Where Are Our Liberal Leaders?

As this long hot summer enters its final days the nation is mired at 9.5% unemployment, but the scary thing is that’s not our biggest economic crisis. Scarier yet, we seem to have lost all sense of how to organize ourselves against these forces.

Paul Krugman writing in Monday’s New York Times takes note of the new normal in America – massive unemployment and underemployment. More frighteningly, Krugman notes, is that the institutions whose job it is to address these issues are simply walking away from their responsibilities:

First, we see Congress sitting on its hands, with Republicans and conservative Democrats refusing to spend anything to create jobs, and unwilling even to mitigate the suffering of the jobless…

Well, if Congress won’t act, what about the Federal Reserve? The Fed, after all, is supposed to pursue two goals: full employment and price stability, usually defined in practice as an inflation rate of about 2 percent. Since unemployment is very high and inflation well below target, you might expect the Fed to be taking aggressive action to boost the economy. But it isn’t…

Krugman’s column comes on the heels of this past weekend’s Financial Times piece on the vanishing American middle-class:

The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the ­multiple is above 300.

The trend has only been getting stronger. Most economists see the Great Stagnation as a structural problem – meaning it is immune to the business cycle. In the last expansion, which started in January 2002 and ended in December 2007, the median US household income dropped by $2,000 – the first ever instance where most Americans were worse off at the end of a cycle than at the start. Worse is that the long era of stagnating incomes has been accompanied by something profoundly un-American: declining income mobility…

Combine those two deep-seated trends with a third – steeply rising inequality – and you get the slow-burning crisis of American capitalism. It is one thing to suffer grinding income stagnation. It is another to realise that you have a diminishing likelihood of escaping it – particularly when the fortunate few living across the proverbial tracks seem more pampered each time you catch a glimpse. “Who killed the American Dream?” say the banners at leftwing protest marches. “Take America back,” shout the rightwing Tea Party demonstrators.

We’re at an economic, and perhaps political, cross-roads in this country. We have decades of growing inequality and concentration of wealth underlying our current employment morass at a time of maximum impotency of our political institutions. And, most frightening to me, we as a society seem to have lost all sense of how to change the economic and political trajectory of this country.

In the heyday of the American labor movement the American worker would apply political pressure on Congress and economic pressure on corporate board rooms to bring some semblance of balance back to the economic order. In the 21st Century though, America’s private sector workers have long since left the labor movement and so our political institutions no longer feel a pull coming from their left side on economic issues.

This lack of a real liberal movement though is not confined to the economic left. As Robert Reich notes in The American Prospect, the lack of a broader left-wing movement in America is having serious consequences across the entire spectrum of policy and social issues. Reich writes:

Each [of Washington's network of progressive advocacy groups] has a narrow bandwidth (health, environment, labor, women’s rights) with a national constituency that donates money and sends members of Congress e-mails as requested about particular initiatives.

These groups are staffed by overworked 20-somethings and headed by people who enjoy being minor celebrities at Washington fundraisers and occasional visitors to the White House. But these groups don’t mobilize people back where they live, and they’re no substitute for a broad progressive movement.

A movement connects the dots across issues and reveals a larger wrong that must be righted.

Our current economic crisis combined with the decades long decline of the American middle-class represent two dots on a larger spectrum of issues. Dots which connect students graduating with few job prospects and six figure debt owed to the same banksters who squandered their parents’ pensions. Dots which connect the same strain of corporate greed that kills miners in West Virginia and to the strain which takes homes in Los Angeles. And dots which lead to the growing unresponsiveness of politicians and regulatory bodies to the deification of corporate speech.

These are all issues arising from the unabated and unmitigated concentration of wealth in America. With wealth comes political power and with the concentration of wealth we now see in America it should be no surprise that those interests have crafted an economic, regulatory and political order which serves only their interests. It has been a long, slow drip and many have been able to ignore it for more than 30 years now. But the 2008 economic collapse brought these issues to the forefront of the daily news and into the homes of middle-class and working-class alike.

These are unsure times, crying out for leaders to credibly make the argument that the unrest being felt in rural Pennsylvania is the same unrest that is being felt on the south side of Chicago. But, as I commented to a friend recently while surveying the field in the Colorado Democratic Senate primary, there is no real leadership anywhere.

The GOP stokes racial animosity to distract working and middle-class Americans from this reality. A middle-class white guy in Georgia has more in common with a middle-class Hispanic woman in Arizona than he does any CEO. But the longer it takes the average white guy to realize this the better for the corporate interests that the GOP serves.

And the long standing party of the people long ago turned their backs on the people in the pursuit of corporate campaign cash. Find me a leader in the Democratic Party right now whose loyalties are with the middle-class voters in his district and not the mythological market – which he dare not offend. Find me one who is demanding to know why the Federal Reserve is sitting on its hands while millions suffer.

Am I casting out forlornly for this generation’s Huey Long? Not quite, but how about this generation’s Frances Perkins? Or Cesar Chavez? Or even Ralph Nader? Someone, anyone, to stand up and to begin to connect the dots. Yes, there are institutional road blocks that prevent the President from running roughshod over Congress. Yes, Republican’s have been intractable in their opposition. But the country is facing a lost generation economically and the further degradation of the American middle and working classes. Someone has to stand up and say, “No more.”

America has been in a decades long economic decline and no single person can reverse that decline. But if ever there was a time when it was possible to connect the economic uncertainty being felt in otherwise diffuse corners of this country and begin a counter movement to the Reagan Revolution, now is that time. Resurrecting our nation’s moribund liberal movement can restore our political institutions and reinvigorate the American dream.

Now, who’s going to start connecting those dots?