A rchive Date
[ 20-08-2024 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[https://slate.com/news - and - politics/2024/08/dnc - kamala - harris - economy - biden.html
The Bernie/Hillary Divide Is Finally Closed
At the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, speaker after speaker illuminated a politics that delivers for working families.
By Zachary D. Carter Aug 20, 2024
Kamala Harris understands the promise of a new beginning. For the past eight years, the Democratic Party has been cut by a schism between two large, broad factions that coalesced around the respective 2016 primary campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. But at the opening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Monday night, the divide that defined the party for nearly a decade seemed to have been bridged, with speaker after speaker illuminating almost identical visions of a politics that delivers for working families.
Here was Joe Biden’s business - friendly Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, pledging Democrats to an economy “free from monopolies” with a tearjerker about her dad’s factory job being offshored by rich Republicans. There was left - wing luminary Rep. Alexandria Ocasio - Cortez from New York, firing a barn burner about Kamala’s “patriot” bona fides - earned by protecting “our way of life” from “corporate greed.” The crowd was equally enthusiastic about appeals to Harris’ background as a prosecutor as about her plans to protect abortion rights and help young families buy a home, but the centrality of the economic message was impossible to miss. No fewer than seven union leaders graced the stage over the course of the evening, most notably United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, who had the crowd on its feet as he hammered Trump as a “scab” - a word that wasn’t even part of the Democratic lexicon at the previous convention but has since transformed into the ultimate liberal insult.
Eight years ago, anyone who accused the executive class of stoking racism to “divide and conquer” workers would have been attacked by an outrage army for minimizing the role of race in American history. When Fain said it Monday night, a relaxed audience simply cheered. This was a party comfortable with itself as pro - union, anti - monopoly, and pro - family - all families - one whose paeans to retail workers, immigrants, and ex - Trump voters seemed natural, with no need for certificates of authenticity.
There were real worldview differences between the old Clinton and Sanders camps, but what made these ideologies so difficult to unite was their origin in an equally real social distinction. For all the ink and pixels dedicated to analyzing the 2016 contest through race, gender, and class, the most striking and consistent demographic divide was age. Hillary handily defeated Bernie among women overall, for instance, even as Sanders trounced her by 37 points among women under 30. Sanders’ idealism was innately appealing to the young, whose energy and optimism have always been essential to any project aimed at social change.
But his appeals to economic justice were uniquely compelling to a generation that came of working age during the Great Recession, a time when the volume of student debt more than doubled. Even college grads who made it into the economic lifeboats knew plenty of people who hadn’t. The experience of economic frustration was common, the experience of economic fear almost universal. The dividing line between millennials and Gen X was not so much a calendar year as an economic order.
There is a perpetual refrain in American politics that it is dangerous to rely on young voters when elderly voters turn out so much more reliably.
But the young adults of the Bernie brigade have entered middle age, and their economic views are no longer a standard deviation or two removed from the mean. Biden recognized this when he took office and insisted on fusing the Obama - Biden project with the Sanders - Elizabeth Warren world. Where Obama had recruited his economic team from Citigroup, Biden included a host of former Warren staffers and academic experts on his. The result was not devoid of revolving - door types, but neither was it dominated by them. Biden spent much more to support the domestic labor market than Obama had, and he was much more aggressive about securing domestic manufacturing than his predecessor had been.
His project had its naysayers among economists, who thought Biden was spending too much money and waxing irrationally nostalgic for ye olde factories. But the project proved remarkably successful. The United States experienced the world’s strongest and fastest recovery from the COVID crash, with inflation peaking earlier and lower than it did in the rest of the developed world, while the country enjoyed the best labor market in at least 50 years.
The economic rhetoric of the DNC is backed up by the Harris economic platform as well as her slate of advisers - she’s working with both Brian Deese and Bharat Ramamurti from Biden’s National Economic Council - one an alum of the Obama administration and BlackRock, the other a former Warren staffer, each with an extraordinary record under Biden. And the Harris economic program looks very strong: She plans to use antitrust law to crack down on price gouging in food and groceries; to make housing more affordable by building 3 million new homes and providing $25,000 in down - payment assistance for first - time homebuyers; and to decimate child poverty by expanding the child tax credit to up to $6,000 per child. This project, too, has its naysayers - the same wonks who denounced Biden all the way to the best economy on the planet.
Biden’s economic program gave Harris a lot of good material to work with, but he could never quite unify the Clinton and Sanders factions because he made a habit of defining himself against the left in noneconomic arenas, blasting “Defund the Police” activists from 2020 and mocking student protesters who have criticized his support for the Israeli government’s cascade of war crimes against the Palestinian people, international journalists, and aid workers.
These students were in grade school when Bernie’s millennials were occupying Wall Street - they represent a new generation of protest politics and a new source of conflict within the Democratic ranks. Protesters demanding justice in Gaza made themselves heard on Monday night, unfurling a banner on the convention floor demanding that Biden “Stop Arming Israel.” Other Democrats shouted them down with chants of “U - S - A!” - an unseemly rejoinder to people calling to stop the brutalization of children.
But the Gaza protesters have been easier on Harris than on Biden because, for whatever reason, she is widely believed to oppose the president’s Middle East policy. And although the rhetoric from the stage Monday night was not grammatically distinct from the Biden administration’s on Gaza, it was quite obviously different in tone. When Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock invoked “the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza … Israelis and Palestinians,” the inclusion of Palestinians in the moral calculus evoked a cheer from the crowd. One of AOC’s biggest applause lines came after she declared that Harris is “working tirelessly to secure a cease - fire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.” Biden, of course, claims to be doing the same thing, while feeding the violence with an endless stream of money and weapons - but it certainly sounded as if AOC meant something more substantive with the phrase.
Harris may or may not disappoint AOC on Gaza. She will first have to defeat Trump, and the election remains close. But on Monday night, at least, her Democratic Party looked like a juggernaut of joy, enraptured with the prospect of a leader who has spent more than a third of her life in the 21st century. On a night organized as a send - off for the Clinton - Biden generation of Democratic leaders, it was tellingly poignant that Hillary Clinton’s most powerful note - framed within one of the most emotionally powerful speeches of the evening - was an overture to the future: “I want my grandchildren and their grandchildren to know I was here at this moment, that we were here.”
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