Election Stress Disorder and the State of the Union
What Will it Take to Stop the Threat to Our Democracy and Which Way Will Workers Turn?
The primary is over and now we can no longer deny it. Despite near record low turnout across the country, Americans will nevertheless be forced to witness if not participate in a geriatric cage match destined to depress, dismay, and potentially decimate our futures should Orange Jesus rise again to inflict his demented rage upon the half of the nation that he considers to be “vermin.”
I’m sorry, dear friends, but if you are reading this, he likely includes you in this category. I’d give you a virtual hug to make you feel better, but, alas, it likely wouldn’t do much good.
Thus, if you are filled with anxiety, fear, and loathing as this election slouches towards November to be born, you are not alone. As the New York Times recently reported, psychologists have labeled the dread felt by a large chunk of the voting populace “election stress disorder,” a malady that describes what happens when our avoidance mechanisms fail and “all the anxiety and resentment” comes “crashing back” as the eternal return of bitter divisions fueled by misinformation give way to looming “threats of violence.”
Sadly, despite our collective PTSD, our civic duties still await us, and we do indeed face yet another “election of our lifetimes” where fundamental civil and reproductive rights, public education, the existence of unions, the regulatory function of government, the environment, and the future of democracy will be on the ballot as the Heritage Foundation and others have already outlined a thoroughgoing agenda for a second term that would undermine all of the above.
Hence, even if you are angry at Biden for his ill-advised policy in Gaza, capitulation to the right on immigration, or some of his other unseemly compromises, the bald truth of the matter really is that those things would get even worse under Trump.
Sorry, Cornel West isn’t going to win, so we are where we are.
Despite the drumbeat of corporate media angst about Biden’s age, his agenda has been very solid with regard to labor on the whole, better than expected if not perfect on climate, and decent on a wide range of social issues with some clear failings on others.
In the State of the Union, Biden did point to a pivotal contrast with Trump that one hopes will take center stage during the fall campaign. Doug Porter noted this over at Words and Deeds last week when he highlighted proposed “tax reforms aimed at making the wealthy pay their fair share of the costs of the nation’s infrastructure that makes their profits possible.” These would include reversing Trump’s budget busting corporate tax cuts and ending other giveaways to the power elite who comprise not his voting base, but rather the only interest group of he actually serves.
Biden went out of his way to enthusiastically emphasize the importance of unions multiple times, called for the passage of the PRO Act to make organizing easier, and underscored this by inviting United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain as a special guest to the State of the Union. This gesture combined with his insistence on real economic populism as a counter to Trump’s backlash cultural populism seems to suggest that he is heading towards the fall election with a strategy that doesn’t simply cede the working class (even the white working class currently smitten with Trump) to the Republicans.
As Thomas Edsall observes in the New York Times:
Where Democrats have been losing is that their economics hasn’t worked for working people. It is far more destructive to be the party of Wall Street and multinational corporations (the neoliberalism from Carter to Clinton to Obama, with Clinton the worst offender) than to be the party defending abortion or D.E.I.
In fact, Biden has done far more than his Democratic predecessors Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to enact legislation economically beneficial to the working class, including the white working class.
Among the measures the Biden administration has pushed through Congress are:
The $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, providing funding for jobs building roads, bridges, passenger and freight rail, public transit, airports and other projects.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which provides $370 billion in spending and tax credits in low-emission forms of energy, extends federal health-insurance subsidies and enables the government to negotiate Medicare prescription drug prices.
The $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act to prop up the American chip manufacturing industry.
Thus, perhaps the key to defeating the fascist threat that Trump represents lies in breaking through to at least a slightly larger segment of that white working class who Biden’s policies have benefited while also rallying what, as Edsall reports, economists like Richard Florida call the “service class”:
Members of the blue-collar working class are largely white men, working in declining industries like manufacturing, as well as construction, transportation and other manual trades. Members of the service class work in rapidly growing industries like food service, clerical and office work, retail stores, hospitality, personal assistance, and the caring industries. The service class has more than double the members of the working class — 65 million versus 30 million members — and is made up disproportionately of women and members of ethnic and racial minorities.
The suggestion here appears to be that winning the future might not mean completely surrendering the industrial working class to the right’s nostalgic revanchist identity politics and Christian culture war but stealing back some of it while winning the new, quickly growing American working class in the service and caring industries overwhelmingly and taking college educated voters in the suburbs with them.
This is a much easier formula to follow in blue states but the margins in swing states for this strategy are too close for comfort given the albatross that is the Electoral College. So, stay tuned.
In San Diego, as in much of California as a whole, the changing demographics of the city and county have transformed our politics significantly so the question facing Democrats here is what the balance is between catering to the more affluent, highly educated suburbs and rallying enough working people to help make their historically very new dominant position a long-standing reality.
Potential fissures have been laid bare by the current debates about homelessness, housing, infrastructure, climate, and transportation, leaving many in historically underserved communities feeling neglected. Really winning the future here will depend on whether Democrats can make the argument that an equitable San Diego is a benefit to all San Diegans when it comes to putting real resources on the line.
If they don’t, pathetically low turnouts like the one last week might prevent us from moving to a more just future that tosses the tourist plantation legacy of our city into the dustbin of history and perhaps, if bad things happen nationally, serving as a model for a better way to govern on the left coast.
Newsflash: We need to do much better.