Triggering Bernie’s Revolution
In 2016, Bernie Sanders mounted a vigorous campaign against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination for the then upcoming Presidential election. Throughout his campaign Sanders railed against rising economic inequality and crusaded for a doubling of the minimum wage, protecting American jobs from rising globalization, Medicare for all and free college tuition. At the time, each of the reforms he was championing seemed politically out of reach. Whenever confronted with this reality, Sanders’ response was that all that was needed was a leader who could energize the nation’s voters into demanding that their elected representatives stop catering to the nation’s corporations and wealthiest citizens and enact these necessary reforms. Ultimately, Sanders failed his own test and Clinton won the Democratic nomination.
It wasn’t that Senator Sanders lacked the necessary rhetorical skills; he was quite accomplished in that regard and inspired millions of Americans (mainly young voters) to support his candidacy. The problem he faced was that the country was simply not ripe for a revolution. The United States was the world’s most advanced and prosperous nation; and, although roughly 13% of its residents had family incomes below the “federal poverty level,” its citizens still enjoyed the right to choose their leaders on a regular basis and voice their displeasure in the streets and at the ballot box. Thus, in Lincoln’s words, Americans had the benefit of a “government of the people, by the people and for the people” and were loath to press for change.
Sanders’ perception of the problems facing his country was not wrong. For 35 years the economic status of America’s middle class had been declining. Whereas between 1981 and 2016 our country’s GDP had increased by 250%, middle class income increase by only 45%. Moreover, the disparity between the total income of those at the top of the income scale and and those encompassed within the lowest 90% of the income scale had grown to obscene levels, with those in the the top 1% of the income scale earning more than all persons in the bottom 90%. In addition, social mobility had also decreased making the American dream of going from “rags to riches” just that, simply a dream. The years of the Obama administration had done little to reverse that trend. When Barack Obama was elected President in 2008, the nation had already begun its descent into the worst recession since the Great Depression. When Obama tried to revitalize the nation’s economy, Congressional Republicans, led by now Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, were determined to make him a one-term president and opposed virtually every action his administration proposed. As a result, the nation’s economic recovery was slow and there was a general perception that the federal government was hopelessly bogged down by partisan bickering.
What Sanders saw did not escape Donald Trump, an unrepentant con man with a talent for gauging the political winds. He fashioned a campaign built around the economic distress of average Americans. He promised to renegotiate what he labeled as the “disastrous” trade deals that were stealing jobs from Americans; he promised to stop the influx of immigrants (particularly those of color) who were displacing Americans on factory floors; and he promised to shake things up in Washington and “drain the swamp” of the special interest groups that were steering the country in the wrong direction. He brought with him the aura of a successful businessman with no Washington connections who knew how to get things done. To those fed up with eight years of Congressional gridlock, his message of “what have you got to lose” was particularly enticing.
Without a doubt, Trump’s electoral campaign in 2016 was by far his greatest con job. Yes, the economy continued to grow and, because of that, unemployment went down to its lowest level in over fifty years. Even so, job creation during Trump’s first three years in office was actually less than during the three preceding years under President Obama. Economic growth was continuing, but at no greater rate than under Obama, and was largely propelled by a massive tax cut which poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the economy financed by a rapidly increasing federal deficit. Predictably, no coal mining or steel-making jobs came back to this country and higher health insurance costs offset the meagre tax reductions which average Americans received from his signature achievement, the 2017 tax legislation. Rather than reduce Congressional acrimony, he increased it by constantly blaming the Democrats for all of the country’s ills. Nor did he drain the swamp. Instead, he filled cabinet and other high level federal government positions with lobbyists and industry executives. Most devastating to average Americans, he rescinded government regulations that protected them from health and economic harms. Similarly, he chipped away at the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, depriving roughly five million Americans of their health insurance coverage.
At the beginning of this year, despite his record of betrayal of all but the nation’s wealthiest individuals, the chances of the President’s winning a second term were nevertheless promising. He had a devoted political base and he was riding a good economy and a booming stock market. In fact, he was enjoying favorable electoral prospects notwithstanding the fact that he had just faced down an impeachment proceeding and would likely be totally unbridled during his second term to further enrich himself and heighten income inequality. In short, much of what was deemed unacceptable when Trump was first elected (including his vulgarity, his womanizing, his insulting and divisive behavior and his unending stream of falsehoods and misrepresentations) had now become the new accepted norm for the nation.
Beginning in early February, however, the President’s fortunes began to change when the world was confronted by a growing pandemic. The President, of course, didn’t create the COVID-19 virus. In fact, the pandemic was the first crisis of his presidency that he hadn’t created. Instead, what he did was to allow the greatest nation on the planet, with the world’s most talented healthcare professionals, to suffer more deaths and economic losses than any other nation. In fact, the U.S. death toll for the virus is more than twice that of any other country.
It is now history that the Trump administration was slow in recognizing the danger posed by COVID-19 and took little action to impede its spread until mid-March. By that time, the country had no choice but to drastically reduce economic activity so as to deprive the virus of additional victims. It was then estimated that the nation would have to go through a virtual lockdown for a period of two months before the virus could be reduced to the point that it could be contained. Facing this prospect, the Congress enacted a series of four acts providing for an aggregate of $2.7 trillion to be fed into the nation’s economy to keep it alive until it could be safely restarted. Thus, the appropriations made by the Congress were essentially an effort to buy time until the nation could put itself into a position to go forward. This was important because little was known about the virus and the government had failed to acquire the necessary testing equipment and personal protective equipment needed to confront the virus when its economy emerged from the coma into which it had been placed.
