The presidential candidate who has given greatest voice to the energy behind the populist "uprising" that David Sirota sees is John Edwards. Yet whenever Edwards speaks about the bias of the political system against the interests of working Americans, he is attacked by Republican pundits for waging "class warfare."
The very use of that term is a pejorative dismissal by Republicans of any attempt to talk about the egregious inequality of rewards for those who participate in the American system. Our society rewards some people very handsomely -- such as mortgage bankers and software inventors -- but often keeps others who are arguably just as critical to our future, such as young teachers and nurses, on not much more than a subsistence level. As glaring as these inequalities are, Edwards' argument actually has little to do with economic or social outcomes. His chief point is that the system in Washington is stacked against anyone who cannot pay handsomely for access to government decisionmakers, and so the allocation of public resources disproportionately favors those who can buy that access. Two examples: New Orleans is ignored by most Republicans who simultaneously hand obscene contracts to Halliburton and Blackwater for a failed reconstruction of Iraq, and the regulation of coal mines is underfunded as miners are trapped in accidents at a higher rate. This is not a simplistic "class war" argument, it merely borrows from the reality of the front pages of the past seven years.
Edwards and others like him are not reincarnations of William Jennings Bryan. They more closely resemble Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 election. The latter were passionate reformers, on behalf of righting the imbalance between public interests on the one hand and entrenched privileged interests on the other hand, in influencing the conduct of government. This is an argument about the fairness of how we are governed, not the fairness of the distribution of wealth, however skewed that may also be. And that argument -- about the fairness of the political system -- is the real potential power behind any 2008 "populist uprising."
posted 01/02/2008 at 00:51:38
The very use of that term is a pejorative dismissal by Republicans of any attempt to talk about the egregious inequality of rewards for those who participate in the American system. Our society rewards some people very handsomely -- such as mortgage bankers and software inventors -- but often keeps others who are arguably just as critical to our future, such as young teachers and nurses, on not much more than a subsistence level. As glaring as these inequalities are, Edwards' argument actually has little to do with economic or social outcomes. His chief point is that the system in Washington is stacked against anyone who cannot pay handsomely for access to government decisionmakers, and so the allocation of public resources disproportionately favors those who can buy that access. Two examples: New Orleans is ignored by most Republicans who simultaneously hand obscene contracts to Halliburton and Blackwater for a failed reconstruction of Iraq, and the regulation of coal mines is underfunded as miners are trapped in accidents at a higher rate. This is not a simplistic "class war" argument, it merely borrows from the reality of the front pages of the past seven years.
Edwards and others like him are not reincarnations of William Jennings Bryan. They more closely resemble Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 election. The latter were passionate reformers, on behalf of righting the imbalance between public interests on the one hand and entrenched privileged interests on the other hand, in influencing the conduct of government. This is an argument about the fairness of how we are governed, not the fairness of the distribution of wealth, however skewed that may also be. And that argument -- about the fairness of the political system -- is the real potential power behind any 2008 "populist uprising."
posted 01/02/2008 at 00:51:38
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