The Choice
Taking on corporate power, sucking up to corporate power, or trying to muddle along by ignoring the issue of corporate power
This is part two of writing about the need for Democrats to confront corporate power. Part one was yesterday’s Substack, in which I talked about how big an opportunity Trump is giving Democrats because of how much he is doing for the richest, most powerful corporations in the world. I shared a poll I helped put together last year specifically on the question of how voters feel about corporate power. Today I will discuss the mistake Democrats make when they bear hug corporate CEOs, and make the case that the only path forward for our party is to take on big money, corporate power.
Related to this topic, Bob Reich has a great new column on the arrogance of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Bob quotes Dimon:
“I have a lot of friends who are Democrats, and they’re idiots. I always say they have big hearts and little brains. They do not understand how the real world works. Almost every single policy rolled out failed.”
Bob then points out a whole bunch of great legislation passed by Democrats over the years, and contrasts it with the horrible legislation passed by Republicans.
Great stuff, but the part of the column I want to highlight is the reminder that Dimon has been on the short list for Treasury Secretary for a couple Democratic presidents over the years. That fact is a big reminder of the long-term fight those of us who care about the party have had over whether the Democrats should be the party of working people or of corporate arrogance.
The “abundance” debate is not the central one that matters for Democrats going forward. The abundance movement has some reasonable points about needing to make it easier to build housing and get economic development projects off the ground; I am all for those kinds of things, and it’s easy to work through them and incorporate them into the Democratic agenda going forward. However, as many writers have pointed out, the abundance movement people are failing to talk about the elephant in the room: corporate economic and political power and the unsustainable concentration of wealth in this country.
Democrats have to make a fundamental political decision going forward: do we suck up to concentrated corporate power, pretend it doesn’t exist and avoid talking about it so that we don’t offend corporate donors, or stand up to it when it abuses people?
I would argue that not only is standing up to abusive corporate power the morally right thing to do, that from a purely pragmatic political strategist point of view, it is in fact the Democrats’ only way back to becoming a majority party again in this country.
The main reason the Democratic Party brand is so bad right now is that voters feel betrayed.
My fellow Democratic consultant Will Robinson and I were talking to a pollster friend of ours, and she told us about the kinds of notes she would get back recently in focus groups when she asked voters to share what they would say to the Democratic Party right now. Will wrote this up in what is simultaneously both an incredibly painful and very funny column.
These voters are still swing voters, and many of them used to be Democrats, but they feel betrayed by the modern Democratic Party. They grew up thinking the Democrats were the party of working people, that we might screw up and get things wrong sometimes, but that we would always at least be fighting on their behalf. They no longer believe that to be the case, and in fact feel betrayed by Democrats. They have emotionally broken up with Democrats the way lovers break up with cheating partners.
After NAFTA, bringing China into the WTO, the opioid crisis, and the 2008 financial crisis where they saw Wall Street get bailed out while they lost their jobs and homes, people don’t feel Democrats have fought for them or protected them. (NAFTA was passed more than 30 years ago, but working-class people in focus groups still bitterly bring it up unprompted.) Add to that the four years of Biden’s term when inflation was squeezing them hard and all they kept hearing from the Biden team was that our country’s economy was the best in the world… And folks were done.
What else did working people in our polling think about Democrats? That we cared about everyone and everything except them and their core economic needs, and that even when we did agree with them on key issues, that we were too weak to get anything accomplished. Democrats often failed to make a case for policies they supported immigration and trans rights, and thus left the Republicans the field to define the issues in the worst possible ways.
Much of this wasn’t fair. Joe Biden and the Democrats in Congress got a lot done policy wise for working people, particularly in red, rural states: lowering the price of drugs like insulin, building infrastructure, beginning to bring home manufacturing jobs, etc. But because of the broken media landscape in this country, no one knew about all the good things that had happened.
Working people broke up with us, and we won’t get them back easily. We're going to have to show folks we are fighting for them, especially showing courage in taking on the big corporations that are shipping jobs overseas, gouging their grocery and gas and rent prices, squeezing them with a dozen different junk fees, and screwing them at work with non-compete clauses, wage theft, union busting, and other insults to their dignity.
If people don’t hear from us on these issues that so deeply impact their lives, they will assume that Democrats either don’t prioritize working people’s lives, or that we are too weak to take on the fights that matter the most to them.
So yes, Democrats when governing need to clear some red tape and get more housing built. We need to figure out better language to explain where we are on immigration and trans rights. But if we fail to fight for working families when they are getting screwed by corporate power, we will never get these voters to vote Democratic again.