I'm not spending a lot of time fretting about the midterms elections - at this point, if Democrats suffer a fairly stinging rout, even one which returns Republicans to control in one house of Congress or both, it will be at least in part a failure of their own making. If you want me to cry about the unfairness of it all - that's how I felt back in 1984 - I'll need a better sense that we're doing all we can and the problem is that no one is getting it. Right now, I don't think a lot of Democrats can make the case that this is the best we ought to offer.
Nothing about this upcoming disaster feels quite so familiar as the sense that all the election disasters are coming down to one of the left's worst weaknesses: a discussion of tax policy. Tax policy is a terrible issue to run on, and it's a sure sign of how DC's right wing machine has managed to reframe the election storyline that the Democratic establishment feels the need to make tax arguments central to the current debate. And it's worth reminding concerned lefties that these wounds we're making are self-inflicted: Republicans aren't arguing about taxes. We are.
And why? I think the reason goes to one of those Democratic flaws about being the heroes of our own story: "it's the right thing to do" becomes the left's defense for almost any unpopular course of action. It's winning the argument for the sake of the argument, to prove a pet theory, a triumph of knowledge and education. We've gotten away, again, from proposals that make pragmatic, practical attempts to address real life problems in favor of the distant, theoretical imperatives of educated professionals, people insulated from the impacts of their discussions. Such insulation makes it more comfortable to take the unpopular position, convincing ourselves that if we just say it right, others will get it. Instead, the argument gets circular, and rehashing it just makes the whole discussion that much more unpopular.
It's not to say that modern Democrats argued for fiscal irresponsibility with no consequences; it's that large swaths of the populace aren't really concerned with the details lurking in the big ideas that attract them. When Roosevelt offered a New Deal, it seemed compelling, and the rest could be worked out later.
By the time of the "Reagan Revolution" I think a lot of longstanding financial problems with government came to a head, embodied in Reagan's skillful use of stereotypes ("Welfare Queens") and preconceptions (taxes are too high!) to make a similar move for Republicans away from the dull, dry scolds of fiscal seriousness. Out with bean counters, in with easy moralizers and trickle down theories of economics.
For 12 years, the Reagan recipe worked fairly well, even as the stock market tanked in 1987 and speculation in Savings and Loans and junk bonds nearly crippled the economy. And it was Bill Clinton who managed to complete this circle by turning unsexy fiscal responsibility into the new sexy, finally managing to call Republicans to heed for abandoning their own ideals about fiscal control (and, in the process, converting much of the East coast's financial elites from Rockefeller Republicans to Rubin Democrats).
It's against this backdrop that I think so much of what's developed in the last couple of years seems both familiar and frustrating to folks on the left: that sense that these arguments about "tax breaks for the rich" from the right are a) not really serious and b) putting us on a defensive that shouldn't seem as hard as it is to make the winning points. The point, though, is that the argument itself is the problem: once your in the position of arguing in favor of taxes, of any sort... you've already lost.
Unless Democrats can figure out how to get a lot of this pointless debate off the table - which, likely means failing to let the "Bush tax cuts" expire as they probably should - it's probably the case that large, painful losses are inevitable. It's trying to win by inspiring people with process, not results. The failure to develop a compelling alternative narrative that actually energizes voters in a positive way is a failure both of the Obama Administration, which seems thoroughly unable to take anything like a new direction, and of the Democratic Congress, which is full of party veterans who have never particularly seen the need to change. You don't get people to vote for fiscal responsibility because its fun, and you won't be able to guilt people into supporting tax policy as the "right thing to do".
If Democrats made this election about addressing the things that truly frighten a wide swath of voters - made an effort to reduce poverty, to help improve access to fair, affordable housing, did Medicaid reform that would really reform our healthcare system, attempted immigration policies that simplified our tortured process to citizenship, thus ending a great deal of economic limbo for working people... any of these, never mind all of them, would represent positive work instead of negative dismissal (and I'm not talking about familiar boilerplate, but some real leaps into creative problem solving). A positive message would be the real surprise wild card of this campaign. It seems entirely apparent that between now and election day, Republicans have no intention of anything approaching serious policy prescriptions for the problems we face. If they win, it will be all about negatives, about dissatisfaction, and the easy appeal of being the irresponsible who, as always, think all taxes are bad.
Our tax policies in this country are a mess that took decades to build and would take a lifetime to undo; discussing changes to our tax policies can't happen in some vacuum where taxes alone are the problem and the solution. The problem is the interplay between revenues and spending, and the only solutions that can possibly work take some hard work at both ends. That may not be sexy... but it's also not a punishment, or at least it doesn't have to be. Until Democratic leaders can re-learn how to make a case about the goals to be accomplished, not the taxes needed to fund them, they've lost sight of how to win the argument... and, more to the point, a sense of what it is we really want to do.
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