The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
‘Won’t you change partners and dance with me?”
After reading two minor notes in last week’s political news, I caught myself thinking of the Irving Berlin classic with Frank Sinatra beckoning his heartthrob to change partners and dance with him. Sinatra could as well be crooning for America’s two political parties, both of whom are busy soliciting the other’s traditional loyalists.
I first read with interest that Sen. Rick Scott, who leads the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, is busy designing a massive fundraising drive focused on small contributors. It was a clear sign that the Trump-reborn GOP believes its future lies less in big business than the passions of conservative populism inspired by our last president.
Donald Trump’s genius was his ability to appeal to the very same blue-collar voters who were hurt by his economic policies. The Trump tax cut, for example, was a gift to the rich which depressed tax collections that could have been applied to scores of programs that help the middle class.
Instead, badly needed investments in infrastructure and public education were starved while Wall Street players made out like bandits. Trump’s trade war devastated agriculture in the Midwest, but farmers and small-town residents were among his most ardent supporters.
President Joe Biden is moving swiftly to repair broken programs but even if successful may not benefit politically, experts warn. The new literature in political science explains why this is the case.
It turns out that voting in this era depends less on the job performance of an officeholder than the cultural values he or she embraces. Think abortion. In their work, “Democracy For Realists,” political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue that we are a product of groupthink and choose candidates in this era based on social identities and partisan loyalties. In fact, most find politics irrelevant.
Advances in civil rights and sexual liberties beginning in the 1960s have created a slow-moving counteraction cheered on by Fox News and right-wing radio, which has fed voters into the GOP, even when their own economic interests rank among the party’s lowest priorities.
The second piece of news that caught my eye was a report that Democratic leader Sen. Charles Schumer has in the first three months of 2021 raised a record $8.3 million for his reelection campaign with a mere 2% coming from small contributors.
In his political classic “Listen, Liberal,” historian Thomas Frank documents how the Democratic Party during the 1990s abandoned blue-collar voters for what he called “the professional class.”
The fact that the Senate Democratic leader now depends on big checks may simply be part of this progression, or it may also be an early sign of shifting corporate support.
Another possible hint could be found in a recent Wall Street Journal ad that featured the signatures of several hundred CEOs protesting the voter suppression tactics being employed by Republican legislatures across the country.
Notwithstanding the makeup of the two parties a decade hence, the danger is that both may be so divorced from everyday American life that their failure to produce solutions to problems could spark a real and further insurrection.
Unlimited cash and gerrymandering have created a self-reinforcing society of politicians and enablers who increasingly resemble a strange 19th-century aristocracy that grows ever more rich and powerful while non-members wither.
During the 2020 election cycle, the political class split up a cool $14 billion! Besides the candidates and staffs, the beneficiaries include all forms of media from network television to talk radio to Facebook, Instagram and podcasts.
Top campaign consultants rake in millions and employ scores of filmmakers, researchers and computer-savvy organizers who all have their own staff of specialists. Politics is now big business.
When economists report that more than 70% of American adults don’t have $500 in savings, and life expectancy among the middle class is falling, when gun violence is an everyday threat and thousands are dying every month of overdoses, when a large segment of our population refuses to take a lifesaving vaccine, America is in big trouble.
The lesson I took from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is that if the political class continues to waltz on, they may soon awake to see the dance hall burned down.
