BY THE LEFT MARCH
The revival of economic populism in the Democratic Party
CHICAGO—Last night Bernie Sanders told the crowd at the United Center: ‘Fellow Americans, in the last three and a half years, working together, we have accomplished more than any government since FDR, but much much more remains to be done. We must summon the courage to stand up to wealth and power and deliver justice for people at home and abroad.’ In April I reviewed Joshua Green’s book The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Struggle for a New American Politics, an account of that ‘working together’, for the Times Literary Supplement. The text of the review is below.
Before the subjects of The Rebels came to political prominence, the Democratic Party sold out. It is a long, sad and tawdry story that Joshua Green tells of the party of the New Deal and the United States’s labour unions betraying its roots to fill its purse from the financial industry and become the party of Wall Street. Jimmy Carter wanted to reform the tax code along the lines of “his simple Baptist decency”: “When a business executive can charge off a $55 luncheon on a tax return and a truck driver cannot deduct his $1.50 sandwich”, he said, “then we need tax reform.”
The peanut farmer-in-chief’s morality play was not what the inflation-ridden country needed in 1978, his advisers informed him, and anyway it wouldn’t make a significant difference to the government’s bottom line. The National Restaurant Association revolted. Bankers told their sob stories to the New York Times. Meanwhile, the most effective liberal advocate for tax reform in Washington (Lawrence Woodworth) dropped dead of a stroke at a Virginia tax conference. Carter was put on notice by members of his own party that what the country required was tax relief and stimulus. To prop up the economy, it was business and the wealthy that needed the biggest boost. Deregulation was the order of the day, pushed naturally by the corporate right but also by Ralph Nader from the left, in the name of consumer choice and lower prices. Tax fairness would have to wait. America is still waiting.