The Way Forward Isn't Through the "Center"

As long as big donors hold sway, bipartisanship won't save us.

There’s a reason that the new administration has encouraged comparisons with FDR. The Great Depression is the best analog we have to our current crisis cluster. Much like the 1930s, we kicked too many cans down the road, and they all landed in the 2020s. But a comparison of Biden’s first 100 days with FDR’s suggests that JRB’s legacy will likely be fleeting. Behind the headline trillions, the vast majority of spending is intended to be one-time only or to sunset. This administration isn’t creating structural or permanent changes like separating commercial and investment banking through the Glass-Steagall Banking Act. There are no guaranteed jobs programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Oh look, Glass-Steagall. How quaint!

In other words, we’re turning on the money spigot, but only because these are extenuating circumstances. And only certain people may connect directly to the cash tap. As of now, there is no minimum wage hike, student debt cancellation, or public healthcare option, nor many other measures with widespread popular support, despite repeated campaign mentions of those very things.

Since the covid vaccine announcement, the allure of “back to normal” has been irresistible. We’re largely settling back into pre-pandemic mode, conducting the same type of business and using the same metrics to determine success. However, if we want to truly fix the problems that the pandemic revealed, we can’t just sprinkle civility dust and infrastructure dollars over everything and call it good. Too many people live precariously for that to be sufficient; 43% of Americans couldn’t cover an unexpected $400 expense in cash before the pandemic.

So we need FDR-like big structural change. We need economic justice. And we need to stop pretending that our current political duopoly will ever deliver them.

Centrism Doesn’t Help the 99%

Centrism, defined as some midpoint between the political left and right, seems like a natural spot to look for solutions. To prevent the pendulum from swinging too far one way, the thinking goes, we need to either vote more of the other side in, or include more moderate voices in the discourse and debates. Centrists are also great believers in compromise. But negotiating the middle ground between two parties that represent rich and corporate donors first and foremost has only made things worse for the mass of American people (e.g. Obama’s “Grand Bargain”).

Last fall, the Rand Corporation found that the top U.S. earners have seen their incomes rise ~300% since 1975. Unfortunately, wages were basically stagnant for everyone else, stiffing the bottom 90% on $47 trillion dollars. The report has ugly parallels worldwide.

Workers everywhere know they’re getting shafted. Regardless of who’s been in office, they’ve been on the losing side. The winners caused the 2008 financial crisis and fomented Occupy Wall Street, but then failed to fix the problems that caused those events. The winners back the established political parties, which have let them make the rules for a long time. Whether it’s the top 1% or top 10%, the people at the top—the winners—have had a functioning representative democracy. The rest of us are just told to shut up and vote for one of their two options, because it’s the lesser of two evils.

There are advocates of centrist parties. The more parties, the merrier. No one should suppress alternative parties. We need more than two. It’s impossible to thread a needle through the current divide, and the duopoly simply isn’t getting the job done. On purpose.

Two Parties Pushing People Away

Our elected officials are incentivized to raise money by vilifying the opposition above all else. It’s Red vs. Blue ad infinitum. 2024 will likely see $20 billion spent on two messages:

“But Trumpism!”
”But Socialism!”

$20 billion was the price of ending homelessness according to a 2012 HUD estimate.

The polls tell us that Americans want elected officials to work together to advance the public interest. Based on their absolute resistance to making permanent changes that help actual people, elected officials recognize that advancing the public interest won’t get them paid. Keeping big donors happy will.

The Way Forward

Fixing our effectively corrupted politics will require many reforms. The electoral college, plurality voting, gerrymandering, corporate capture, and above all, the unresponsive duopoly of Democrats and Republicans must all be broken.

The recent announcement of a splinter GOP faction suggests a way to make it happen. While Democratic party reformers are working on a generational plan to elect more progressives, these potential breakaways want faster results, either by voting as a unified bloc within the Republican party or by forming a new one.

If the product of this movement is still corporate-backed, which it likely will be, then nothing will fundamentally change. But it suggests the formation of new parties is viable for the first time in living memory. 2024 could see four major parties vie for the White House: A populist party on the right, a new center-right party, the center-right Democrats, and a new populist party on the left. That’s what happened in Spain in 2015, with Ciudadanos (Citizens) on the right and Podemos (We Can) on the left.

Should a new populist party on the left foreswear corporate cash, inoculating it against corporate capture, it would have an instant advantage over all others. It could sweep into power for a generation and enact a new New Deal.

Representative government is a good invention. It lets us elect advocates who can fix problems and manage day-to-day civic operations. Unfortunately, large donors have turned our system into a money-making machine for themselves at the expense of everyone else. If we want to fix ::all this::, we'll have to do it ourselves. We’ll need to create those viable new parties. We’ll need to volunteer. We’ll need brave, capable people to run for office at every level. When they get there, we’ll need progressives old and new alike to caucus together. And we’ll need to keep doing all of it until we get big structural changes.

Edited by Dan Luft