Do Democrats have ears to hear?
Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio is one of the few Democrats naturally adept at “Speaking American,” as David Kusnet urged 30 years ago. John Fetterman, Democrats’ candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, is as well.
Dan Pfeiffer spoke of Fetterman’s style in his Friday newsletter. Jon Favreau, his Pod Save America co-host, advises politicians to “talk like a human.” Drop the jargon, the acronyms, and the “focus group applesauce-esque verbiage that reeks of everything people hate about politicians.” The Fetterman Campaign, writes Pfeiffer, “looks and feels different. It’s entertaining and attention-grabbing. They are confident in their message and content. John Fetterman talks to his voters the way he talks to his friends.” Fetterman considers a Carhartt hoodie and shorts “Western PA business casual.”
The tousled-haired Brown is a bit more polished in his essay for The American Prospect. He reminisces sadly about his upbringing in Mansfield, Ohio.
Brown calls out the greed that drove American companies there to relocate first to the South, then to Mexico, then offshore in the name of “efficiency”—business-school-speak for “pay workers less.” What businesses became more efficient at was destroying people’s lives and desiccating once-thriving towns. This, especially for “people outside big coastal cities and people without college degrees or inherited wealth.”
What trickled down was bitterness all the way to the political sewer:
Their hard work doesn’t pay off like it used to. And for women and people of color—who make up more of these voters than the national media narrative ever portrays—hard work has never paid off the way it should.
All these Americans are desperate for more stability and security in their lives. But they wonder if things will ever get better. They think politicians have forgotten them.
The people I grew up with knew that Republicans would sell them out to corporations—Bush negotiating NAFTA, Gingrich fighting to bring China into the WTO, Trump granting corporate tax breaks. That surprised no one.
But many Democrats’ active encouragement of the corporate outsourcing agenda came as a shocking betrayal. Those decisions stung much worse coming from the party of Roosevelt—the party that for generations these workers had trusted to be on their side.
Brown sees potential now for Democrats to rebuild that lost trust in depressed and rural places Democrats all but abandoned to the GOP:
Democrats just passed the kind of industrial policy we haven’t seen in many decades, to build out domestic supply chains of key inputs like semiconductors.
It will create the kind of jobs that too many communities have lost. And it sends a clear message to these Americans that we have not forgotten them.
None of this requires compromising on our values. A commitment to populist economics and fair trade isn’t just compatible with a commitment to social justice—the two naturally go together. One need only read Martin Luther King’s dozens of speeches to unions, and ponder what he was doing when he was killed, to remember the deep connection between workers’ rights and civil rights.
A relentless focus on populist economics wins out over Republicans’ manufactured culture war.
Except while American business got busy manufacturing overseas, American conservatives were busy exploiting displaced workers’ social and economic anxieties. They manufactured a rogues’ gallery of scapegoats for their culture war, and a well-funded infrastructure to sustain it year after year.
“We are supposed to be the workers’ party,” Brown insists. “Democrats must be that party again.” If they will listen.
Is there still time? The $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed last November will, like Eisenhower’s Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, take years to affect Americans outside the cities. The political mood is so foul that members of Congress who supported that bill over the former president’s objections received death threats.
You can’t win if you don’t show up to play. The president from Scranton gets that, as Brown does, as Howard Dean did.
A major obstacle Democrats face is that their party’s political infrastructure in counties outside urban centers is so degraded that rural Democrats have little with which to fight. In counties below 100,000 in population here in North Carolina, I calculate that unaffiliated voters, now the largest tranche of the electorate, are not as swingy as believed. They vote with Republicans and help them dominate the legislature. There will be no quick fix for that. But there will be no fix at all if we do not start.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.