Sadly, more than a month has already been squandered. It is beyond ironic that the man who has been so quick to characterize virtually every action taken by his predecessor as a “disaster”, when confronted by the most serious threat that this nation has faced since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, has contended that the pandemic should be handled by the state governments. He took this unprecedented step even after he had declared the pandemic a “national emergency” giving him extraordinary powers under the National Emergency Act to acquire items needed to combat the virus. To compound the burdens he imposed on the state governments, he has gone on to place pressure on them to restart their economies before they are fully prepared to do so, while at the same time holding back the professional guidance from public health experts that they will need if they are to have any chance of being successful in their efforts. Thus, the overwhelming likelihood is that the current efforts to restart the nation’s economy will not be successful and will only serve to reinvigorate the spread of the virus, causing the nation to have to extend its curbs on economic activity well into the summer and possibly beyond.
While we are yet to realize the full extent of the losses caused by the President’s mismanagement of this crisis, the grand total is now projected to include close to 150,000 deaths which is more deaths than this nation incurred in any war other than World War II, even more deaths that it incurred in World War I and more deaths than were incurred in all of the wars it has fought in the last 70 years. In the past six weeks alone over 36 million jobs have been lost and that number could increase further if business failures are not quickly contained. To put this figure in perspective, that is more than the 23.5 million jobs created during President Clinton’s eight years in office and more than twice as many jobs as were created during the eight years that Presidents Obama was in office plus the first three years of President Trump’s presidency.
This brings me to the fable of how to boil a frog. It posits that if you place a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately sense the danger and jump out. However, if you place the frog into tepid water and slowly raise the heat, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor and accept its ultimate demise. While this fable does not accurately depict how a frog will react, it is a fairly accurate metaphor of human behavior.
The questions that now face us are whether the nation’s response to COVID-19 is turning up the heat too high and too fast for Americans to tolerate and whether what happens over the next few months will trigger the revolution that Bernie Sanders’ rhetoric couldn’t. While I don’t purport to know the answers, my concern is that these are not frivolous questions. Certainly, the virus itself would not have been sufficient. Other countries around the world are having to confront the virus and will suffer the loss of many lives as well as significant damage to their economies. Even so, most governments are enjoying an increase in their approval ratings as their citizens rally together in an effort to defeat what can only be characterized as an external threat. That could and should have been the case in this country.
The real and sustained economic hardships on the vast majority of American families will begin in early summer. Nevertheless, many families have already begun to experience economic distress because the relief programs authorized by Congress were hastily conceived and have experienced many false starts and inefficiencies, something that was foreseeable at the outset. Those problems were compounded by the Republican penchant for funneling economic assistance through businesses entities, trusting that the monies will find their way into the hands of their workers.. There was the added problem that Congress’ early actions didn’t always focus appropriations where economic help was required. State governments and hospitals which are carrying on the bulk of the fight against the virus have been underfunded and will soon be forced to lay off healthcare workers, school teachers and first responders which will only serve to increase an already chaotic situation.
Recognizing these problems, the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives just passed a bill authorizing an additional $3 trillion in appropriations to hopefully carry the nation until it can contain the virus and safely restart its economy. While not all Democrats agree that this bill covers every need that should be addressed, it is now running into a wall of opposition by Republican legislators who generously characterize their opposition as a “wait and see”” approach. The fact is that many Republicans have ideological problems with providing state and local governments with additional funding, claiming that they will use that funding to simply pay off their prior fiscal deficits unrelated to their current efforts to combat the virus. In addition, there are many Republicans (and some Democrats) who are concerned over the mounting size of this year’s federal deficit which could reach $6 trillion (yes, $6 trillion). On top of these problems we have a President who is disinclined to provide state governments with the funding they will need to make it through this crisis for fear that it will remove their incentive to support his political agenda.
Even assuming that yet another economic rescue package will be approved by Congress and signed by the President, that alone will not solve the nation’s economic problems, just as the last group of appropriations did not set us back on the road to recovery. The nation still has to devise and implement a plan to move forward and that could be a major obstacle considering that we have a President whose sole focus is to have himself re-elected. Considering his actions in ignoring the advice of his public health experts and surrounding himself with advisors bent on showering him in praise, there may not be anyone who will be able to convince him to do what will be in the best interest of the nation.
All of this means that many businesses, both large and small, are going to fail, and many of those that survive are going to alter their operations to require fewer workers, all with the result that a significant number of the 36 million workers who have already lost their jobs will remain unemployed. The current level of unemployment is already approaching the levels reached during the Great Depression when unemployed workers and World War I veterans chose to protest by occupying the Capitol Mall in Washington, an uprising which ushered in FDR’s New Deal.
At this point we don’t know exactly how many families will be adversely affected or the extent or duration of their suffering. What we do know is that as things are now progressing the economic plight of the American people, most of whom already live paycheck to paycheck, is not going to get better anytime soon and there is good reason to believe may get much worse. Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic might just make the water hot enough to send Americans into the streets and thereby spark the revolution that Bernie Sanders’ rhetoric failed to inspire.