The Democrats claim an interest in redistributing income to alleviate the worst aspects of economic insecurity, but they resist the structural changes that gave rise to the problems in the first place. Until the precariat’s longstanding economic concerns—jobs, health, safety, pollution, government that serves the public, and above all, relative stability and employment security over long periods of time.
December 2020, excerpt, https://thescrum.substack.com/p/the-precarity-election
There are some recent indications that the GOP is beginning to grasp this…
The reality for both parties is that the working class as we knew it is disappearing—eviscerated through a combination of automation, globalization, attacks on private-sector unions, and cuts in public services. And until our political class comes to a broader recognition that work is nothing like what it was, and increasingly won’t be, it will be hard for either party to offer credible solutions. As things stand, our corrupt two-party duopoly makes a credible third party virtually inconceivable.
The last two elections manifest a country that is profoundly divided, with the economic precariat being the most profound and collateral damage. The GOP talks about security in militaristic terms or via guns and religion but seldom addresses economic insecurity. The Democrats claim an interest in redistributing income to alleviate the worst aspects of economic insecurity, but they resist the structural changes that gave rise to the problems in the first place. Until the precariat’s longstanding economic concerns—jobs, health, safety, pollution, government that serves the public, and above all, relative stability and employment security over long periods of time—are addressed, the U.S. will remain a profoundly divided and divisive country at war with itself.
Albena Azmanova: Associate Professor of Politics at the Brussels School of International Studies , University of Kent, author of Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia (2020).
Jeffrey HarrisonNov 28Let me say this about that (in my best Nixonian). We do not have two parties, we have one party, aided and abetted by a servile media, who have slightly different views of how to screw the serfs. The Democrats (or, as I think of them, the paternalistic liberals) have, indeed abandoned the working class. This happened after George McGovern was defeated in his run for President and was sealed when St. Ronnie was elected head dog catcher and chased all the moderate Republicans out of the Republican party whence they infested the Democratic party. They might have been moderate but they were still Republicans. The Republicans (or, as I have always thought of them, the authoritarian liberals) have always been up front that there objective was to screw the serfs and they had the money to make it happen. So that’s the first thing that has to come out of our politics. Money. Citizen’s United has to be written out of the constitution. The next thing is that it isn’t “our corrupt two-party duopoly makes a credible third party virtually inconceivable.” Our corrupt two party charade is the result of two things: one, every state has minimum requirements to get on the ballot. Either they have to get so many signatures on a petition or they have to get some percentage of the last vote. In “authoritarian” Russia all you need is the filing fee to get on the ballot. Two, at least for President, the measure is first past the post get all the electors. If the electors were divvied up by the percentage of votes their respective Presidential candidate got, Presidential elections would be so much more interesting. For the income inequality, there is an incredibly simple solution. Bring back the 91% top marginal tax rate. Whatever your top marginal tax bracket is becomes your effective max pay. This is the minimum we must do. As the Economist said, we are a flawed democracy. And I would add…. at best.
