they were running a corporation, wouldn’t they be fired?
Will the party even get the chance to enable a new generation of leaders? With the GOP set to rule all three branches of the federal government, the administration of 2020-23 will look like a clambake. The Democrats will fight a rear-guard action, but will it be enough to preserve democracy? Or will the United State of America have to suffer a second civil war?
If the Democratic Party gets a chance to gain control of the federal government, its new leaders must champion working Americans to correct deep income and wealth inequality. Only broad support of working Americans can force the super-rich to choose between confiscatory taxation and support of a true democracy. Our country can be an oligarchy, or a democracy. It cannot be both.
The GOP will do nothing to address income inequality. Democrats supporting working Americans should not miss an opportunity to call out how the GOP works at the behest of the super-rich. And you can be sure that the GOP will never oppose the egregious Citizens United ruling. But if the Democratic Party promotes leaders who will fight for working class Americans, they will gain a decisive majority of popular support. That will not only save our democracy, but evolve it toward what Abraham Lincoln called “a more perfect union.”
