Code Red by E.J. Dionne Jr

Author:E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

The italicized line was Kennedy’s signature slogan. The word “again” is crucial. It is a commitment to restoring progress. That is the task in the years after Trump.

* * *

Among the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, no one was more intent on meeting the demand for new policy breakthroughs than Elizabeth Warren. It seemed, at times, that she was offering a plan a day—on everything from child care to farm policy to college loan debt forgiveness to affordable housing to improving the lives of Native Americans. The candidate responded so often to voters’ questions with the words “I have a plan for that” that her campaign printed T-shirts bearing this unlikely slogan. That she rose steadily in the polls during the pre-primary period pointed to the hunger for new initiatives that would reorganize American capitalism while offering specific forms of relief to rebuild a middle class that she saw as dying.42

Warren’s bywords were “sweeping structural changes”—both adjectives mattered—and her proposals were not a disconnected pile of white papers. They were focused, as Robert Borosage noted in The Nation, on “four major areas for fundamental reform: corruption, democracy, economy and social justice.” Indeed, her democracy and economy proposals were linked in her proposed changes to corporate governance that would give workers 40 percent of the seats on the boards of major corporations while prohibiting a company from making political contributions unless it obtained approval from 75 percent of its board. New antitrust actions and an attack on concentrated economic power figured in her policies to diversify the digital economy and defend family farming.43

She also proposed a comprehensive anti-corruption law going well beyond post-Watergate reforms, and her critique of the nation’s capital was more pointed than a general condemnation of its swampiness. “Washington works great for the wealthy and well-connected,” she said again and again, “but it doesn’t work for anyone else.” Her ideas had much in common with the comprehensive reform bill passed by House Democrats in early 2019 as HR 1. The focus on structural reforms by both Warren and the House—they included a restored Voting Rights Act, curbs on gerrymandering, full access to the ballot, and sweeping changes in the rules for financing campaigns—reflected the lessons of the New Deal on the importance of democratizing political power. Warren’s plan for universal child care and her linking of free college to extensive debt relief were aimed at rebuilding the middle class and its capacity to move from debt to savings. Other candidates, notably Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, before she dropped out of the race, and former Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro, also focused on packages of ideas oriented to families and children, including expanded child care and pre-K programs as well as more generous family leave policies.44

And Warren’s wealth tax, as we saw in the last chapter, underscored that public action could be financed by reallocating resources now concentrated at the very top of the economy.45

Warren made clear that you don’t have to be a socialist to advocate far-reaching reform of capitalism.

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