Will it capsize all boats?
The discredited trickle-down economic theory, that lowering taxes on the wealthy and corporations will result in a supercharged economy as they invest in the economy, had a slogan attached to it, that rising waters lift all boats, wealthy and poverty stricken alike.
I couldn’t help but think of it while reading Professor Richardson’s latest post to her Letters from an American blog:
Far from the policy struggles of the Republicans and Democrats back East, in the summer of 1890, a new movement began, quietly, to take shape. In western towns, workers and poor farmers and entrepreneurs shut out of opportunities by monopolies began to talk to each other. They discovered a shared dismay over a government that seemed to work only for the rich industrialists, and anger that they seemed to be working themselves to the bone only to have the fruits of their labor taken by the rich. “Wall Street owns the country,” western organizer Mary Elizabeth Lease told audiences. “It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.”
Westerners suffering in the new economy began to come together. Reviving older Farmers’ Alliances, they distributed literature across the country explaining how tariffs worked and how railroad monopolies jacked up prices. Existing newspapers began to echo their arguments, and where there weren’t local newspapers, Alliance members began to print them.
Resulting in…
While congressmen and eastern newspapers fought over every scrap of Washington political gossip, western farmers and workers and entrepreneurs had organized. New newspapers, letters, barbecues, lectures, and picnics had done their work, educating those on the peripheries of politics about the grand issues of the day. When the votes were counted after the November 1890 election, the Alliances had carried South Dakota and almost the whole state ticket in Kansas, and they held the balance of power in the Minnesota and Illinois legislatures. In Nebraska and Iowa, they had split the Republicans and given the governorship to a Democrat. They controlled 52 seats in the new Congress, enough to swing laws in their direction.
While Professor Richardson undoubtedly is hoping for a similar wave this year, lifting the Democrats over the Republicans, from my vantage point I’m wondering if both canoes are going to end up tipped over. Could a political movement, independent of either major Party and the old smaller parties, achieve success in the scant time left to it in 2022?
Neither Party seems to be worthy of confidence. The Republicans feature amateur hour elected officials who run around howling that the last election was stolen, and sometimes even engaging in politically and/or legally dubious behavior. I do not exclude the former President from this characterization, as he has served as an inspiration to half-baked idiots nation-wide, as well as inspiring an attempt to interfere with the lawful procedures of Congress. He, and his devotees, live on the mistaken political philosophy that the only criteria a politician need have is a devotion to Party leaders and specified ideological/theological positions; experience, character, and expertise as a rhetorician need not apply.
The Democrats continue to labor under the twin crosses of their botch of handling the transgenderism issue and a whiff of arrogance that alienates independents. Add in a perception that certain elected officials’ philosophy, when it comes to crime, has led to an increase in highly violent crime – true or not – and a few other issues, and this appears to stir up the independents’ fears, as shown in the Virginia elections last year.
BUT – The problem with a new party is that it may be populated with smart people, or with grifters and power-seekers, and it’s unlikely to be populated with folks with relevant experience to the challenges of governing. Would we want that sort of thing? While the Republicans continue to howl out criticisms of how President Biden has handled the Afghanistan pull-out and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I have come to view those criticisms as hollow, being divided between those outraged that we’ve given up on Afghanistan, and those who just don’t like Biden and the governmental philosophies he represents. I think Biden, in the face of unremitting opposition from Republicans and traps set, clumsily as they were, by the former President Trump (R), has done quite well on the foreign relations front, while on the domestic front he’s been hobbled and unable to implement a full recovery program, although what has been implemented has done relatively well. Those squealing about inflation fail to consider the impact of Russia’s actions on the world economy.
And I don’t honestly see a new political party self-organizing in time to field candidates by 2022. But by 2024?
That’s a distinct possibility.
So, we’ll see what the people have to say. I’m looking forward to it, if with a little trepidation.
