Democratic Primaries
Related: About this forumA NEW ELECTORATE
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The 2010 tea party wave brought more poor and working-class districts into the GOP fold, accelerating the realignment, but it was 2018 that cemented Democrats as the party of people who shop at Whole Foods. In 1960, Democrats represented nearly every district in the bottom fifth of average income, and roughly half of the richest. After the 2018 midterms, they represented 83 percent of the richest districts. They went from a near universal hold on the poorest districts to controlling just about 40 percent. The parties have switched places on the income ladder.
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When Republicans represent the rich and Democrats represent the well-educated but not quite as rich, Piketty says, theres no obvious party home for the working class, and no motivation for the government to do much of anything for that working class.
Its a global trend, and its one that the Sanders campaign is trying to stop and reverse. Instead of crafting a platform to fit a coalition, the campaign is trying to create a coalition to fit his platform.
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As Piketty observed, when both major parties are catering to the elites, the system cant deliver material gains for the broad base of people, so the parties fight over the one thing a nation can control: its borders, and correspondingly the definition of citizenship. Without a party advocating for universal programs of uplift, for a collective effort to confront the seismic challenges facing the planet, the dialogue in the U.S. will dissolve, the way it has already begun to do in Europe, solely into battles over immigration and nationalism, battles that the right is well-positioned to win by exploiting fear, xenophobia, and anti-elite sentiment. At a rally in December, Sanders underlined what he saw as the stakes: We are in a pivotal moment in American and world history. The future of the planet rests in a very significant way on this election. As a way to confront the climate emergency and global refugee crisis, the Sanders approach to the campaign could hardly be more urgent or necessary. Whether its a way to win a presidential campaign is an open question.
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https://theintercept.com/2020/01/03/bernie-sanders-democratic-party-2020-presidential-election/
This is a long read but well worth it.
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
redqueen
(115,103 posts)I like the sound of that! 👍
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
Gothmog
(145,321 posts)Most economists are ignoring the work that this article is based on http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/marshall-steinbaum-why-are-economists-giving-piketty-cold-shoulder
In the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson wrote, If the history of grand pronouncements of the general laws of capitalism repeats itselfperhaps first as tragedy and then as farce as Marx colorfully put itthen we may expect the same sort of frustration with Pikettys sweeping predictions as they fail to come true, in the same way that those of Ricardo and Marx similarly failed in the past. In the Journal of Political Economy, after praising Pikettys lifelong research agenda assembling inequality statistics for income and wealth (as do all the reviewers named here), Lawrence Blume and Steven Durlauf wrote, Capital is, nonetheless, unpersuasive when it turns from description to analysis. . . . Both of us are very liberal (in the contemporary as opposed to classical sense), and we regard ourselves as egalitarians. We are therefore disturbed that Piketty has undermined the egalitarian case with weak empirical, analytical, and ethical arguments.....
But perhaps the greatest rebuke of Piketty to be found among academic economics is not contained in any of these overt or veiled attacks on his scholarship and interpretation, but rather in the deafening silence that greets it, as well as inequality in general, in broad swathes of the fieldeven to this day. You can search through the websites of several leading economics departments or the official lists of working papers curated by federal agencies and not come across a single publication that has any obvious or even secondary bearing on the themes raised by Capital in the Twenty-First Century, even in order to oppose them. It is as though the central facts, controversies, and policy proposals that have consumed our public debate about the economy for three years are of little-to-no importance to the people who are paid and tenured to conduct a lifetimes research into how the economy works.
This dearth of reaction to such a critical work is not healthy. It is as if the rapturous reception by the public increased the resentment among Pikettys academic economist colleagues. As an appeal to the public to resolve, or at least have a say in, what the experts consider their own domain, Piketty appears to have questioned the very value of having a credentialed economics elite empowered to make policy in the name of the public interest but not answerable to public opinion. The economics elite, it seems, answered by stonewalling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, so it would not have the impact on economics research agendas that it merits.
No one in academia is taking this book seriously and so it is hard to base election results on this book This is the fourth of fifth time study have been posed on DU and no one is going to pay attention to this amusing theory
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Thekaspervote
(32,778 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Uncle Joe
(58,366 posts)The Piketty Panic
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the new book by the French economist Thomas Piketty, is a bona fide phenomenon. Other books on economics have been best sellers, but Mr. Pikettys contribution is serious, discourse-changing scholarship in a way most best sellers arent. And conservatives are terrified. Thus James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute warns in National Review that Mr. Pikettys work must be refuted, because otherwise it will spread among the clerisy and reshape the political economic landscape on which all future policy battles will be waged.
Well, good luck with that. The really striking thing about the debate so far is that the right seems unable to mount any kind of substantive counterattack to Mr. Pikettys thesis. Instead, the response has been all about name-calling in particular, claims that Mr. Piketty is a Marxist, and so is anyone who considers inequality of income and wealth an important issue.
Ill come back to the name-calling in a moment. First, lets talk about why Capital is having such an impact.
Mr. Piketty is hardly the first economist to point out that we are experiencing a sharp rise in inequality, or even to emphasize the contrast between slow income growth for most of the population and soaring incomes at the top. Its true that Mr. Piketty and his colleagues have added a great deal of historical depth to our knowledge, demonstrating that we really are living in a new Gilded Age. But weve known that for a while.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/opinion/krugman-the-piketty-panic.html
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
Gothmog
(145,321 posts)The 2018 success in the midterms show that the basis of this book does not hold up in the real world. It was mainly moderate candidate who won in 2018
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
MineralMan
(146,317 posts)Again? This is the same stuff that was trotted out in 2016. Boring.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Uncle Joe
(58,366 posts)(snip)
No, whats really new about Capital is the way it demolishes that most cherished of conservative myths, the insistence that were living in a meritocracy in which great wealth is earned and deserved.
For the past couple of decades, the conservative response to attempts to make soaring incomes at the top into a political issue has involved two lines of defense: first, denial that the rich are actually doing as well and the rest as badly as they are, but when denial fails, claims that those soaring incomes at the top are a justified reward for services rendered. Dont call them the 1 percent, or the wealthy; call them job creators.
But how do you make that defense if the rich derive much of their income not from the work they do but from the assets they own? And what if great wealth comes increasingly not from enterprise but from inheritance?
What Mr. Piketty shows is that these are not idle questions. Western societies before World War I were indeed dominated by an oligarchy of inherited wealth and his book makes a compelling case that were well on our way back toward that state.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/opinion/krugman-the-piketty-panic.html
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
MineralMan
(146,317 posts)You're really having to reach back in time, it seems.
Piketty is not among the most respected thinkers on the topic, really.
But, you keep on keeping on...
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
TidalWave46
(2,061 posts)One of this authors greatest passions is attacking Mayor Pete.
Attack Democrats? Check.
Float bogus conspiracy theories? Check.
Sanders surrogate? Check. Fifty percent of this persons recent articles are either attacking one of Sanders challengers or propping up Sanders.
This is literally a surrogate posing as a journalist. Dark money campaign support from The Intercept. Some things never change.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden