The Squeeze

by digby

If you are looking for an example of the liberal populist argument, Elizabeth Warren has written a good one. The crux of it is that the system has been rigged for the last few decades by the Big Money Boyz against the average Joe and the answer to that is not more tax cuts for wealthy people and not more coddling of industries that have been getting away with murder. That’s been tried and it has led to massive wealth inequality and a rapidly shrinking middle class. What’s needed is an active government working to mitigate the excesses of the markets, mediate the complexity of the modern economy and providing recourse and support for average citizens. It’s not revolutionary or even particularly radical and so perhaps it’s insufficient. But it’s better than the technocratic twaddle you hear from the Democratic party, which is as comprehensible as Swahili to most people and has the visceral excitement of banana pudding.

As I’ve noted before, people have been propagandized with conservative dogma for years and the Democratic Party hasn’t even been offering much rhetorical support to those who are feeling this awful squeeze. People are turning to the explanations that have been pounded into them for decades about free markets, taxes and deficits and they are scapegoating culprits far more ancient than that.

If liberals hope to persuade people that their philosophy is preferable to the emerging wingnut rage, they’re going to have to at least try to explain why. So far it’s all been about mechanics and arcane concepts that seem remote and uninspiring. The fact is, as Warren illustrates in her piece, these problems aren’t just there because of the current economic crisis. It’s been building for decades as a result of those conservative dogmas to which people are clinging for the lack of anything more persuasive. It’s highly doubtful that once the crisis has passed that people are going to feel “normal” now that credit’s become far tighter and is likely to stay that way for some time to come. This reform populism is at least trying to address these real problems of real people in ways they can see, understand and feel.

.