Clive Crook: Resistance isn't a real strategy for the Democrats

Nearly nine months after Donald Trump’s reelection, Democrats still can’t make sense of it. Only the faintest glimmers of a reset are visible. The only thing that might pass for a strategy seems to be the hope that, given time, voters will finally come to their senses: It’s the people who need to think again, not the politicians who are asking for their support.

Given Trump’s recklessness, this approach isn’t in fact doomed to fail — yet his opponents need to do better. How, exactly? What should a Democratic reset look like?

Let’s move quickly past what’s obvious, or ought to be.

First, address the voters whose minds you want to change — people who voted for Trump — with respect. They don’t like being called idiots and bigots. Acknowledge the elements of validity in Trump’s account of what needs to change. Insist that support for Trump is a mistake, but neither groundless nor intelligible only as a consequence of racism or stupidity.

Second, renounce — don’t just decline to discuss — the provably unpopular woke nonsense that party extremists have set as an ideological litmus test. Sex is a social construct. Color-blindness is racist. Speech is violence. Equality is a fraud. Capitalism is evil. Immigrants can’t be “illegal.” The country’s true founding was in 1619. And so forth. Democrats should stand for compassion and fairness, but not for an encompassing theory of systemic oppression that most Americans don’t recognize and rightly view as unhinged.

So much for the easy part. Equally important, though, is framing a popular and workable policy agenda — and this is less straightforward. Democrats stand for nothing if not redistribution, regulation of market excesses, equal opportunity and support for the less fortunate. But these noble and desirable purposes all involve trade-offs, which Democrats often prefer to ignore. That’s a mistake. Voters need to be persuaded that such policies won’t do more harm than good and that reformers understand the drawbacks. The party needs to line up with policies that express its values while reassuring voters it knows what it’s doing. Woke is the opposite of reassuring, but anti-woke isn’t enough to project competence.

The themes I’d recommend are opportunity and security — as opposed to “justice” or “equity,” which imply (deliberately or otherwise) fundamental failures of market-based economies and a desire for root-and-branch transformation. Persuadable Trump voters, the target audience, don’t despise the rich or long for a progressive utopia. They want pragmatic, intelligible interventions that engage with their economic goals and anxieties.

The most promising ideas address both at once. Dislocation caused by trade and innovation is a main cause of economic insecurity. Historically, innovation has been by far the more disruptive of the two — and the advent of AI could be especially so. Trying to stop such disruptions would be folly, but when jobs are lost, the U.S. should do more to cushion the victims and help them find new, better ways to make a living.

The U.S. has only ever flicked at this, with half-hearted programs such as Trade Adjustment Assistance, too narrowly purposed and seriously underfunded. A bigger and more comprehensive program, delivering income support during the transition from job to job, help with moving costs and associated complications, and guidance on training and further education still won’t make economic disruption win-win — but it would spread the costs more broadly and, through upskilling and better allocation of labor, raise productivity and add to the overall gains.

Better schools are critical for advancing opportunity for children of the poor and low-paid. One of America’s biggest public-policy anomalies is that government-run schools in prosperous areas are far better financed than schools in poor areas (where financially stressed parents can’t make up the difference). Equality of opportunity means using federal money to redress this imbalance.

Probably even more important is to raise the quality of teaching and management in schools that serve the less well-off. Some Democrats may balk, because it means recognizing (as parents did during the pandemic) that teachers’ unions put their members’ interests above those of the children they teach. The remedy is to empower parents with vouchers and force schools to compete. Ideally, the alliance between Democrats and public-sector unions — and with teachers above all — would be scrapped entirely. That’s unimaginable, but the terms of this partnership need to be revised.

Ensuring that work pays should be a central part of the Democrats’ opportunity agenda. Make low-wage subsidies such as the earned-income tax credit more generous. Simplify taxes and benefits to reduce unintended disincentives (as when a small increase in wages triggers a big loss of income). Grasp the nettle of Social Security reform and redesign the payroll tax, which kicks in at the first dollar of earnings. In my dreams, the payroll tax is replaced with a value-added tax, which is less regressive, less anti-work and less anti-saving — but the Democrats have a long way to go before voters would trust them with such a radical change.

Helping those on low incomes to save is about security as well as opportunity: Living paycheck to paycheck is stressful. Existing savings reliefs and incentives tilt heavily in favor of the better off, and are inordinately complicated to boot. Democrats should propose subsidized auto-enrollment plans for saving, to supplement Social Security in retirement and to meet unforeseen expenses; they should design them with those on low pay uppermost in mind.

Health-care costs — Obamacare notwithstanding — are still a principal cause of financial insecurity. Democrats have proposed various kinds of “public option” health insurance. They should dare to press this idea again. This, too, is treacherous terrain because Democrats would be taking their own reform, which many voters unfairly perceive as a failure, back to the drawing board. “What if they come up with something even worse?”

But it’s necessary, because the existing system, even after Obamacare’s improvements, is still a disgrace: expensive, complicated, anxiety-inducing because of the link to employer-provided coverage (lose your job, you’re uninsured), yielding poor health outcomes (by international standards), and failing, above all, to shield people of limited means from the risk of financial catastrophe.

Two last things — falling again under the heading of “should be obvious.”

First, fiscal discipline. The policies sketched above will cost money. (Remember trade-offs?) Democrats must explain how they’ll fund their plans. “Let the top 1% pay” won’t cut it. Nor will “public debt doesn’t matter.” Much of the burden will fall on the middle class. The challenge will be to explain why, on balance, the middle class will be better off as a result.

Second, Americans want the border secured and are entitled to choose who they welcome as immigrants. Merely turning up at the border isn’t a qualification for eventual citizenship. Whatever else they do, Democrats must bring themselves as a party to care about the distinction between legal and illegal immigration.

That’s a lot to discuss. The party, still firmly in resistance mode, is barely even thinking about it. Democrats must understand that resistance isn’t a program for government — which is what beating the Republicans might well require.

____

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Clive Crook is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering economics. Previously, he was deputy editor of the Economist and chief Washington commentator for the Financial Times.