Populism for 2020

I have a confession to make. I have been the beneficiary of white male privilege.

I didn’t get any scholarships to college. In fact I had to quit college and go  to work, and therefore didn’t get to be a mechanical engineer. But the college class I was in for 1963 had just one black guy and two women out of probably a hundred studying engineering. I don’t remember any of Mexican or Indigenous heritage at all.

But I have lived a very successful career as an auto mechanic first, and then after an apprenticeship at a factory in southern California, a machinist, with the benefits of also having engineering and mechanical knowledge.

After working for peanuts in little machine shops and inventor’s startups, gaining a lot of experience in how the real world works, I got lucky and found work in an electric generation plant in Colorado. When that one shut down after nine years, I found a good job in another power plant in Nevada.

So if I include the year working in the small power plant in college, I have a total of thirty five years in electric power plants, all but the first year working under union contracts, with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, known as the IBEW. In Colorado it was with IBEW Local 111, and in Nevada it was with the IBEW Local 1245.

Consequently, when I retired in 2006, I got a fair defined benefit retirement pension, which includes paid medical benefits. Barring an economic catastrophe on the order of 1929, I should be able to eat until I die. Using my retirement benefits and the Social Security checks for both me and my wife, I could afford to keep her in a beautiful assisted living facility for two years as she died of Alzheimer’s disease. 

At this juncture in my life, I should be happy and grateful for the life I have been able to live. But I am also aware that I am lucky to have lived in the era made possible by the policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the old Democratic Party. The New Deal protections for unions and the working class made my life possible.

Now most of those benefits are going and gone. Retirement pensions have been replaced by 401Ks, which puts those funds into the hands of Wall Street gamblers. It’s 1928 all over again. Conservative politicians all across the country are cutting programs to help children, poor people, and single women. Education is on the chopping block, with fewer teachers and larger classes the goal of the Department of Education. 

The population began to wake up to the fact that our representatives don’t represent us anymore. It’s not just Republicans. They have always been against unions, minimum wage laws, workplace safety laws and such. The Democratic Party, which used to be the party of working class and poor people, has abandoned that demographic entirely. 

President Clinton slashed benefits for single mothers and children with his Welfare Reform legislation and threw hundreds of thousands of poor people and people of colors besides white into long prison sentences with his crackdown on crime laws. Before that, we used to point out how terrible the Soviet Union was having all those prisoners in the Gulag. Now we have outstripped them as they closed down their prisons and freed those prisoners.

When the economy was crashed by George W. Bush in 2007, a plan was hatched to save the national economy. When Obama was elected millions of us waited in anticipation of another chance for a Liberal Democratic president to save the poor and working class, just as FDR did under nearly the same circumstances.

Instead, my heart sank as he poured billions into saving the banks, allowing them to consolidate and get bigger, instead of closing them and breaking them up. Then he basically stood by as those same banks foreclosed on millions of families across the nation, evicting those families onto the street with no help at all.

On top of that, medical expenses were growing much faster than wages, and the predatory extortionate practices of the insurance companies made a large segment of the population prepared for anybody who promised real change. Obama had promised that change, but we were sorely disappointed there, too. His Affordable Care Act removed the cap on benefits and allowed people with preexisting conditions to get insurance if they could afford it, but there was no effective means in the legislation to reduce costs. 

Worst of all, it made buying insurance mandatory, with fines if you didn’t buy an approved medical insurance policy. If you are a single Mom trying to keep food and the table, clothe your children and pay the rent and the light bill every month, and you are already working two or more jobs, it was insult to injury.

A huge opportunity was apparent for a politician who could promise these people real relief. A politician who claims to be for “the people” is called a Populist. I can think of only three in the 2016 election: John Edwards, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump. The rest of the crowd of candidates ran mostly on tweaking the “status quo” or even worse, on their youth or good looks.

John Edwards took himself out of the race by getting caught cheating on his wife while she was dying of cancer.

On the Democratic side then, that left Sanders and Clinton. And all I heard from the Democrats is is she “nice“ enough, or is he too old? Maybe he’s too “grouchy”, or she wears the wrong pantsuits. We just had our first president of color, now it’s time for a woman, kind of like there is a checklist. 

If issues were mentioned at all, it was how extreme Bernie’s proposals were, even though he was just espousing getting back to what we had with the New Deal seventy years ago. Hillary was pretty vague on how she would help poor people cope with the bills, and offered no help at all for college students buried in unremitting lifetime debt. And a living wage was out of the question. It took her a long time to finally acquiesce to $15.00 as a minimum wage.

On the Republican side, it was Trump against all the rest. He made a lot of promises to working people - to bring back jobs, make wages higher by banning immigrants from the southern border, and fix the medical coverage so everybody would have perfect coverage for almost nothing. The rest of the candidates made fun of him, called him names, and then when he trounced them all in the primaries, swallowed their pride and kissed and made up in the general election.

So in the general election in 2016, it became Clinton, who narrowly won over Sanders, by hook or crook, I don’t know. I do know that his followers were the enthusiastic ones, who out organized everywhere across the country, but could not overcome the power of the party establishment to sideline a usurper of the “status quo.”

On the other side it was Trump, who by dint of his promises for change to working class people, to be the one who was looking out for their interests, to bring back good wages and jobs, who easily overcame the other mainstream Republicans and got the nomination.

The mainstream media and the Neo-liberal establishment were horrified. They were blinded by their preconceived notions of the voting population. Pollsters were proved wrong time and time again, as they massaged their questions to favor mainstream voters, and ignored the rising populist vote.

Trump tailored his speeches to the crowds he spoke to, and as usual with any politician, nobody noticed or cared if he said one thing to this group and another thing the next group. Meanwhile Clinton ignored the issues pretty much everywhere, and based her campaign on disparaging the populist voters, calling them “deplorable”, and refusing to even campaign in a few states she thought were reliably hers.

Hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of voters who had voted for Obama twice, came out to vote for Trump this time. They were still looking for the change they had been promised and didn’t get. The pollsters were confused, Democrats were shocked and despondent, and even Trump seemed amazed that he had won.

The years since the election have amazed me. I believe Trump won because he saw the populist discontent in the country and played to it, and Hillary ran against Trump, which had the same effect as running against the populist tide sweeping the country.

Today, two years later, I watch in fascination and wonder as the Democratic Party is choosing its next candidate for 2020. In the midterm elections several upset victories brought forth new, unheard of progressive candidates, including a lot of women playing to the poorest of the base, espousing single payer medical plans, higher wages, and free college tuition. 

Reliably and dishearteningly, the Democratic establishment is trying to sideline and disparage the new progressives as too radical and naive. I believe if Democrats don’t wake up and recognize the populist tide swelling in the country, they will be left in the dustbin of history.

It’s not enough anymore to just be the party of professional women, people of color, and the LGBTQ. Nothing wrong with those demographics, but they won’t win you any elections. Young people understand that without big changes, their future looks pretty dim. They are selling the issues. 

Democrats are still selling the hierarchy - “It’s my turn now.”  If they don’t open their eyes to the populist yearnings in the electorate, they will give the presidency to Trump again.

It’s been said before, and I’ll say it again. Nobody can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory like a Democrat.