Big systemic changes

[Recursion]

Last edited Thu Jan 2, 2020, 05:58 AM - Edit history (1)

Dave Milliband, brother of the UK Labour leader before Corbyn, made an interesting point the other day in an op-ed. He argued that "people with the least have the most reason to be risk averse about taking a chance on the future." I think this is an important point.

Back in 2016, Hillary Clinton dominated both the primary election and the general election among voters from households making $50K or less. This point often gets glossed over with all the talk about the "white working class", but it's worth remembering: even just among white voters, the richer a voter was, the more likely he was to vote for Trump. In the primaries the richer a voter was, the more likely he was to vote for Sanders. I mention both Trump and Sanders because both campaigned based on the idea that the system is fundamentally broken and needs radical immediate change, and I think it's worth at least considering the fact that richer voters are more likely to agree with this than poorer voters.

This isn't new or unprecedented. The American Revolution was a revolt of the middle and upper classes. The French Revolution was not started by the sans culottes, it was clerks and artisans who stormed the Bastille (one of the key original demands was that pawnbrokers allow redemption of pawned tools and machinery on credit -- that is, it was an argument among owners of the means of production). The guillotine was invented by and for the bourgeois to create an execution method compatible with bourgeois tastes, and killed far more poor people than rich people -- for that matter, the Terror began when the Cordeliers had 1000 common criminals and homeless people killed out of fear that they would support the Duke of Brunswick, whose army was approaching Paris. Time and time again, revolutionaries are not the destitute but rather the aggrieved somewhat well-off: revolution is a middle class hobby.

There are a couple of threads about YouGov's most recent poll and I want to call out something that hasn't really been talked about. Roughly half of the sample was from households making $50K a year or less. They were less likely than richer respondents to say that the Democratic party was not liberal enough, and more likely to say the Democratic party's ideological position is "about right". I've said this over and over since the 2016 exit polls first came out but it's worth saying again: as a party, we already do very well among the economically disadvantaged; where we fall short is among voters making $80K a year. (To circle back from something above: $80K is the median income of a white two-earner couple both of whom have high school diplomas -- we are losing the "white working class", largely because they're a lot richer than people seem to think).

Our political process has an unfortunate tendency to confuse the aspirations of the middle class with the needs of the poor. The most famous example right now is college tuition: the poorer half of the country gets need-based financial aid; the bigger problem for them is foregoing 4 years of income. An even bigger problem is the recruitment pipeline to begin with and all the social barriers that get put up (if the middle class doesn't understand that a job posting asking for a college degree is a more polite way of saying "middle class candidates only", the people that excludes certainly do -- just like 200 years ago college exists in the US mostly as a class signal, and when it no longer nearly bankrupts a middle class family it no longer serves that purpose and will be replaced by something else). But it impacts every disagreement we have. Take health care: the poorest third of the country, and the poorest half of children, are on Medicaid, and according to the polling really like the program. How the middle class pays for healthcare is not an immediate personal concern for them. It's like Milliband said. The people who have the least aren't dumb; they know perfectly well who's going to win out if it's a fight between them and the middle class for a single pool of doctors and clinics.

Bluntly, every big idea the party has right now (other than a UBI) only helps the poor incidentally in its rush to help the middle class. All the strutting around putting on the mantle of the New Deal is great but what I want is somebody who will pick up the mantle of the Great Society. Is anybody talking about bringing back AFDC? Is anybody talking about expanding Medicaid? (The answer to that is "yes", and they're getting excoriated for it as a lesser alternative to the holy grail of MFA.)

The poor, women, and minorities (and the last of the two constitute a horrific percentage of the first) are going to bear the full cost of any experimental massive change we introduce. It shouldn't be surprising that they are less eager than more fortunate people to try them.

[stopdiggin]

1. Super post. Very interesting, and well laid out. (nt)

[betsuni]

2. Steve Almond:

"Taken together, John's posts composed a kind of ideologically incoherent gumbo in which the main ingredients were disinformation and distrust of authority in general, and Clinton in particular -- the same stew Trump dished out daily at his rallies. And John didn't just opine on social media. He participated in various online chat groups, circulating these same links, while bantering with friends and relatives. Here, too, his logic was tough to follow. 'This country can't survive another Clinton presidency,' he wrote to his chat group, most of whom happened to be female Clinton supporters. And: 'Clinton will lead us into war.' And: 'She'll create a corporatist controlled police state.' When another member of his chat group asked John about the potential dangers of electing Trump, he replied, 'Why are you stuck on fear mongering?'

"John insisted he wanted to vote for someone he believed in, not the lesser of two evils. He promoted himself as the epitome of righteous idealism. But his logic was that of a fatalist. The system was rigged beyond repair. Platforms and policies are bullshit. 'A vote for hillary is a vote for trump,' John wrote my wife a few weeks before the election. This is how you knew he wasn't a person of color, or a Muslim, or an immigrant."

[abqtommy]

3. Thanks. I found the op informative but less understandable than I would have liked.

[Recursion]

7. Sorry :(

I sometimes run away with my parentheticals

[abqtommy]

8. Don't be sorry on my account. There's a lot of variables involved in this type of communication.

[ritapria]

4. How the middle class takes care of health care is not of immediate concern for them

What is Andrew Yang's program for Healthcare ? He is for Medical For all - as an aspiration ……..What are his specific proposals to make that aspiration a reality ?

[Recursion]

6. Here's his page on it. If you want a bumper sticker slogan you'll be disappointed

This is the summary:

https://www.yang2020.com/policies/medicare-for-all/

And this is the longer statement:

https://www.yang2020.com/blog/a-new-way-forward-for-healthcare-in-america/

US healthcare is a complicated system with complicated problems that will require complicated solutions.

Yang wants to:

1. Lower the cost of drugs through importation, enforced licensing, and public manufacture

2. Increase flexibility of remote and tele-medicine as well as remove the 1970s-era limit on medical school seats

3. Move out of fee for service and towards capitation budgeting (this is sometimes called "All Payer" )

4. Actually decide how much end-of-life care we want to provide (hoo-boy would this be a political shitstorm)

5. Move more providers into "comprehensive" systems (think Kaiser or Mayo)

6. Put more of healthcare spending on a formula to decrease the impact of lobbying

[The Mouth]

5. I wish I could rec this more than once

Very good analysis. Change and opportunity are often sides of the same coin, but a coin much easier to spend when you are middle class rather than just barely hanging on.

[Recursion]

9. Thanks

I think this is an idea we ignore at our peril